Building Flexiple & co. as a bootstrapped founder

Hey there

It has been 6 full years since I first started building a business. So, I thought it was a good time to just briefly reflect on the past and introspect about the future.

Beginning

I began Flexiple as an absolute newbie - with no experience in entrepreneurship. After working in banking and realising it wasn’t for me, the goal was to buildd something that gave me happiness, with people I really liked working with.

That goal led us to bootstrap Flexiple, instead of raising VC funding. And, the early years of bootstrapping were brutal - great co-founders and sheer willpower got us through. But, after a tough lift-off, it did deliver with freedom & satisfaction.

Building Remote Clan and failing at it

After a couple of years, we tried building a 2nd startup - a professional network for remote workers. It started as a small project to market Flexiple, but we always find it tough to curb our ambitions. So, it became an independent company of its own.

The journey was enriching, but we failed and had to shut it down. I will pen it down later, but the short of it is that we weren’t super passionate about remote work. So building a community with that as the cornerstone was never going to be successful.

Starting Buildd

Our journey of Flexiple & Remote Clan gave us the realisation that we were super passionate about building businesses. And that gave birth to buildd.

Interestingly, around the same time, we became really good at SEO. So, we just used the website of our failed startup to buildd an affiliate website - it gets 1 million hits a month now and we make $13,000 each month. This helps us fund & bootstrap buildd.

Future

Well, that’s the briefest distillation of the past 6 years that I could come up with. Many tough but necessary lessons learnt along the way to share. But not all can be packed into a single mail :P

The goals as we move ahead are:

1. Flexiple: Keep solving important problems in hiring and become a de-facto hiring partner for all tech companies.

2. buildd: Buildd a thriving but guilt-free social network where people have fun while learning.

3. Side projects: Create many passive income sources. They help us monetise skills we have learnt, and learn new skills, all while ensuring money isn’t a concern.

Flexiple Updates

A new product to hire full-time engineers

Flexiple started by helping tech startups & companies hire dream developers & designers on contract. Over the years, we have learnt how to:

1. Attract talent

2. Curate the best

3. Match them to specific roles

So, over the past 6 months, we productised this knowledge, added some GPT magic and are ready to help companies run their entire hiring process on auto-pilot.

Discover, Evaluate & Match with your dream talent in just a few clicks.

Now companies can hire dream talent for full-time or contract roles in the most affordable way - at ZERO recruiting fees. All while saving a ton of time.

Build your dream company. Let Flexiple build your dream team.

We are working with 5 companies on beta. Apply for beta access today.

You can try our product out for FREE :)

Best,
Karthik