We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR
blog.thinkst.com
blog.thinkst.com
I'm the cofounder of Eureka Surveys. We're bootstrapped, profitable, and just crossed 1M+ users. We've had an amazing experience hiring customer support in the Philippines. I have a thread about it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/t0mstah/status/1356296043009253382
The tl;dr is that you can hire cheap ($3.50/hr), high quality virtual assistants from the Philippines to handle customer support for you, all from day one. Having CS has really made a difference for us in our business and is one of our main differentiators as we've scaled up the CS team. DM me on Twitter and I can connect you to some excellent VAs looking for jobs!
Better to go straight to the source in my opinion, rather than using something like Fiverr. Going direct is cheaper, allows you to interview around a bit more easily, and helps build a more direct, long-term connection with the VA as an employer instead of as a contractor.
Spare me the "Life is cheaper in the 3-world non-sense"
- Pay your local workers livable wages and dont fuck the local population. Where are most of the customers located?
- If you want to hire foreign workers pay them the same or a substantial fraction of your local workers. If they are good their nationality should not matter.
- Hire and pay directly not through intermediates, dont wash your hands off from all the regulations you need to comply with.
Here we have a company which is effectively paying 10-20% of what a local worker would get (Net Salaries+Taxes+Compliance Requirements,etc). Are they going to charge for their product 10% of the US price in the Philippines?
Many companies want the "good things" about globalization: Access to cheap, unregulated workforce, free-flow of capitals, lack of responsibility for any externality created (are they contributing to social security?) but complain about the other side: worldwide liability, open borders, different regulations.
Companies should adhere to regulations though, no arguments there.
I determine that and I say +80% , you dont get weasel out of this with useless semantic distinctions.
> Is it a simple fraction
As oppose to a "complex" one?
> Is it something governments should regulate or should consumers vote with their wallets?
The company owners should be ethical enough to pay that.
Do you use this kind of sophistry to justify your compensation or what you charge for your product or service? I highly suspect that is not the case. Easy peasy to play Aristotle when it is about poor working-people living money.
No I dont.
> You don’t own anything with an intel in it?
No.
> Do you not buy anything made overseas that pays workers less than 80% of some us based rate?
This is all what I have bought in the last 12 months (besides food and rent and services)
2 used jeans
2 used cargo shorts
3 T-shirts (5 USD each)
10 pair of boxers (New, 3 USD each)
1 100 USD phone
That's have been my total consumption. In my place I use 1 lightbulb, 1 small fridge, 1 rice maker and the laptop.
Any other question?
Manufacturing for example, is heavily outsourced to cheaper locations. We can certainly have all the tshirts we buy in the US made in the US. Hire locally, create jobs, pay a thriving wage etc.
Then the tshirts will cost more. You might be ok with that, but will the rest of the population? Or will they opt to buy the $10 tshirts made in China? Do we impose heavy duties on anything imported, so the domestic products are price competitive? What about export markets? Will Europe buy our $50 tshirts over the $10 Chinese made tshirts?
Paying local workers a thriving wage would be great, and we certainly do it for many sectors (tech for example). I just don't know if it's workable for a lot of things.
We currently have a situation (we use cheaper labor in developing countries to make stuff more cheaply). Some take issue with this for various reasons like exploitation, depriving local labor force of work etc. I genuinely would like to hear some viable alternatives.
The common response is "just pay them more". But that doesn't work in most situations. So what do we do?
We have had 0% attrition rate and have been told by our VAs that working for us has been the best job they've ever had!
You obviously don't know what you're talking about.
I'm from Brazil. If you paid me $40.000 yearly to work remotely i would be a top 3%~ earner.
This would entitle me to:
- Renting a 60m2 2bdr, 2bath appartment in a top neighbourhood of São Paulo
- Having a really nice car (by brazillian standards)
- Top notch health insurance in the most respected hospitals in Latin America
- Easily keeping 1/4 of the money for investments and private pension
From an American perspective, a couple key points to know are 1. Filipinos are among the nicest people in the world, cultural-wise, and 2. English is taught starting in most elementary schools there.
But wait, there’s more!
