Six lessons in bootstrapping from Mash founders Tash Menon and Sarah Churchlow
For Mash founders Tash Menon and Sarah Churchlow, bootstrapping has given them autonomy in creating a values-driven, global business.
Our business exists to empower great independent creatives with the freedom to choose work that fulfils them, and from this premise, we’ve built a model to deliver creative services in a more creative way. We launched Mash before the pandemic, offering a way for clients to work with the best talent, without geographical restrictions. Less than five years later, we’ve scaled rapidly, and have been self-funded to date.
Freelancing as a concept has evolved dramatically since we started. We were challenged in the early days on how a traditional service could be delivered without a traditional agency model. We were forced out of our comfort zones and got very comfy with getting uncomfortable. In hindsight, it’s helped us to earn confidence in our own decisions.
When investors in Australia and abroad started approaching us, we were flattered. As a founder, there is no better confidence boost. However, we realised investment doesn’t immediately equal credibility or clarity, and it won’t make hard decisions for you.
Bootstrapping has made us more effective leaders and given us the confidence to back our decisions — both good and bad. By challenging ourselves to be more effective commercial leaders, we can now have brave conversations about the future of Mash.
Scaling a business is very different to running a business, and bootstrapping taught us the good, bad and ugly of how we can get better at doing both.
Here are our top tips for other startups who are bootstrapping.
Embrace every opportunity
Embrace every opportunity, and see opportunities as a way to learn from your mistakes or grow your success. Either way, they’re a positive. It’s also important to ask hard questions upfront, so that you can navigate difficult decisions while staying agile and evolving quickly. A fast no helps you move on to the next yes.
Find the right fit, with the right partner
Finding the right partner plays a significant role in driving innovation and growth. The orientation should be outside-in. Ask: “What need are we able to fulfil together?”
You need to be clear on what value you can bring and then be hyper-strategic in getting the right combination of personalities, skill sets and experience around you.
Be clear and creative about how you grow your team
As a startup, every decision is about making our income work harder. Culture and values-based hiring has underpinned our team growth, and our first hire was actually a community manager, rather than a salesperson or tech expert. With more than 150 creative freelancers now on board, building and maintaining that community is essential to our success, so a highly engaged community manager was critical.
Think outside of your industry box
We’ve been fortunate to not be reliant on external investors, or beholden to them and their expectations or opinions, but we aren’t operating in a vacuum.
Our approach to learning was to challenge ourselves and look beyond what we know. We adopted the Mash Operating Partner concept from traditional private equity firms, with our own twist. Recognising we had a lean operating model and an opportunity to scale abroad, we built a team of operating partners (OPs), who are seasoned business leaders who help drive our creative, commercial, operational and brand objectives.
Be humble and open to learning
We’re now in a phase of transformation, as we move away from being a purely service-based business, to building a tech platform that will underpin our business model in a sustainable and user-friendly way.
Not being from the tech world, we spent two years talking to more than 80 tech founders and CTOs from around the world to self-educate on how best we could take this leap. Through this process, we recognised it was more effective for us to self-fund the first phase of development for our “virtual office” rather than to bring in external investment.
But if you’re not in a similar position and decide to get investors onboard, be clear that they share your values and vision – otherwise that money is going to come with headaches and strings attached, that might not really be worth it.
Back yourself
For us, bootstrapping has been a highly rewarding experience. We sometimes look back to that time when our lives were literally bootstrapped and we were pouring everything into an idea. There are stories that literally make us burst into tears of laughter, and sometimes actual tears. But we knew the idea had legs, so rather than listening to what others said, we stayed true to what we believed and continue to do so.
If you see an opportunity, our advice is to jump in, but be clear on why you want to create a business that does something differently, while also having the conviction to realise when is the right time to push and when is the right time to pull back. Listen, learn and build your opinion based on perspectives rather than purely placing your ear to the ground, and seeking advice.
The Mash business of today has evolved into something almost unrecognisable from when we started this at a kitchen dining table – as our approach has also been influenced and shaped by contributors, advisers, team members and community members.
Bootstrapping has allowed us to grow our business in a way that is true to ourselves and we are proud of how far we’ve come. But as the appetite for new ways of working and freelance-powered momentum continues, we know we’re only just getting started.
Tash Menon and Sarah Churchlow are the founders of Mash.
