Entrepreneur Stories: Triberr’s Founder on Bootstrapping, Criticism, and the Importance of Educating Customers

Whether bootstrapping your way to hiring help, or navigating toward profitability under investors’ eyes, an entrepreneur’s path is often a long and lonely one. Dino Dogan, founder of blog amplification platform Triberr, talks about the lessons he’s learned firsthand while carving out a new space in social media for his company.

The story behind Triberr will sound familiar to many entrepreneurs: founder Dino Dogan saw a common problem without an easy solution. “I was doing SEO for a long time,” he says, but optimizing content “didn’t work for what I was trying to do.” Dogan wanted to build a community around his blog to include more than immediate friends who would comment on and share his posts, but that required “a lot of heavy lifting.”
Enter Triberr. Dogan’s social network “allows you to set up a blogging tribe” of like-minded writers who share each other’s work in a “streamlined, frictionless, no-heavy-lifting kind of way.” He recently spoke with OpenView to share how he’s learning from criticism, educating customers, and bootstrapping “a Facebook for bloggers.”

Accepting and Learning from Criticism

Not long after Triberr began to receive attention, Dogan saw that what he was developing was polarizing users. “There’s been a lot of criticism over the years,” he explains, but founders need to remember the negative commentary can contain hard truths that you need to hear.
Take the time to “sift through the yelling,” Dogan says, and you’ll find “kernel truths and actionable items.” Apply those gems of constructive criticism to improve your product. After all, detractors “aren’t sugar coating,” he points out, and they may just provide you with the outside, unbiased perspective that you need to spot legitimate limitations in what you’re developing.

Educating Customers While Selling to Them

With his new product, Dogan learned quickly just how important how-to and support materials can be. The Triberr platform is designed to facilitate what Dogan has dubbed “tribe marketing.” Most of his customers, however, arrive not knowing what this new form of marketing is.
New Triberr users “don’t understand how to build a tribe,” Dogan says, and, “perhaps more importantly, they don’t see the importance of doing that.” To educate customers on the benefits of your product, and to raise awareness of your brand, Dogan suggests turning to content. “I’m actually in the process of writing an eBook that we’re going to give to our community,” he says. The eBook explains “how to build a tribe” and offers “tribal strategies for bloggers.”
Without any guides or support documentation for his platform, Dogan estimates that Triberr has been 60% successful in retaining its users. “I’m hoping that we’ll chip away another 10% or 20% by having this eBook resource,” he says.
Word of mouth and customer referrals are what will determine your product’s success early on, so effective onboarding and customer satisfaction are hugely important. Maximize retention by having your support content in place as soon as possible.

Challenges of Bootstrapping: Prioritizing Features

While startups are always a tough endeavor, Dogan faced the added difficulties that come with building a business entirely on his own. “We’re totally bootstrapped,” Dogan says, and because Triberr lacks any outside financial investment, one of its main obstacles is a lack of resources.
“We have to be really frugal with our time and effort,” Dogan explains, starting with focusing solely on the product’s core features. Dogan laments the “hard choices” that he’s had to make, both in terms of “what features we want to build,” as well as “features we’ve actually built but could no longer maintain.” Even though paring back the product’s scope can be “very painful,” he stresses that you have to be willing to let some features go.
At the same time, Dogan warns against losing sight of the grand vision that drove you to start your company in the first place. With Triberr, he still wants to take the blogosphere and convert it “into one giant social organism.” Carry that elephantine goal with you, but, as Dogan says, there’s only one way to eat it: “one bite at a time.”

What do you think is the most important piece of advice for bootstrapping entrepreneurs?