From the Filipino perspective, you get to help enable a new means of living income in what is a competitive and resourced-limited economy. To add perspective, while it’s not in all locations, it’s not uncommon to see homeless children wandering hopelessly.
Filipino culture is also very friendly and most VAs speak almost fluent English.
We're small enough that I check out the website of every new company. I continue to be amazed at the sheer breadth of small-ish, profitable companies, often bootstrapped, that I would normally never encounter.
Also, a shameless plug for my podcast for people running bootstrapped software companies: https://bootstrapped.fm/
Speaking as someone that tried to be a founder from Brazil: I imagine that making it on Silicon Valley must be hard task on itself but making in an underdeveloped country makes odds stacked against you.
We compete with companies founded with people that have access to clients with way more purchasing power and better supply pipeline.
I'm a bit curious on how the team got overcame this issues, and would suggest you to repost this on a time that gets more traffic in americas, since is 3AM here.
Your wording flipped a bit in my head. That exact wording could be said of Europe. There's a whole show and dance to make it seem like it's not, but when everything is about government grants and consortiums, it is.
Sounds very much like Australia, too.
We are building waste management IoT devices that are deployed to the public, and making a sale easily takes 2 years and thousands of hours in compliance testing and validation.
Usually this will involve identifying features, getting documentation from your customers they would use the features, inventing a story about how these features will save CO2 and create export oriented jobs, and magically forgetting that you have all the inhouse competencies needed while simultaneously identifying a knowledge partner (preferably in another EU country) who can provide you with the missing knowledge.
It's hard to believe it unless you've seen it. Many companies have full-time employees who do nothing but write and manage funding applications. And don't think it stops at startups. Consortiums mixing startups and established SMEs are a huge plus.
I mean I run a SaaS in the Netherlands. I know some such subsidies exist but they're also appallingly unattractive (except a general R&D salary tax cut). Shit like "get 25k if you do a project with 2 other companies in 2 other EU countries". I'd rather focus that energy on our product and our customers, thanks.
Your suggestion that "everything is about" getting these grants does not match my experience. Rather, I'd put it as, "there are some companies who'd rather hunt down grants than actually focus on their market, and they're seldomly successful". While I agree that these grants, by virtue of existing, actively discourage good entrepreneurship and thus hurt the market, I strongly disagree that you need them to succeed.
I have lots of thoughts on this though. I think with a low enough burn rate, you can overcome this with a great product, and taking just one bite at a time. ie. one happy customer, then another. Actual customer happiness is so low, that you just have to do a little better to have people talk about you, and over time it compounds nicely.
i.e. if you dont have the voice in the industry that people will listen to, find people who do, and get them to see your product. Most industry leaders are constantly looking to up their game, so you should be able to catch their eye, and if your product is awesome, they will say so
For infosec for example, i think if your product did "X amazing thing", then you'd definitely get a seasoned experts attention if you tweeted "hey, we built a thing that does X amazing thing, give me 5 minutes and i'll show it to you"
I think theres a part of this that means your products has to convince them in the 5 minutes they give you (or at least has to convince them to give you 5 minutes more)
> over the past 2 years have managed to donate over a million dollars to local charities
I wish more companies were doing this. There are many already -- consider joining the Fouders Pledge https://founderspledge.com/ if you're thinking of doing the same.
What about employee compensation? Is it just a fixed salary or? Since I do not see any mention of going public in the article, so I'm curious what is the motivation for employees.
It's worth noting that we couldn't always do this (starting off we just went with "decent salaries and smart ppl to work with").
We try to keep doing this right so that we all do well as the company does.
The second best part about bootstrapping (specifically: solo bootstrapping)? The immense satisfaction of eating from the work of my own hands. I finally launched my side project last month, and it's making enough to pay for rent and food. I have no other source of income or savings, and the feeling is fantastic -- even though the amount I am earning right now is tiny, far less than what I earned as a private consultant or employee of a VC-backed firm before. I wouldn't trade this feeling of satisfaction for any other job in the world. The freedom of 100% ownership: earning, managing, and spending every dollar without having to answer to anyone is priceless.
Taking VC money is just a glorified type of employment with lottery returns.
