#334 - Bridget Harris, CEO of You Can Book Me - on the art of Bootstrapping.

Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to build a successful bootstrapped SaaS company in the highly competitive scheduling software market.

My guest is Bridget Harris, Co-founder and CEO of You Can Book Me.

Bridget has had three distinct careers, showcasing her versatility and adaptability:

She started in the television and film industry. Then, transitioned to politics, serving as a political advisor focusing on constitutional reform and the House of Lords. Her political career culminated in a role as an advisor to the UK Deputy Prime Minister.

Finally, she co-founded YouCanBook.Me, where she now serves as CEO.

Their mission: To provide the best booking experience for businesses' clients and customers.

Under Bridget's leadership, YouCanBook.Me has achieved impressive growth:

The company has reached $5 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) without external funding.

That route was a deliberate one. She decided from day one to avoid external funding that might have distorted business priorities, saying "I'd rather make a million dollars slowly than lose a million dollars fast",

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Bridget to my podcast. We explore her bootstrapping journey over the past 12 years. She shares how she's successfully competing in a saturated market against well-funded competitors and tech giants like Google and Calendly. She elaborates on how she's maintaining a customer-centric approach while managing limited resources. Last but not least, she shares insights on how she overcame the challenges of pricing, overcoming feature bloat, refactoring legacy code, and adapting to market change.

Here's one of her quotes

Feature bloat is real. You can say, 'Let's be really generous about our free tool and have loads of features in the free tool.' All you're doing is confusing free users who need a really simple tool and don't want to think because they're not paying for the software. So they just literally want it to work.

So if you have a problem that your free users can't contact support, it means that your free tool is more complicated than it needs to be.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How she's aligning her entire team so they deliver on time and grow an eagerness to go above and beyond.
2. What she learned from refactoring their pricing approach and the lessons nobody talks about is that
3. How to avoid feature bloat in your development process.
4. What she's doing differently to create the best customer experience.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Bridget Harris
• Website: You Can Book Me
• Bootstrappers Manual

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