PRIME Initiative

How do you start or grow a business if you don’t have much money? The answer according to US marketing guru Seth Godin is to focus on the advantages that your lack of resources brings. and build a business that consciously makes use of them.

This is not a collection of money-saving hints and tips. Instead it’s about something much more important. It’s about getting your business model and marketing strategy right so your success does not depend on resources you don’t have but is instead based on exploiting to the full what you do have. That’s why The Bootstrapper’s Bible is already a business classic.

Download The Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin

Don’t be put off by Godin’s American style. By page eight he has got the local cultural references over with and is well into a solid comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of rich and poor businesses. The remaining 90 or so pages is inspirational stuff, and likely to spark practical ideas about how you can turn your situation to your advantage.

A note on printing the PDF: it prints out fine on A4 as long as you select landscape.

There’s an interesting business story behind the work itself. It’s based on a book Godin wrote about 10 years ago. In paper form it sold about 10,000 copies before going out of print. Godin then got the rights back and adapted it into a downloadable e-book that Amazon sold for $3 a pop for another 18 months. Godin then decided there was one more thing he could do to extract value from it - turn it into the current 103-page PDF and put it out completely free.

Within a week of this free version becoming available Godin estimates that more people had downloaded and read it than both previous versions combined. This of course brought him no new revenue - but it did powerfully promote his more recent in-print books that do. So at very little cost to himself he has got large numbers of people sampling his product.

We are able to offer the work here as Godin has released it under a new form of copyright that allows free distribution while at the same time making sure that the author will always be identified - which is important for a promotional giveaway.

The Creative Commons (attribution + noncommercial + noderivs) licence allows us or anyone else to republish this version of the Bootstrapper’s Bible on the conditions that we credit Seth Godin, make no charge and don’t alter the content. Note that this isn’t the same thing as putting a work into the public domain, where alterations can be made and the original authorship can soon get lost.

By his act of careful altruism Godin has got other people distributing his freebie and mentioning his name at no cost or effort to himself. This is itself a good illustration of bootstrapping principles at work in marketing.