To enable one co-founder to leave a stable tech job, Bashify's founders relied on brand deal income from their personal social media accounts. This alternate revenue stream acted as a financial safety net, allowing them to reinvest all business profits back into growth.

To start his marketing agency, the founder created content about his beliefs on the future of social media. This attracted inbound leads from people who resonated with his vision. This strategy applies to any service business: use platforms to share your point of view and establish authority.

Bashify's founder focuses on providing the "best balloon experience" rather than being the world's best balloon artist. This customer-centric approach builds loyalty and drives high repeat business, proving that service quality can be a stronger differentiator than pure product perfection.

The brand runs paid ads on Meta specifically to recruit new affiliates. The ads are profitable on their own from direct product sales to people signing up. This creates a powerful growth loop: they acquire customers profitably while simultaneously building an army of affiliates who then generate even more sales.

The founders' retail store serves as a physical portfolio for their primary production design studio. By showcasing their capabilities, the store attracts high-value B2B clients for design projects and events. This makes the store's profitability a complex, cross-business calculation that extends beyond its direct retail sales.

To achieve rapid, bootstrapped growth, don't choose between a service or a product. Start with a hybrid: a product with a service aspect. This allows you to generate immediate cash flow and validate the market with the service, while using that revenue to build the more scalable product asset.

Before Province of Canada was their full-time focus, the founders ran a Shopify agency. This service business provided cash flow, deep platform expertise, and a testing ground for their ideas. It served as a real-world MBA, giving them the confidence and proof points to launch their own successful product brand.

Coterie treats its physical retail presence not just as a sales channel, but as a marketing tool. A well-placed product block acts like a billboard, driving discovery and funneling 10-12% of new customers back to their primary D2C subscription business.

Instead of building a single product, build a powerful distribution engine first (e.g., SEO and video hacking tools). Once you've solved customer acquisition at scale, you can launch a suite of complementary products and cross-sell them to your existing customer base, dramatically increasing lifetime value (LTV) and proving your core thesis.