Lessons we learned while bootstrapping
kinsta.com
kinsta.com
I wanted to point out one bullet though: Automation
My product is a SaaS product. I've automated every single thing possible from self-creating wikis to recommendations. I stepped away to visit Japan for 3 weeks earlier this year and came back to a site that increased in value.
I've thought about raising money for it so many times but I always come back to this. Answer to someone else, or keep growing it on my own terms.
In terms of infrastructure, this meant using Ansible for quickly deploying new servers where needed and adding them to the right load balancer. Currently all I need to do is spin up a new instance with the right tag & run the relevant Ansible script - this will grab a copy of the site from git, sort out dependencies and any other apps needed (supervisord and so on), and add it to the nginx loadbalancer config as a new upstream server.
Same applies for things like billing. Yes I could have started off doing billing manually, sending out invoices etc, but these take time and realistically need to be automated to avoid any errors.
These things definitely meant I didn’t get my MVP out in weeks, but meant I could still do this as a solo-bootstrapper and look after a young family and such.
+1 on slight premature automation. In my case, there are 70k signed up users, so doing anything manually at this point is out of control.
To me, this still sounds awfully manual. You still need to always have an eye on load/health and proactively provision instances or risk not having the necessary capacity. Why go that route and not a template with auto-scaling and an init script or image to pull the dependencies?
Additionally, I have multiple alerts setup for any signs of downtime, so that any deployment can be invoked as soon as possible.
However, I completely understand your perspective, and if this was a different type of startup or industry, I would probably implement it the way you mentioned.
> The best way to get things done is to simply sit down and start working on them.
So many people worry so much about failure that they don't even bother to start. You can't possibly plan for every roadblock and eventuality. The only thing you can control is your execution, and there are no short cuts. Hard work won't guarantee success, but lack of it will guarantee failure.
"stop trying to be clever and start trying to be done"
> So many people worry so much about failure that they don't even bother to start
>You can't possibly plan for every roadblock and eventuality.
> The only thing you can control is your execution, and there are no short cuts.
> Hard work won't guarantee success, but lack of it will guarantee failure.
Does this study also consider that children remain living at their parents' for longer and longer? For example, it is not bizarrely uncommon in Spain to find people in their late twenties or thirties still living with their parents.
> After that, we start narrowing down the list to the top 5 or 10 candidates. We have multiple rounds of job interviews, usually 2 or 3. Thanks to this we are able to narrow down our list to the top 3 candidates and make the final decision. Yes, this process takes time, usually weeks. If you’re not in a hurry you should follow this slow method, trust me, it’s worth the time.
Perfect strategy to only have people who are desperate/lazy enough to have nothing else lined up during that time! Not sure about "best" though but they sure as hell will be cheap.
No thanks, I'll just go with the existing offer from a company that doesn't hoist neon red flags during their interview process.
Far more realistic: you have to constantly adapt to the labor market a lot more than their rigid premise suggests. There is no actual dream candidate (just like the article's premise is a fantasy), they do not exist, they have never existed, they will never exist; smart compromise is an always present requirement of success and that goes for team building as well as anything else.
Or to steal from a related concept: a great candidate hired today, is better than a fantasy dream candidate hired at some unknown time in the future.
I think I made the mistake of getting too fancy with the architecture (but designing architecture was too much fun to resist), so I’ve ended up with something that’s a collection of Clojure services on the backend, running on several linodes along with rabbitmq, elasticsearch, etc. Well, at least it should scale decently, if the need arises :fingers crossed:
So this project has probably taken way too long to get to a MVP. But hey, the day job won’t let me do cool stuff like use FP languages, design architecture, do front end work, etc., so I need some sort of creative outlet :)
Now if I can only find some folks willing to test this thing. So far I’ve only gotten a small handful of email sign ups via my landing page. Maybe it’s time to spend some money on AdWords, etc.
> We’re currently working hard on getting Contabulo ready and hope to launch a beta in the very near future.
