S 01 | Ep 27 Bootstrapping to $ 10M + with community - led growth This episode is genuinely energizing and pushes back on a lot of the ambient startup mythology in a way that feels earned rather than contrarian for its own sake . Lloyd ' s central argument is that there is more than one way to build a successful company , and the obsession with unicorn outcomes has left most founders optimizing for someone else ' s definition of success before they have even clarified their own . The most useful framework Lloyd shares is the one he calls starting with a service . Rather than building software and then finding customers , Boast started by delivering the outcome manually , learned exactly what the painful and repetitive parts of the process were , and then built software to automate what they already understood deeply . This is the opposite of building in a vacuum , and it explains why so many well - funded companies launch products that nobody actually wants .