Running out of cash is one of the quickest ways for a startup to go out of business. As a primarily bootstrapped but capital-intensive business, managing cash flow at Backblaze was and still is a key element of our success and requires continued focus. Let’s look at what we learned over the years.

“Are you crazy?” “Why would you do that?!” “You shouldn’t share that!” were just a few of the common questions and comments we heard over the years when Backblaze shared information about our business that most other companies do not. What was the thought process behind opening up? I’d like to explore the positives and negatives of being so transparent as a company.

Perhaps your business is competing in a brand new space free from established competitors. Most of us, though, start companies that compete with existing offerings from large, established companies. Your job is to come up with a better mousetrap — not the first mousetrap. That’s the challenge Backblaze faced. In this post, I’d like to share some of the lessons I learned from that experience.

In my previous posts, I talked about coming up with an idea, determining the solution, and getting your first customers. But you’re building a company, not a product. Let’s talk about what the first year should look like.

If you launch your startup and no one knows, did you actually launch? As mentioned in my last post, our initial launch target was to get a 1,000 people to use our service. But how do you get even 1,000 people to sign up for your service when no one knows who you are?

After deciding to build an unlimited backup service and developing our own storage platform, the next step was to get customers and feedback. Not all customers are created equal. Let’s talk about the types, and when and how to attract them.