Getting to Profitable, by Maria Ly and Women 2.0

Founder Feedback gives you insights from the startup trenches. In a guest blog post that ran on Women 2.0 today, Maria Ly (Co-Founder of Skimble) provides some tips on getting to profitability. 

Read the full story on Women 2.0 here. Below is an excerpt: 

"There really wasn't much in the way of glamor during our bootstrapped days. We were like honey badgers hustling to get Skimble up and running. For us, success certainly did not happen overnight.

Tips From Our Journey:

• Invest in yourself. Prioritize, build & iterate! Have some cash in hand to get you frugally through the early days/months/year. You'll also want to do everything but with resource constraints, you'll need to prioritize, build and iterate fast. We initially focused on developing tracking tools for the sports we knew well, grew to support 45 different activities and now offer multimedia training content in the form of workouts for all levels.
• Get help. Be your own cheerleader. Upon enthusiastically sharing our vision, many of our friends and community members became passionately involved. We owe them many thanks for things from sports icons to studio time, French/Italian/German/Spanish translations to Android app development.
• Outsource yourself. Become ramen profitable. Gabe and I won roundtrip tickets to Asia for best Halloween costume. We figured we'd continue to keep our burn low by 'outsourcing ourselves' for a few months last winter. We set up Skimble HQ in China with a penthouse view of limestone rock formations, weekly maid service and a plethora of top restaurants to choose from. No housework. Minimal cooking. Just Skimble!

To date, we haven't taken any outside funding - we simply made Skimble profitable and sustainable. I'm happy to report we have done quite a lot with very little. The photos of our bootstrapped days show we've put smiles on many healthy faces already."

Skimble, a company that creates fun mobile applications to help you stay healthy and fit, is a Graduate of the SIlicon Valley Founder Institute. Their Workout Trainer app currently ranks Top 10 on iPhone and Top 3 on iPad in the free Healthcare & Fitness category. They just recently launched the app for Android as well.