Our #1 Non-Negotiable Rule at AppArmor

Welcome to the Dave vs. Startups.

My brother Chris had one non-negotiable rule before we hired anyone at AppArmor:

Build the systems first.

When you're bootstrapping, every hire has to be immediately productive and profitable.

You can't afford to bring someone on and then spend weeks figuring out what they should actually do.

Here's how we applied this in practice:

We had project implementation specialists who helped execute customer deployments, but the key was building systems that made their work scalable and efficient.

We learned this lesson the hard way with our content management system.

Initially, customers had to email us every time they wanted to make changes… "Hey, we want to add a button here, we want to change colors here."

We quickly realized this approach was unsustainable.

So we created our content management system for native mobile apps where organizations could make changes themselves instead of going through us for every small update.

This system allowed our implementation team to focus on bigger challenges while customers handled routine updates independently.

One customer could log in and update their app for a football game with 100,000 people coming to campus.

No phone calls, no back-and-forth emails, no waiting for our team.

We had tons of structure in our business, which made managing our lean team much more effective.

So Chris was right.

It's way more profitable and way easier to manage people when you've built the systems for them to be successful first.

Most bootstrapped founders hire first and build systems later. That's backwards and expensive.

Build the machine, then hire people to operate it.

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So AI took your job? Time to start a business (yes, ironically using AI to make it a lot easier).

One trick? Start with a services offering and move into a product as you reliably build your revenues.

Chris and I go deep on this and more in the latest episode of the pod.

Tune into the Startup Different Podcast