Did You Bootstrap as a Child? No Money and Plenty of Time

I had a game-changing revelation the other day. I was thinking about my childhood among a million other things, and I realized there’s a pretty solid analogy between bootstrapping as an entrepreneur and building crap when I was in my younger days.

To give a quick background, I grew up in Rochester, Minnesota. My father was a home builder for most of my younger life, so I always had access to tools and scrap wood. I basically grew up with a hammer in my hand (granted I would usually set it down when I went to bed). My family was by no means poor, but, as much as I would of liked at times, I wasn’t able to buy anything and everything my heart desired. (Don’t worry, I was not deprived as a child either. My parents bought me plenty of crap that I probably either took apart or broke, or both.)

This was back when I used to actually smile for pictures

Anyway, I had limited resources, but I still built some pretty cool stuff. One of the first forts I remember building was in the woods near one of our houses. It was pretty sick; it was raised off the ground and kept the rain out. Plus, I contracted my dad to help me build some roof trusses since at the time I couldn’t use the circular saw. I guess my parents didn’t want me to cut my hand off or something. At one point I drew up some pretty elaborate plans along with the material lists of what would have been an ultimate club house, but it ended up costing like $1500, and I sure didn’t have that. This was the next best thing.

When we moved to our next house, I built a free standing clubhouse (meaning not attached to any trees). It was an L-shaped clubhouse (girls were allowed) that was pretty damn sturdy. I even put a lock on it to keep the bad guys out. I invested about $9 into this one in order to buy a 4x8 sheet of plywood for the roof, but otherwise it was made out of old pallets and some metal sheeting from an old shelf. My neighbor friend and I used to do strength tests on it by rolling a big wooden spool (like those huge spools for telephone cable) down a hill and letting it smash into the clubhouse. It held up no problem.

I remember wanting a go-kart growing up, which were expensive as hell, like in the thousands of dollars. So I decided to build one out of wood. Sure, metal has obvious advantages to wood, but I didn’t have scrap metal and had no idea how to weld considering I was probably about 11 or 12 at this point. I hired (aka. forced) my little brother to help me carry materials back from a Menard’s store next to our house. I think I ended up investing about $30 into this as I needed some metal rods for the axles, and a throttle control, which was just a lawn mower throttle control. I also needed a nice, thick piece of plywood for the base. It turned out to be pretty cool and I would zip around our cul de sac with it. Then some big dude took it for a spin and bent the axle. I’m still waiting for him to replace that.

Drill baby, drill.

I guess I’ll try to get to a point now: when you think of bootstrapping a startup company, get in the mindset of a kid with no money and a lot of time.

• What from your environment can you “borrow”?
• What are the things you simply need to buy?
• Who around you can you convince to work for free?
• What’s a simple and cheap/free way to test your product?
• What resources do you have access to already?

Originally published at www.fakeweblog.com on June 9, 2010.