That's probably killing you. My advice would be to get rid of that immediately.
It sounds like in general you need to reprioritize and refocus. You use the words "SaaS product," "project," "creative outlet," and "this thing" to describe your efforts thus far. "Things" don't make money, businesses do. You need to stop being an engineer building a product and start building a business if you actually intend to generate income from this endeavor. To that end, I suggest a few immediate actions:
- Give users the ability to sign up and pay you money. If users can't pay you, you'll never make a dime. Stop worrying about architecture or feature development or closed betas and focus 100% on attracting and retaining high-quality customers. Don't do any further development beyond bug fixes until you have paying customers and can articulate why additional features will drive growth.
- Consider offering a free trial to get "testers" instead of a beta (but don't call them that). The free trial will allow you to collect feedback from real customers without establishing an ongoing expectation of free or reduced cost that can kill long-term revenue. In general, startups price too low. Read a few articles like https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... and https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-product/
- Spend a lot more time & effort on your branding/marketing. In particular, your site currently shows two screenshots that look quite similar to Trello + photo attachments, and has a bland tagline of "Organize. Collaborate. Get stuff done." Differentiate yourself from potential competitors and clearly communicate value. Also, minor nit but there's no reason a static landing page should show a loading bar before revealing the content. That alone is going to cost you real $$$ in page bounces.
Agree with this. Years ago I ended up in a situation where I had 10's of thousands of people using our "beta, not for serious use" service for free. I didn't want to charge money because I figured that only made sense if the product was finished and up to the standard I'd want (it wasn't). People would email every day asking if they could pay something.
Not so smart...
And yes, I definitely need to work on the marketing site... I’m afraid I’m not the world’s best salesman.
Hang on... don't you need a product that people want to use and pay for? You can't just magic that up out of nothing. There's a necessary amount of development required isn't there to get something built that people are willing to shell out for.
I've worked on some hobby SAAS stuff and every time I look at the numbers to see what it would take to equal my salary the numbers are staggering.
I think that's the key point made here, that these high salaries are not demanded if you aren't hiring on the U.S. west coast.
i have an mvp (phone app and webapp) to demo to customers. i have the decks and sales pitch. i'm a reasonably smart and articulate person and communicate well (able to "speak sales"). yet because i have no company history, no clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i can't get any traction. at least i think this is the reason i'm not getting any bites? i had leads (through my FFF investors) - i've had probably 10-15 sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where (the latest one fizzled out yesterday). pricing isn't the issue because i've floated several different pricing schemes to customers and while some are more attractive than others it's never been the deal breaker. maybe i have poor product/market fit but i've experimented with adjusted the product offering too and no significant change in reception there either.
now supposedly i should be learning something about my market segment but the problem is i constantly get contradictory signals - one customers says it's a great product but too early, another says it's not a useful product maybe i'd like to consider building such and such product, one customer says price is too high, another doesn't even mention it.
i'm really at a complete loss for how to turn this thing around and i'm burning through cash (although i'm not above taking cost cutting measures - fired one of us three 3 weeks ago and cut my own pay this month).
Small businesses on the other hand will normally try out a demo of the product and decide on the spot if they like it or not. They aren't all that way, but if you talk to 50 10-person businesses, at least a couple of them will probably be willing to buy on the spot if your product solves a problem for them at a reasonable price.
Go get some of those tiny customers even if they're not profitable for you, and then later move upmarket to the enterprise clients you really want. Or do what I do and just stay focused on small customers indefinitely because they're so much better to work with.
but this is a good idea. i've tried cold outreach but to larger organizations. i'll try reaching out to smaller (tiny) customers. thank you
How did you come up with the idea? How do you know it's something people want in the first place?
To me, this sounds more like a fundamental product problem as opposed to a sales/marketing problem. Try talking to (potential) users and find out what version of the general idea you want to build they could use and why.
Even if they say something like "too early", ask "why". Ask it 5 times, like a small child. "Too early" is just an excuse because they don't have the balls to say no. Find out what the underlying reason is.
