The setup is strategy, the act of stacking the odds in your favor.

Interestingly, Arvid didn't include the smartest marketing strategy he uses himself

Most of the books that I want to read during my Bootstrap MBA experiment focus on just one specific topic. This makes sense because book that cover too many topics usually don’t go deep enough to be useful. However, I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to read at least one “general purpose” book that covers a lot of ground and thus can give me some orientation at the beginning of my journey. Initially, I decided to read Pieter Level’s book MAKE which is subtitled “The Bootstrapper’s Handbook” and has gathered a lot of praise in the maker community.

One of the first books I read on bootstrapping is MAKE by Pieter Levels. Pieter promises to share the techniques that allowed him to build two highly successful products (Nomad List and RemoteOK) that bring in more than $80.000 each month. In addition to sharing actionable advice he wants to encourage others to try the bootstrapped way of building businesses. In his words:

I recently decided that I want to learn Rails. Since everyone keeps raving about it, I used Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial. While the tutorial was helpful, I felt as if something immensely important was missing from it.