But point taken! You don't have to answer to VC whose interests don't necessarily align with yours.
You can't spend out of the company's bank account, but you can take distributions from the company. At that point it's yours.
Also, it's not clear to me that avoiding accountability is really a plus for a startup. Basically the first thing I did when I was exploring a solo founder/bootstrapped thing was to hire a startup-focused coach to serve as an accountability partner.
He's brilliant, and he started Bootstrappers Breakfast, so he's very comfortable with bootstrapping and solo founders. He asked so many good questions.
I also recommend Tristan Kromer: http://www.tristankromer.com/
He's also great, and is more focused on larger startups and intrapreneurs.
Fingers crossed on 100M ARR!
1. Are outside the valley
2. Started with minimal or no funding
3. Hire a ton of employees overall
4. Give their founders comfortable lives.
5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing.
6. You've never heard about.
They used to be called micro independent software vendors (mISV) and before the silicon valley gold rush this was the dream of young entrepreneurs.
Brainstorming is still important to me, but I'd rather brainstorm with a specialist. If any HNers fit the bill, please do send an email.
Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives.
Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people.
We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 months. Happy to answer any questions.
Looks like this is dead. Happy to answer any questions @dang ! Once kids are in high school, maybe will try something bigger!
Many users would use the product and then file chargebacks. Many users will go to any extend to get out of paying coming up with either sad stories, lies or threats. When it's a low cost, high volume product (5m+ paying customers over time) - you deal with too many of these and sometimes it's very demoralizing.
I used to work for someone else in Saas and this wasn't such a big issue there. Next thing I do won't be in consumer.
Some ideas where tried end to end in a week, some were run for 2 years. Did a lot of mistakes along the way.
What distinguished the successful attempts from the unsuccessful ones?
How did you know when it was time to move on?
Knowing this, how do you create and market your product to get people to buy?
I feel like with B2B it's easier to convince people to buy purely by showing them value, whereas B2C seems more impulse driven.
Today's consumer doesn't like to pay for anything, especially if it is a digital product. They will do whatever they can to get out of paying either by pirating or trying to get a refund/chargeback after using it.
Sometimes they will do an impulse buy. Which is what we were able to work for us, but then bad actors try to make your life as miserable as possible.
B2B is not rosy and has its own set of issues. But I would rather kick 50 ungrateful users from the platform to their face, rather than deal with 10k ungrateful consumers.
And as you said: loathe customer support for B2C.
Solution to both of them is making a simple product which provides incredible value which is self serve. Word of mouth will take care of the rest. Eventually build a community driven forum which will help with support.
I don't live in US.
We do have outsourced customer service. But still I have to be aware of what the customers are complaining about. In some cases people are filing frivolous complaints to government agencies which you have to respond to. With Saas, I would go after the bad actors. With consumers the number of bad actors is endless.
PS: I am getting throttled by HN algorithms. If someone can help get me unthrottled I will get around to answering all the questions.
Try contacting hn on their email.
Thought this was a good opportunity to share my learnings and answer any questions. If there is any way I could help answer any question, I would love to!
Congratulations on your success!
Here are some questions:
Q1. What was the prerequisite for your success (product/service, team, market)?
Q2 What technology space are you in? (Digital/brand vs high-tech)?
Q3 What weré your difficultis when iterating over your product concepts, and what was the iteration frequency?
Q4 How long did it take to take off?
Would love to chat at some point, or connect. My email is the profile.
> Q1. What was the prerequisite for your success (product/service, team, market)?
Drive and desire of learn would probably be biggest. No task is good or bad: If something has to be done it has to be done.
Acquiring more skills apart from programming: devops, product, hiring, management, sales, marketing, legal, accounting. This help you develop holistic view of your product and company.
> Q2 What technology space are you in? (Digital/brand vs high-tech)?
Product for end consumer. The end product itself is not very high tech. I don't know a humble way to say it - but the tech powering the company is really well architected and managed.
> Q3 What weré your difficultis when iterating over your product concepts, and what was the iteration frequency?
