Biggest Challenges Faced by a Founder at YourNegotiations.com
Gerta's biggest challenge at YourNegotiations.com, a bootstrapped company, is scaling a niche business with limited resources; while "people love what we do, and we both win," the path from six-figure to seven-figure revenue requires strategic choices among many possibilities, each with a significant time and financial cost.
Entrepreneurship, Startups, Scaling a Business, Marketing, Financial Management
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Gerta Malaj
Founder
YourNegotiations.com
Wellesley College
MIT
Mathematics, Data Science, Statistics
Coaching, Speaking & Writing
Entrepreneurship and Business Owner
International Student, Honors Student, Scholarship Recipient, Immigrant
Video Highlights
1. Bootstrapping a business and the resource constraints that follow (e.g., limited budget and reliance on founders' diverse skill sets).
2. Scaling a niche business and determining effective strategies to increase revenue without a clear blueprint or industry precedent.
3. The importance of complementary skills in a co-founded company and how they can help to overcome resource limitations.
Transcript
What is your biggest challenge in your current role?
There are a couple of challenges. With this early stage of a business, especially since we haven't taken venture capital or any investor money, we have fewer resources. We have to do everything ourselves.
We also have less money and less time available. This means we can't hire a marketing expert or a video editing expert, so a lot of things we have to do ourselves. That is one challenge.
The one that's less of a challenge is that my co-founder, who is also my husband, and I have very complementary skills. Between the two of us, we cover a lot of areas that the business needs.
However, the one thing that has been top of mind for me for the last six months to a year is that because this is a relatively niche type of business, there isn't much of a blueprint on how to scale. We have amazing product-market fit, and people love what we do. We've had revenue from day one.
But it's hard to know how to grow. We are now a six-figure business; how do we get to a seven-figure business? There are 20 to 50 things we could be doing. We could start TikTok, double down on our newsletter, start a podcast, or write a book. There's so much we could be doing.
How do we scale? Every decision will have a cost, likely a time and financial cost. That has been the biggest challenge we're still trying to figure out.