Rui Bom

Raised $1 million for my own ventures and, as a mentor, have helped dozens of startups fundraise. From building pitch decks and financials projections to helping with investor outreach and meeting preparation, I have done a bit of everything. By the way, you'll love my cold email framework, guaranteed to get you sending better emails than 99% of the people in the World.

Welcome to Startupland, where nothing gets done without a major dose of bootstrapping. All my startup experience has been working for bootstrapped companies. Some of those have gone to become successful ventures but most of them weren't. Bootstrapping my own life since 2012.

Hired, fired, managed and motivated high performance teams for my own startups and for countless others. For the past 10 years I have been more and more involved in building and managing offshore remote teams, mostly out of the Philippines (IMO, the best labor market in the World right now). All these experiences have led to the creation of a solid hiring, management and motivational blueprint that is extremely relevant as we get ready for a post-pandemic World.

Have what I consider to be one of the best cold email frameworks in the World. That doesn't make me an email marketing expert but it definitely makes me someone you may want to speak to as you put together your email marketing roadmap.

My involvement as an executive at several startups happened as these companies navigated through accelerated growth, in environments where a lot of high tempo testing took place.

My involvement with several B2C and B2B business models over the years has shown me how important proper idea research, generation and validation is. Design Thinking is, in my view, the best methodology to successful do that and the one I use to help companies develop world-class Minimum Viable Products.

I'm a big proponent of the 'mindset day', a one-day-a-week mindset building routine. Despite having no formal training in psychology, education or wellness, the many ups and downs I've been through and a life dedicated to self-experimentation has led me to find and develop an array of important tools that get me 'in the zone' and can be helpful to more entrepreneurs out there.

Launching products since 2003. Started my career as a product marketer at Unilever, where I launched countless consumer products. At some point decided to move into the dark side of entrepreneurship and co-found a couple companies, launching both B2B, SaaS and B2C products.

I have developed an entire program for 500 Startups on Product Market Fit and therefore I'm extremely familiar with the concepts, methodologies and long lists of do's and dont's. Important disclaimer though: as it happens with most startups, I've never managed to achieve PMF with my own businesses *insert pile of poo emoji here*.

Started working remotely in 2012, when there were no playbooks, blueprints and best practices. Have taught myself how to be a highly effective remote worker and have been using these learnings to help many startups set up and manage their offshore remote teams. Advisor at top remote work consulting company.

My bread and butter. 10+ years experience as Head of Sales and Business Development for multiple startups (including mine), from early stage to growth (and acquisition), B2C, B2C, Saas and B2B2C, leading many of these companies to record sales.

In my view, by far the most important stage for any early stage venture. Get this right and you will be so much closer to an outstanding MVP. When mentoring startups I put an incredible amount of energy and time behind research methods, crafting great questionnaires and downloading insights. Have helped countless startups create and implement their research roadmaps. Have powerful tools and templates to help you become world-class at this.

No experience in setting it up, but experience as a user and someone who looks at its dashboards to get the relevant information to make better informed decisions. If you're not on Amplitude yet, you should definitely be. Great analytics tool.

The first project management and team communication tool I used back in the day when I was spending most of my time making sure my co-founders wouldn't be all over the place. Easy and intuitive to use but there are better tools out there today.

Early, early, early user of Dropbox. Could have given Drew Houston a lot of great feedback in the early days of DB but never got to meet him. Using Google Drive a bit more these days.

My go-to analytics platform during my first few years as a (serious) entrepreneur. Still find it an imperative today for any startup I work with. If you have no Google Analytics you probably don't exist.

I'm not a social media guy. But when you run B2C startups I guess you don't have much of a choice. Which means I've scheduled a few dozen posts with Hootsuite before.

Can't recall how many millions of bugs I have logged on Jira over the years. It's a necessarily evil for all software companies out there I guess. Happy I don't get to use it so much anymore.

Been using Mailchimp since its early days. It was actually the first email automation tool I used to send out what today might be considered spam. Not proud of that, but sometimes a 'man has got to do what a man has got to do', right?

Over the years Optimizely has been my primary tool for A/B testing. Super important tool to get your site converting like a champion. If you're not using it yet, you should definitely check it out - gamechanger.

Trello boards. Who hasn't created some and then some more? Important tool if you want to get things organized at your company. Which you definitely want to be doing.

Have used Unbounce to generate landing pages for several marketing campaigns over the years. An important tool if you're into the optimization game for your startup.

Trello killer? Maybe not so fast. Important tool if you want to get things organized at your company. Which you definitely want to do. Switched between Trello and Wrike at some point, have some good and bad things to say about both.