OP - you may want to examine if you're offering a solution in search of a problem. Problems are harder to find and drill into than solutions. (And enterprise sales are hard, so make sure you're aware of the software valley of death and are in the mid 5 figure annual contract if you've got a long sales cycle).
our initial price was there but we've scaled it down exactly because of the long sales cycle (which honestly i could tolerate if i knew that i was actually in a cycle rather than circling the drain).
this has occurred to me of course but i just don't think it's true. without giving too much away it's a simple app that makes distribution of content at tradeshows much easier, personalized, and trackable (lead gen/capture for the content producer). if that's not a thing that tradeshows dearly need then i don't know what is.
> How did you come up with the idea? How do you know it's something people want in the first place?
everyone on the "advisory board" has decades of experience in the industry. it was one particular advisor's idea and i've run with it.
> Try talking to (potential) users and find out what version of the general idea you want to build they could use and why.
truf
After the solution is built, the expert decided she's "too busy" to return emails.
It happens all the time. Experts have ideas because their 9-5 job requires them to have ideas. They have to push hard for ideas so they will be taken seriously at meetings at work. That's why they are "experts". It's natural for an expert to "push" for her own ideas--otherwise she can't get buy-in from the rest of the organization for their ideas/initiatives and won't thrive.
The quality of the idea is not ass important as the act of pushing for it. Because if an idea does not get support, it's useless, regardless of if it was good or bad.
The moment you ask them to be use your product, they cease to be an "expert" and is now a "user", or even a "paid customer". Suddenly, they don't find the problem so "major" anymore. So you have to really qualify them before diving into the problem. Really make sure they are committed as a user before you start building anything.
I don't really understand this attitude. Why are you keeping this a secret? Aren't you trying to sell your app/service? That seems hard if you're not willing to tell people what it is/does.
Let's do an exercise: I don't know anything about tradeshow. Can you explain to me what you mean by content and how it's distributed currently?
Ash Maurya came on my Sales for Nerds podcast and talked about it.[0]
I remember saying something like "I wish I'd known this 5 years ago."
And he said, "me, too." ;-)
[0]: https://www.salesfornerds.io/episode-7-ash-maurya-on-scaling...
This is going to sound harsh I guess, but you don't just have poor product/market fit, you have none at all.
I would recommend reading Steve Blank's Four Steps To The Epiphany (again if you have already).
Edit: I see in your other comment that it's related to lead gen at trade shows, so see if you can convince customers to use a free trial at a trade show so they can actually see the value (and have invested in the platform with real leads by the time you come knocking with a bill).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_y2WkZ2JEQ&list=PLNFgwC3AOW...
Did you guys pick this product out of the blue, or do you have industry experience? If you have industry experience, reach out to your network. Both for trying to get actual leads and for simply soliciting their feedback, even if they won't be a customer themselves. The feedback in and of itself will be valuable, and after you've exposed it to them, they may know of someone to connect you with, and eventually you'll land on someone that's willing to bite.
> i have no company history, no clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i can't get any traction. The above piggybacks off your past experiences and working experience to try to force some initial social proof. If you can't do that, it does get harder and is more of a raw numbers game to try to have conversations with as many people as possible.
> i've had probably 10-15 sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where That's less than one a week. Your number should at least be an order of magnitude higher than that. Especially with Enterprise clients, the deal rate is going to be really low and you counter that by a high volume of outreach. Even if it's just cold contacting, rather than leads from investors, you should be reaching out to several people per day, and following up with a regular cadence (which can be automated). Rarely do you hear back on first contact, and multiple touch points, which works even if it sounds skeezy to non-sales people (including me, I work for a demand/lead generation firm and know sales pipeline figures from an analytics perspective, but hate doing sales myself). Or even just one new person a day. But definitely not one person a week.