This could be a 5000 word reply. In the end difficulties don't matter. Brutally prioritize and keep at it till you overcome it. Know when to cut your losses and move on.
> Q4 How long did it take to take off?
I had 3 products which saw good adoption. Only the current one is financially successful. Each of those took 1-2 months to build and we knew within a week that it was going to be successful.
Yes.
You may want to introspect into what you are bringing into the reading as your own context.
Glad that we could figure this out like reasonable adults.
What was your criteria for "this one has failed let's do another one"?
I could maybe spend 5000 words and still not be able to say all I want to say about this.
The ideas were all over the place: Social, Enterprise, Consumer, Saas.
I learnt over time that once you have failed so many times, you start avoiding obvious mistakes. Mistakes like polishing your app before launch, wasting time on PR, building too many features, not spending enough time qualifying your users.
Once you build enough products you start knowing the impact of things like:
1. Marketplace products: supplier and consumer chicken and egg problem)
2. Single player mode: you don't need your friends to be on the app and you can get immediate value as soon as you start.
3. Social products: Where degree matters. Most IM products can provide a lot of value of if 1-3 of your close friends are on it. But products like Facebook needs 50+ friends, Twitter needs strangers.
4. See if you LTV (life time value) > CAC (customer acquisition cost) + Operation cost + Development cost
5. Customer acquisition strategies: Programmatic (ads, crawler), Sales team, Referral, Content marketing
There are so many other small things. These concepts are like different lego pieces and over time you find which one works better for your product and you use the right pieces.
Biggest takeaway was how to do faster iteration, brutally prioritize and automate everything. Everything else is learning along the way!
> How do you handle support with just 3 people? I imagine at that scale you either have a lot of customers, or small number of customers with very specific needs.
We are highly automated. Very very few queries get through and they are contracted out.
> what is the skillset of 3 people? 1 product, 1 sale/market, 1 developer or something else? how complex is the product in terms of technology?
2 developers (I am 1 of them) and 1 person for everything else.
> Are you in a large market with competitors but still plenty of room, or have you more or less cornered a smaller one?
It's a large market with 20+ competitors. Because our operational costs are so low and we are highly automated we could take over big chunk of business from our competitors. Essentially the dynamic is like Altavista vs Google.
Our competitors sometimes do some really dark patterns. I am realizing that almost all companies do that (Google incognito tracking, Facebook charging kids in games etc). Somehow I can't get myself to do that. So I am thinking of moving to Saas so that I can deal with mature customers and ideally provide them value.
> What are your skillsets? How did you get there?
I am a programmer as my core skill. But I have also played product, marketing, sales, hiring through my career. To get good a these, I worked in my jobs as if I was the owner. That helped get me experience faster.
If people want to do a startup, best advice for them would be join a startup with good team at an early stage. Bonus points if that startup is in a space you like. Learn, make good friends and then then do your own startup.
I really recommend Naval's "How to get rich" podcast. It's as if he is talking about my life. He decided to move to more investing, but I still like building stuff myself.
> What distinguished the successful attempts from the unsuccessful ones? > How did you know when it was time to move on?
If I don't know how to keep growing the business, it's a dead-end and time to move on.
25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?
7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money
3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money
4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit.
It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas.
I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work for someone else. That kept me going.
We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret.
Don't answer if this is too personal - but why the regret? It sounds like you have had kids, so perhaps it got harder? Or you had fewer than you wanted. Why do you regret it?
As you get older, the quality of time you spend with them will also get worse.
My wife went through lot of difficulties in her pregnancies. It would have been easier for her body, if we had kids earlier.
My drive to get out of the corporate slavery was the reason for the delay. So I regret the delay.
At a friend's wedding, his great grandmother was there. Hearing that, I realised there is an amazing upside to having kids a little earlier.
Think of the advantage of having kids later: Your kids get to be born into a deeper and better future, and may some day enter the 22nd century, lucid and able.
I know this is an extreme example but, talk about downsides!
One of my great grandmothers was in an actual arranged marriage at age 14 to a man who was like 60 years old. She managed to get out of that one, but had to marry another man (my great grandfather, who I never met) to do it.
