These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is from the Mobflint team, formed by Philip De Smedt.

I love Github. Not only because it’s one of the most useful platforms on the internet for technical people, but also because of its bootstrapped nature. And bootstrapping is awesome. Let me explain. Media outlets like TechCrunch or Mashable love writing about some random startup that just raised a ridiculous amount of money. Usually the founders are also claiming to be building the next billion dollar company. Github is not one of them. Although Github might be the next billion dollar company, it has never taken any funding… ever. The startup was founded by Tom Preston-Werner in 2008 and is on track to generate something around 15 million dollars in revenue this year. This post is a reflection on his talk at Startup School 2010 where he talks about Github and the bootstrapped nature of the startup.

Before going into bootstrapping itself, we might ask ourselves the following: what is it that defines our success? One of the key factors is probably luck. When you are creating a solution to a problem you have, at least 20 other people will be working on a similar solution. So you don’t just have to execute better than those 20 others, but you’ll need to be lucky as well. But what is luck? Luck can be defined as some sort of probability of something good happening to you. Note that there are two elements of importance in this definition, chance and you. Chance might be completely random, but “you” can be influenced. Improve luck with your location (Tom moved to San Francisco) and keep hacking up different concepts to the problems you have. Ultimately, you can define luck as a constant, the luck constant. Change it so we can do the things we want to do, not only by choosing your location, but also by considering carefully who you’ll work with.

Somehow, bootstrapping is a way you can do something about problems you have without having to ask someone else for permission to do them. Computing power is cheap (almost free on Amazon) and open source solutions to problems are available everywhere. If you have an idea that will solve a problem that YOU have, start by solving it! Don’t go and see all the VC’s on Sand Hill Road, but start building your product. For instance, Tom wanted to use this great version control system called Git, but it was a huge pain in the ass. When Github was founded, Git itself was in a very early stage. It wasn’t very functional and just kind of resided in the linux kernel. Still they took their time building the product, even though it was very small. When bootstrapping, look for small opportunities, but know that will grow big.

Another important aspect to consider when bootstrapping is virality. If your product isn’t viral by nature, you will have to put in a HUGE amount of effort to get people to use it. Find some way to make your product viral. If you can improve someones’ life through your product, she will tell their friends. In the case of Github, virality is achieved through putting your open source projects on the web and showing them to friends. Github makes it easy to collaborate on projects. It provides a social experience. You don’t wanna sell your technology, you wanna sell the experience behind it. Github isn’t about using Git. It’s about collaborating on software with your friends or co-workers. It’s the same thing Apple does. They sell experiences. Friends are telling me I pay $400 more for a Macbook that has the same specifications as some Acer crap. I couldn’t give a shit. I need a machine that offers me the best experience I can get, and that’s what my Macbook does. Sell experiences.

All these considerations lead to one major point, optimizing for happiness. As a bootstrapper, you have full control over your startup. But what is it that we want? In other words, what is it that you want to be optimizing for? Everybody is optimizing for money, the biggest valuation, the best VC’s and/or angels etc. That’s optimizing for the wrong variable. Why don’t you optimize for what you really want? Why don’t you optimize for happiness? You have full control. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do. At Github, they threw everything away that doesn’t optimize for happiness: deadlines, divisions, departments, work hours,… You don’t want all these things. You want to work on something you’re passionate about with the maximum amount of freedom you can get.

One final remark before I cut the crap: do things that allow you to win and that allow someone else to win as well. Github sells mugs. They win because they make profit and you win because you have a cool mug you can relate to. It’s not a zero-sum game. Not if you optimize for happiness. If you optimize for happiness and focus on your product, VC’s will come to you. You have a choice. Will you optimize for money or will you optimize for happiness?

You would probably like to watch the talk (you should), check it out here.