> an enterprise saas product that involves some cool buzzwords and potentially really adds value in the space i'm targeting but i'm getting no traction. Is the added value worth the headache of integrating your tool? Is your product replacing an industry-standard in the space or augmenting it? Introducing change is hard and every change introduced simultaneously introduces a level of operational risk (from the change management process itself to the added dependency of your product in their work chain). Most organizations resist change, and your product either has to be seamless enough to be perceived as low friction to introduce or have a large enough upside to be worth the hassle/headache of introducing it.
> (able to "speak sales") In enterprise sales, you need to speak sales and dance politics. Depending on the level of decision maker you're targeting, they'll have different levers they can pull, different politics they have to play, and different constraints on what they can do. Your pitch needs to account for the concerns of the decision maker you're speaking to. A middle manager will have different concerns than a division director than a C-level individual. You also need to make sure the person you're speaking with can actually make a decision related to your. Are you BANT qualifying them[1]?
> one customer says price is too high, another doesn't even mention it. Different customers will value your product's impact differently. You'll always get conflicting responses like this, and until you have a higher volume of responses you can't make much sense of this. But one thing to keep in mind is what I mentioned above - different level of decision makers will have different responses. A middle manager may have authority, but they're working off of a "what can I put on my procurement card" budget because they know your project will die if you have to actually get approved as a vendor and get billing set up with accounts payable. So your product can be perceived as too expensive, when it's really just too expensive for this individual to push through on their own. Don't take this response at face value, dig into the reasoning behind it. Creative payment terms can sometimes solve this. Other leads may know they have full authority to sign an annual contract and pay up front, and won't mention budget being an issue. Normalize your contradictory signals by the situation of the individual giving them, to get a better idea of what your target demographic is and what your true issues are.
Also, in the case where the customer says the price is too high, if that's their only hangup, discount the price significantly (or stretch an annual term into an 18 month term at the same rate, so they get a cheaper per-month rate but you lock them in for longer but renew at 12 months and the discount disappears without explicitly changing your rate on the client). Make sure you include language related to permission for a case study and testimonial as part of the discount terms. Chalk it up as a marketing expense to gain that first bit of social proof, and leverage it for other pitches.
[1] BANT - Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. A crude but effective sales qualification process which validates a lead is worth continuing with, and also helps you identify which points you need to work focus on. For example, if you qualify the person has a budget, need, and timeline, but no authority, you know the company is a potential client but need to figure out how to get a more authoritative person involved in the discussion. If it's timeline, then follow up later on. If it's Need, then convince them of their need (or give up). Etc
> If you have industry experience, reach out to your network. Both for trying to get actual leads and for simply soliciting their feedback, even if they won't be a customer themselves. The feedback in and of itself will be valuable, and after you've exposed it to them, they may know of someone to connect you with, and eventually you'll land on someone that's willing to bite.
i didn't have industry experience when i started but the rest of the team does (decades worth). we've been doing essentially this - leveraging their network to "solicit feedback", i.e. pitch the product.
> Is the added value worth the headache of integrating your tool?
this is probably the crux of the issue for me. there is too much operational cost in actually rolling out the product i think. a lot of it revolves around the customer essentially reselling this product. we've considered taking reseller sales in house (i.e. customer signs a contract with us and we resell our own product on their behalf) but that basically multiplies my problems ten fold.
> Are you BANT qualifying them
no and i should be for every call. thank you. i need to make a list of thing i'm trying to learn about each lead on each call.
step one: be more intelligent than most people
behind almost every business, behind almost every professional success and behind almost any success in general that ive seen, is a highly intelligent person. i find it irritating to read because the concept of a guide is spelling things out so that anyone can follow the steps and get the same result. successful people always benefit from high intelligence, money and success will always be unfairly skewed to the benefit of those who happened to be born with better brains and into better developmental circumstances. nobody needs this guide because they are either smart and dont need a guide or dumb and in which case cant use this guide.
This sounds to me like multiple flavors of selection bias, e.g., survivorship bias, confirmation bias, etc.
Have you looked into how many very smart people achieve nothing of significance? There are a lot of them...