It was a different world back then, but compressing generations to the point where you are able to know your great grandparents usually requires some creative accounting that wouldn't fly for most people today.
My point is that multiple generations of people need to have children at very young ages - often under conditions where they lack agency - for you to know your great-grandparents. It was a great experience for me, but every generation before me had a hard life.
But live for yourself and what you think is good. It's always a tradeoff. Having your grandparents at your wedding is nice, sure, but you can't optimize for everything.
These days they're of course much older, and I am in the lucky position to be able to look after them financially, but they're also filled with added regret about depending on me - they feel like failures because rely on me to cover all their expenses - despite my best efforts to assure them that it's ok.
So to your point, whilst having kids younger means you can spend more time with them when you're older, it's not necessarily the better solution if it requires a trade-off in terms of first establishing yourself financially - and from reading your other comments - it sounds like you and I both started off in life with relatively little, so I think the choice to first secure ourselves financially before having kids makes more sense.
I delayed having kids with my wife until relatively late (I was 37 she was 33), and whilst I know this will probably reduce the amount of time I'll get to spend with my children when I'm much older, the peace of mind that has come with having first established my SaaS before starting a family is immense.
In fact one could argue that the reduced stress alone will probably add 10 years on to my life :-)
Thanks for sharing your inspirational comments above and below. Enjoyed reading all of them. And congratulations on the success - I'm sure it is well deserved.
In my case my big mistake was moving to US mid way in career. It disrupted by established life and I had to start over from scratch. If I had stayed in my native country, I would have been able to have kids earlier.
Thanks for sharing your experience!
> I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret.
I know it's your choice but haven't you still sacrificed your personal life, so why not try to become 10x?
1% ungrateful complaining consumer out of 1 million users are 10k users. I don't like dealing with them. At 10x the business they might become 100k or more. I would rather have 10k high paying Saas customers and weed out the ungrateful ones there but to their face.
Currently we are working above the board with no dark patterns. We have one of the best customer service and refund policies across possibly all consumer internet companies. Our competitors have lot of dark patterns. To grow 10k, we might need to do shittier things which I don't want to.
I know there are lot of founders and executives out there who would be fine doing dark patterns for growth. But I am not and maybe that is my shortcoming and which is why I didn't want to grow in the Corporate ladder. If I own the company, I can have final say on these things.
And I'm not sure how to even outsource support. Do I just hire someone part-time from some gig website and pay them for X hours/week? I think one dedicated customer support person would do wonders for my business but it would require about ~5-10 hours of work per week. And customer support is something you get better at the longer you do it, so I don't want to constantly hire replacements, especially if it's going to be just one person doing support.
Do you have helpdesk software?
Are you using an answering service/receptionist to answer calls and then send the support issue to your support email or software?
Make as much as you can self-service for your users.
Have brief videos explaining your solution, so you can easily reply with a link to the video and ask them to follow up with you if they have more questions.
Keep track of both issue count and resolution time.
You may find it better to automate something you only do 4 times a month, but takes 8 hours, versus something you do 8 times per day, but only takes 5 seconds.
Finally, keep track of support issues by type, so you can see emerging trends and find your biggest pain points (# of tickets with a particular issue * median resolution time of particular issue).
Automate everything possible.
If you still can't manage and need human support, hire someone in India/Philippines part time, treat them like a valued employee, build a relationship.
I got a simple question, was it worth it and what would you change?
I should have qualified my statement about failures better.
Current one: Financially successful for me.
Another one: Financially successful but got screwed over.
Another one: Was very successful with adoption, but timing got wrong and didn't become financially successful.
2 others: Moderate success but financially not successful.
It was really tough, but I enjoyed the process. I love building products. I have a few really good ideas, but don't have bandwidth for them right now. I would keep building products for my love of it.
My long term goal is to leave the world a better place. It took 10+ years to get to the point that I can work on anything I want to without worrying about bills.
I regret delaying having kids. I regret not spending enough time with family and friends. I wish I had taken better care of my health. But right now I get to spend more time with my kids than any of my friends.
Every individual is different with their situation and motivations. What worked for me might not work for others. The thing which helped me the most was my innate desire to build better products and making sure I keep learning more and more.
