Ask HN: How many of you want to stay small, part-time, and manageable?
I've been bitten by the bootstrapping "bug" and I hope to launch my own micro-ISV in the next few months with a niche SaaS product. I've been inspired by many late nights of pouring over Patrick's (BingoCardCreator) blog, A Small Bear, Peldi's writings about getting Mockups off the ground and many others out there.
The thing I love most about HN is the diversity. There is the single-founder, bootstrapped "Shareware" guy with a handfull of lifetime solds having a discussion about sales techniques with a founder of a top SaaS firm and ego's never get involved.
With that said, I plan on being one those single-founder bootstrapped guys with a small number of customers. And I want to stay that way. I know I might be the minority here on HN and that is perfectly OK (each of us has different backgrounds, ambitions, and goals). A little bit more about my backgroud: I don't know what Series A funding is. I don't live near the Valley, San Francisco or NYC - I live in a small town in New Hampshire, USA. I don't Tweet, I'm shy, I've never met an angel investor and I don't have a blog. I provide these details because I hope they give you a little insight as to how much I'm not a loud, Twitter-happy founder ready to shake up the social media with a interweb 2.0 platform!
I enjoy writing software and also finding niche B2B voids to write software for. I've finally picked one and started writing some code. As I poke around HN and read the conversations, I'm curious how many of you are creating something small and manageable. I'm OK if my SaaS product, at $29/mo doesn't grow past 200 customers. Imagine that, grossing over 65K/yr to compliment my full-time software job! In fact, I don't think I want the headache that comes with 1,000 customers. At that point, you probably can't hold down your full-time job anymore. Then you're hiring, you're paying for additional accounting and legal fees, employees, taxes are increasingly complicated, multi-lingual releases, you need office space and your accountant wants you to become a Delaware corporation but some book you read said to incorporate in Nevada. My goodness!
Summary: Did you start out with small business plans but things took off? Do you sometimes wish your business was smaller and more manageable? Are a micro-ISV with just a few customers and absolutely love it? If someone popped up on HN and said they now have 200 SaaS paying subscribers and they are taking down the sign-up page to keep his/her business small and manageable rather than growing, would you laugh at the notion or, like me, completely understand his/her decision?