> step one: be more intelligent than most people
Studies have shown that founder IQ correllates lower than other factors with business success. (I assume you're talking about IQ, otherwise defining being "smart" to mean do what it takes to be successful is a tautology.)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2013/11/27/smarts...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140717120528-117825785-what...
http://scientificbrains.com/people-with-higher-iq-makes-more...
It's been proven time and time again that humans can learn and adapt to achieve their own aspirations. Take one quick look at the special olympics; you'll see a very large group of individuals who have all overcome amazing obstacles to become olympians.
Similarly, highly intelligent people may not have the domain knowledge required to understand how to bootstrap a company. Their knowledge domain may come from a completely different environment or culture which has its own mindset on how to bootstrap a company. Being smart does not necessarily make you more equipped than "dumb" (and highly motivated) people, but it does give you a decent head start.
Gradients
Diagonal limits between sessions, these escape a little bit from traditional HTML-boxed content and suggest scroll-down behavior.
Top left Logo, top menubar for quick navigation.
Text to the left, images to the right
Why listen to someone who's basically got the new version of a flash website?
Also, try making your screen half width, as if you had two browser windows side-by-side, something I do regularly.
I mean, it's one thing to throw mud about everyone copying stripe, it's another when your own site is shockingly bad.
All it does is show that perhaps it's better to have designers copy successful designs given what they'll sometimes do left to their own devices.
For example, I searched for "people working" and this was result #2 which is in a similar style: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/set-isometric-busi... .. and the illustrator in question has numerous graphics along a similar style: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/yindee .. this was just the first one I found, there are hundreds of such illustrators, though. "isometric" is another good word to use in searches, BTW, see https://www.shutterstock.com/search?searchterm=isometric+ele... for example.
I launched about a month ago, and my MRR is 3 figures. Here's a few of the marketing ideas I've tried.
* I spent around $100 on AdWords, but didn't get any conversions. I think my ad was pretty good, but my theory is that most of my target audience are using ad-blockers.
* I started a blog, and wrote a post about Rails/React development [1]. It was included in the Ruby Weekly newsletter, which was great, although it didn't get too many views (< 1,000). The blog post doesn't mention an author, so they used "FORMAPI BLOG" as the subtitle. This was a nice surprise, since sponsored links are very expensive. (I'm booking a sponsored link for early next year.)
* I ran a "Bitcoin Treasure Hunt" [2] with a few programming challenges. I had a good spike of about 60,000 views, so some programmers might remember the service next time they need to generate PDFs. I couldn't get any attention on Reddit or Hacker News, but maybe I'll have better luck next time.
I learned a lot from this experience, so the next one will be much more interesting, and it won't have any ambiguities or mistakes. It will be less of a "scavenger hunt", and will have more fun challenges with algorithms and logic puzzles. (There's a signup form at the bottom of the post, if you're interested.)
* I paid for a short marketing consultation with someone who has a lot of relevant experience. They've been really awesome, and have provided a lot of great advice that I'll be implementing soon. Lots of things to improve around pricing, SEO, UX, social, PR, etc.
The initial launch went pretty well on HN and Product Hunt, but that traffic has died down, so now I've just got to put in consistent work over the next few years.
[1] https://formapi.io/blog/posts/json-patch-with-rails-5-and-re...
Bootstrapping does have a fairly rich history in computing. It has found an excellent meaning or two. Does it need another not quite analogous one? I dunno, I was in business and in Private Equity (at a very junior level) for a long while before I was in computers, and prefer the jargon of classic finance I guess. Likewise I don't like 'burn-rate' and 'runway' as the naive twins of 'cash-flows'. I could go on but my stuffy finance background is never likely to win me a popularity contest...
I guess one thing people might want to bear in mind if they are not in the US, you may find senior finance people in the UK, for instance, totally bemused by this term if you find you want to stop bootstrapping and look for funding.
A more substantive comment might say what specifically is interesting, or point out something specific about "the life he advocates".
Did you read the article?