My life's driving principle is: If I can't look back at my self 2 years back and I don't think I was so stupid back then I am not learning fast enough.
Even though I have regrets, I would say it was worth it. Of course if I could I wish few things would have gone differently about my life - but who doesn't.
Also if you are looking to expand into new ideas and want eng folks with more time on their hands I have a group that would be interested. Currently we are evaluating ideas to go off and build after coming to terms with the big tech corporate grind.
I'm too early to yet have regrets about pursuing this path, but I feel like it will inevitably get to me too and I try to think of ways I could have the cake and eat it too ( to some minimal extent). I don't yet think about family, it's not on my priority list at the moment (I'm thinking about starting it in my 40s and I accept the drawbacks), but there are some things I would like to get out of my personal life - preferably while still in my 20s, rather than 30s that I care about.
I'm sorry because this is going to be a long post. Please feel free to ignore it. I hope it contributes something to the discussion in general.
I'm thinking about 3 scenarios I could play out:
A) Pursue a niche desktop app idea that is a spin-off from an earlier failed product. It's the scratch your own itch thing, I have a new vision for the product. It would take 1 year to ship and 2 years from now in total to evaluate. Potential 100k - 1M / year revenue after years in business. This could be the type of business I could work hard at now, and spend a healthy 50h/week later to be still able to enjoy my life and enjoy playing the game. It's also realistic given my current resources. If it fails, I "lose" 2 years.
B) Pursue another spin-off idea, but this one is not niche, it's big and I know I may come off as naive - but I'm certain this is something that people will want. The challenge here is more in execution and competition (there's no other product like this on the market, and the demand is there). I'm a little guy now, so I could get squashed by more experienced players however, I may still pocket a million before going out of business. To get started with it, I would have to get a full time job asap (I have a dead end freelancing gig now), work 1 year and then live off savings. So it wouldn't see the light of day until at least 2024. This plan would also require 5+ years working at intense startup, sacrificing a lot - all these personal goals I care so much about.
c) Focus on the big idea, but delay it by 2 years to get some things off my personal bucket list. So I get full-time job by the end of 2021, 2022 - 2024 I focus mostly on personal life, while working and making savings (I may have 10h/week to spend on building the prototype / v1 - which is very very little, but over 3 years is always better than nothing). Then 2025, quit job, work 70h/week full-time on preparing the business, launch it in 2026 or 2027. If it fails, I still should have enough savings to pursue another idea. Or if someone beats me to market and there's no point, I can pursue another idea straight away. Yes, it's 5 years, so there are big chances someone gets there first, but even if they get there first, they wouldn't get like a mainstream market adoption in 5 years, so there would still be place for competition and different variants of the idea. The real danger here is that these 3 years of focus on personal life may throw me off the path, I may not be able to come back once I lose momentum, but I like to think I would have the discipline to do come back.
Currently I'm most inclined towards option C - it has some certainity about it. The business may fail, but there's a lot of certainity I will have logistics to pursue another idea. I can also get personal goals to some extent (unless the pandemic restrictions last too long). So it's potentially big reward, less sacrifice and risk.
I put some work into option A however, so it's hard to not think about it. Maybe it could be really good opportunity at having a lightweight business, that's also achievable given my current resources and experience. But it can still fail - and it's a subset of the bigger idea (as I mentioned earlier, both projects are spin off ideas from my first failed product).And if it fails, I can't work on the next business right away.
I guess I self-answered myself here. I'm only torn because if I want to go for option C, I had this plan to release A as open source and use it for my resume, I think it would help the job hunt a lot and allow me to negotiate a better salary, as well as flex product-building muscles. The logic for this, is I want a remote job, and while there are full time remote jobs offerrings within the niche I'm freelancing in - I think it may take me some 6 months to get a job like this - so I think, I could take this time to release the app as open source to 10x my resume and not leaving the job thing to luck.
So because I work on product A day to day, it's challenging to not view it as a business. It will be even more challenging when I complete it and willingly not give it a try to sell it (though I know selling it is like 5x more effort than building it, but still).
