My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

Except in this analogy the two birds in the bush give you a continuous stream of their eggs.

Not sure why this is downvoted, "growing from 700/month to 7000/month can be mostly momentum" is trivializing what is more likely a very difficult scaling process, and there is a huge opportunity cost to continue to operating the business as opposed to cashing out and trying the next thing.

That's what a present value calculation is for.

SaaS maps better to Golden Goose analogies.

Negative feedback is better than no feedback. at least you know the person was sufficiently attracted to your product and idea and try it. It’s an opportunity to improve, and it’s also an encouragement. I’ve had people giving me bad feedback and then a few years later come back and finally use it. At this point i knew my product had improved.

Also, you’d be surprised how most people sound harsh but actually don’t really mean to. They’ll most likely completely change their tone after you’ve contacted them and tell them you’d like their opinion on future improvements. Also, if by any chance those people finaly use your product, you have a high chance that they become strong proponents and advertisers for your product.

Negative feedback doesn't matter unless it's from customers (or potential customers). People tend to worry too much about negative feedback from non-customers. A good example of non-customers eager to provide negative feedback is right here: HN :-)

I've been running a SaaS for a couple of years now and learned to take all feedback from customers very, very seriously, but also largely ignore feedback from non-customers. As an example, most people who whine about your B2B SaaS being "too expensive", are non-customers. I did some experiments with discounts, these people inevitably leave anyway.

Most real customers will give you feedback that is constructive, which immediately makes it positive. E.g. rather than whine or complain they will point out a missing feature or show how the software fails.

So, while anxiety is very real (solo founder anxiety is a major issue), it should not come from negative feedback.

Don't internalize the feedback. There will always be haters and bashers (we had people trolling the newspaper article comment section when we got bought by Intel). The point is that if you provide a valuable service to someone you'll get meaningful feedback from them (maybe not all good!) and you can learn from that. Don't pay attention to people who are just recreationally crapping on you and you'll be fine.

If you try to launch something, and it doesn't go well for anyone - well, you learned something. I do a martial art (Brazilian Juijitsu) where one of the cliches is "you win or you learn". It may be a cliche, but it applies to a lot of things. But to extend the metaphor, you have to get on the mat.

Negative feedback does not mean your product is bad, just look at the Show HN post for Dropbox (and discussions about this post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863. I especially love that the top post is someone saying that this is trivial to make on your own, something I hear far too often.

I hear you.

There's a good chance that, if you're like me, your anxiety about putting it out there leads you to tell yourself that if you just do this one other feature that it'll be ready. So you wait, and you do it. But it isn't quiiiite there yet. So you repeat that cycle. After a while, you've built up your expectations — both of how good it'd have to be to receive attention, and of what kind of attention you'd need to receive to justify the investment of time — that it's almost an impossible bar to meet. So … you don't ship.

I'd encourage you to ship things earlier in the process. As Matt Mullenweg said, "if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long." (https://ma.tt/2010/11/one-point-oh/)

I'd also be more than happy to give you friendly-but-honest feedback, if it'll help. Email in profile.

Find someone who's already building a useful SaaS product that they're willing to take the responsibility for, and help them build it. If it fails, at least that person takes the brunt of the negative feedback?

If that's most of what's holding you back, you should try to power through that anxiety, I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised. Most people who bother to write in are very kind, and if you're this anxious about negative feedback, I'm guessing you're not the type to try the obnoxious stuff that pisses people off enough to write in with negative feedback. Making it very easy to cancel will help too.

If you are sensitive to negative feedback it’s likely you are also sensitive to positive feedback, and it comes in roughly equal amounts. I have an email file of positive feedback received over the years. When I read stuff like “Thanks for such an excellent product. I really like it in our stack.” It lifts my spirits again and again.

It’s actually a chore to get a meaningful critique from a customer they just don’t care enough and will just cancel.

Why is a new grad R&D Engineer strange? that's certainly most of the people recruited at the first place I worked (UK) started as.

OK they wont be at the same level as the Boss (the President of the Mechanical engineers at the time)

What sort of people do you thein NASA JPL etc. recruit from university in the main.

I had previous colleague from India, two years of experience and suddenly was a senior.

I thought it was more common over there... guess not so odd.

He was bootstrapped and sold it for more than he would have made working full-time for another company or contracting for those 9 months, so kudos for coming out ahead!

He basically ripped off a github repo curated list of APIs and made it "searchable" + listed to PH then sold the site based on the traffic from that one spike. Not belittling it at all - he had the initiative to build it, monetize it, and sell it.

Yea, you'll really only find salaries like that in America.

I certainly have never sold a product I developed. Have you?

For reference, you can pick up .xyz domains for a dollar on namecheap (last time I checked).

A domain with traffic though.

Sure, for an individual, what you say is exactly the correct approach.

But for society, does it benefit us to pay people to work on scraping websites more than on OSS infrastructure? (One argument is yes because that's how the money flows, but why?) How do we as society fund OSS infrastructure and prevent people who would be good at it from leaving to seek money?

I mean, unlike theoretically preached by old billionaires and millionaires trying to trick the public and rewrite their own history, making money is usually at odds with creating real value. It's usually about marketing, PR and gaming the system.