Bootstrap Grows: 8 Tips for a Healthy Garden
By Emma Brown Creative Marketing at Bootstrap Compost, Inc. With the weather heating up and your seedlings firmly planted in your garden beds, we’re ready to share some tips on…
Bootstrap Grows: 7 Tips to Sprout your Garden
Now that you've received your share of black gold, we're eager to share some tried-and-true gardening tips. As the growing season continues to germinate, the Boot will periodically share bits…
2015: The Year Bootstrap Learned to Tie Its Boots
By Igor Kharitonenkov, Co-Founder
It wasn’t long ago when Bootstrap Compost, serving just a couple hundred clients around town, was operating out of our backyards (Andy’s and my own), much to the chagrin of our neighbors. We did it all – collection, cleaning and delivery. At just 24 years young, I quickly learned the art of business negotiation; pizzas were exchanged and annoyances were quelled. When the going gets tough, buy them off with pie, I say.
Still, our little operation was bothering more than just our immediate abutters. With a garden hose running 100 feet from my third-story apartment down to the backyard cleaning station, the message was clear: “Sorry roommates, you’ll have to hydrate elsewhere.” And to think we cleaned outdoors. In the winter. In Boston. For that reason, we even managed to anger ourselves. To this day, I’m not quite sure how we pulled it all off were it not for Andy, Adam, Jake, Jonas, Everett, Max and those first few staffers who had the heart, humor, and courage to believe in our operation.
And they weren’t wrong to believe.
Much has changed since those early rug rat days and 2015 will always serve as the year we put on our big boy pants. For starters, (more…)
2015: The Year Bootstrap Learned to Tie Its Boots
By Igor Kharitonenkov, Co-Founder
It wasn’t long ago when Bootstrap Compost, serving just a couple hundred clients around town, was operating out of our backyards (Andy’s and my own), much to the chagrin of our neighbors. We did it all – collection, cleaning and delivery. At just 24 years young, I quickly learned the art of business negotiation; pizzas were exchanged and annoyances were quelled. When the going gets tough, buy them off with pie, I say.
Still, our little operation was bothering more than just our immediate abutters. With a garden hose running 100 feet from my third-story apartment down to the backyard cleaning station, the message was clear: “Sorry roommates, you’ll have to hydrate elsewhere.” And to think we cleaned outdoors. In the winter. In Boston. For that reason, we even managed to anger ourselves. To this day, I’m not quite sure how we pulled it all off were it not for Andy, Adam, Jake, Jonas, Everett, Max and those first few staffers who had the heart, humor, and courage to believe in our operation.
And they weren’t wrong to believe.
Much has changed since those early rug rat days and 2015 will always serve as the year we put on our big boy pants. For starters, (more…)
The ABCs of BSC
Why Compost? Spell it out with B-O-O-T-S-T-R-A-P
e the envy of your neighbors. With other fools tossing out their food scraps like it’s 1987, Bootstrap brings convenience, practicality, and oodles of cachet to the radical act of food diversion. Get with the future now.
MG…It’s so easy. Seriously, composting with Bootstrap is essentially hassle-proof: Signup online, get a bucket, start collecting organics.
ffset landfills. Landfills are fundamentally unsustainable, releasing pollutants into the ground, air and water. By removing organics from the conventional waste stream, we are challenging — and transforming — the very notion of trash.
ake aim at GHG emissions. Carbon dioxide and methane gas (prevalent offshoots from landfills) contribute to global warming. Composting a pound of kale offsets the emission of .95 pounds of Co2. That’s a (more…)
Green Plate Club seeks members
Bootstrap has again joined forces with our friends and neighbors Boston Organics to lick wastefulness. This easy-as-pie promo (ingeniously dubbed The Green Plate Club) serves to bind the ties between two…
The Quick and Dirty: The Story of Greater Boston’s Food Scrap Go-Getters
Jobless in the midst of a severely depressed economy, Andy Brooks launched Bootstrap Compost in January 2011 as a means to a paycheck. Equipped with a hand truck, a T-pass, flyers and a desire for meaningful work, Andy began collecting the food scraps of a few subscribers in his Jamaica Plain neighborhood, processing the organics in his backyard. When the DailyCandy, a popular cultural blog in Boston, caught wind of his composting business, the response was nothing short of bananas.
Flash forward five months: Igor Kharitonenkov, an up and coming multi-media producer (and coincidentally, an unemployed one), created a video short about Bootstrap. Igor was interested in profiling and promoting sustainable businesses through new media. Impressed with his work, Andy hired Igor to help with marketing and administrative tasks. At this point, the company was serving 101 subscribers and had forged a partnership with a local farm, eager to make use of the nitrogen-rich scraps.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/cWzaMV07buI]
Flash forward one year: Bootstrap had grown to 250 subscribers, matching the gray hairs suddenly appearing on Andy’s head. To add to the workload, the company was selected as a finalist for MassChallenge 2012, an internationally renowned 4-month long start-up incubator. Help was needed (more…)