It would be helpful to get an outside view on these plans. Maybe each plan is dumb either way. The plan I had 3 years ago didn't pass reality test. I suppose it could be similar this time. What would you do? Try to have a shot at the simpler product and accepting a 2 year delay if it doesn't work out, or follow the long term plan and have a go at a much more ambitious product with a backup savings plan?
Go through Naval's podcast "How to get rich". Listen it once a month for 4 months. Make notes and see how his suggestions apply to you. Focus on the things that you disagree with and understand why do you disagree with them.
Now on to my feedback:
You are worrying too much about big competitors getting you out of business or idea already launched. Unless your product has a very small market, there is always opportunities for new players. Looks at the instant messaging space over the time we have had IRC, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Slack and there will be a lot more.
If an idea doesn't work out, you don't lose 2 years. You would have learnt a lot through this time. You are investing in your learning and capabilities.
Think of startup as a series of sprints. You sprint, strategize, sprint, strategize.
So my high level suggestion would be:
Start building what you want to build right now. Don't wait.
Don't think about doing startup in binary terms. Figure out which product you want to build next and try to find whatever time to make progress on it. During this phase if you have to sort out personal things do that. If you need to take a job to support finances do it. These are things that you have to take care of along the way. There will always be news stuff when you have taken care of the personal and finance part. Don't lose focus on your startup and keep chugging along.
If you get a job, make sure you don't use company hardware to build it. Make sure that there are no clauses which make products developed on your personal time as company property.
Yes pretty much I'm all over the place. It would be simpler if I had a single goal and be able to sacrifice everything else, but I can't. These personal goals are very important and spending even just 2 years on that would be one of the best investments I could make for myself, so I have been bending over backwards trying to figure out how I can carve out that time, while still being on the path towards having a product business.
> You are worrying too much about big competitors getting you out of business or idea already launched. Unless your product has a very small market, there is always opportunities for new players. Looks at the instant messaging space over the time we have had IRC, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Slack and there will be a lot more.
You are right. Even more so I shouldn't worry since I'm small and my criteria for success are relatively low and unlike a startup with vc funding I don't have to take over the world to be successful. So even if a large competitor would pop up, there may still be a place for a few million per year niche variant of the idea.
> Start building what you want to build right now. Don't wait. > Don't think about doing startup in binary terms. Figure out which product you want to build next and try to find whatever time to make progress on it. During this phase if you have to sort out personal things do that. If you need to take a job to support finances do it.
The product I really want to build (the bigger product), I could ship this in 3 years if I completely sacrificed the personal goals, or I could ship it in 5-6 years if I didn't sacrifice. The latter would allow me to also have more runway savings in case things go wrong. I think there are great benefits to the latter path. I would like you said, spend whatever free time left I had on the idea - even if it's only 10h/week - it would keep me invested in the path, so when the time is due to quit the job, I 'm excited to quit the job and work on the business (instead of keeping the job and staying comfortable). (I know these are long timelines, but the product is very complex to build, I have to work a full-time job for some of that time and I'm still a newbie so I'm moving slow)
> If you get a job, make sure you don't use company hardware to build it. Make sure that there are no clauses which make products developed on your personal time as company property.
For these reasons I'm specifically looking for a job at a small company (not a startup though) - up to 20 people, targeted around one product (which there are plenty of in my niche), this is why I assume it will take me a while to get a job - because they are usually looking for one person at a time. This is also why I had this idea to spend next 6 months building an open source product related to my niche, to have a near certainity I can get hired by one of these companies. I could have instead get the job in a large corp and I think there are high chances I would get it soon, because they hire a lot of people - but I consider it dangerous, because this is the kind of company that is all over the place, any digital product would be considered a competition with them and they would have the resources to bring me down if they wanted to - and from what I have heard, they do have a requirement to sign these kind of ugly IP clauses. While a small company, they don't have either money or inclination to chasing ex-employee over IP completely unrelated to their business he built in his spare time, and are small enough that probably even if they did require clauses, I could negotiate with them to not sign it.
I think my biggest weakpoint may be is I don't know any potential business partners. I have dropped out of university very soon and then I have been freelancing, so I never acquired any contacts I have been working together with. But what could I do? Looking for a partner could take a long time and there are big chances the partnership could go wrong obviously. I'm comfortable working solo and I think I can handle the psychology of it - but I have only one mind and one pair of hands. What would you say about having a co-founder vs. going solo in bootstrapped businesses?
Thanks again for your time.
What was your biggest lesson? Is there one thing you would do differently now if you could?
Listen to Naval's podcast about "How to get rich". He knows how to put ideas much better than me.
There are no shortcuts and if I tell you my winning lottery number after claiming the prize, it's not worth anything. Discover how you can provide value in your own unique way.
I first went moderately deep on technology skills. Then on a need basis, I kind of did a BFS on all skills needs to build and run a startup.
Eventually all the skills are important.
One other thing I really put a lot of effort in is trying to put me in the shoes of other parties. E.g. if I am trying to launch an idea I try to get in the shoes of engineer, pm, design, marketing, analytics and end user. Given that I have played all of these roles to some extent, it helps me make better decisions.
Maybe it would be better to seek a young wife then if you plan to be ambitious?
With wife and kids you want to follow your heart as long as your head (life situation) can support it.
If you would want to love your kids and be there for them, have them whenever you can. Nothing is guaranteed for anyone. Make your best case effort and love them from the bottom of your heart.
Don't seek out wife like an agenda. That is a receipt for disaster. I married my wife because that was the first person I met where my thought process was: "How can I make her happy" not "How does this person fulfill my image and needs from a life partner".
Your expectations from your life partner might change with time. If you start with a baseline and it doesn't hold anymore, it would likely lead to discontent and possibly separation. Expectation is the bane of all relationship.
For immediate family just focus on what you can give and don't expect anything back.
By their own admission, OP's 20+ ideas didn't work.
You only need one, it just has to be the right one :)
Snark aside, I guess receptivity to novelty is critical when pivoting. At that point, though, the pivot should be based on data. Creativity is still required, constrained by the data. I believe that's more amenable to being 'engineered' rather than just waiting for the muse to arrive.
He said it was hard at first, but it got easier over time. His ideas didn’t dry up. They multiplied.
Honestly the hardest thing is picking one thing to focus on for an extended amount of time. It's tempting to prototype something and then get excited by the next idea and never fully finish what you were working on. I think this is just part of how humans are. I know a guy who worked on rockets and says it got boring after a couple of years.
I just came up with an analogy of trying to be successful at startup: Imagine someone who is just born in prehistoric rugged terrain who wants to reach some magical place. You don't know even how to crawl. There is some food and clues all over the place about how to reach the magical place. You have a magic button which can take you to slave house (corporate life). You could potentially come back from Corporate life to the startup life, but you would be bruised and would have picked bad skills which you know needs to forget.
You immediate focus should be gaining skills and pace. You will start by learning to crawl, walk, jump, climb, track your path, get better instincts, find food, look for clues, follow clues.
With more tries, you will get better at these. You will be better at navigating the terrain. You will get better heuristics which will determine your success.
Many time either people looking for a magic solution. This is equivalent to someone in this situation thinking if they can roll downhill and hope to be within crawling space of the magical space. It doesn't work that way. Some people do get lucky but most don't.
Any many times people are procrastinating. Which is like someone waiting at the edge of this magical world figuring out whether to make a plunge.
Just get started. You will figure out along the way. Make sure you have a good plan on health and finances!
RE my earlier question I’d really appreciate it if you could provide more insight into this.
So far I’ve been building MVPs in Django ( quick and easy) CRUD mainly, trying to improve copy writing, building better communication skills ( being more succinct), learning about SEO ( evergreen for marketing) and building paid marketing campaigns through FB. What else would you suggest?
So have a razor sharp focus on building and adoption. If things are going great then cool. If not, introspect and seek advice till you figure out how to make progress. You will acquire skills along the way.
There is no magic bullet. Naval said that for success you need Product, Market, Founder fit. I would suggest go through his podcast "How to get rich".
Don't fall in love with the idea. The idea you start with will never be the idea when you are successful. It will evolve or likely you will pivot to another related idea. Facebook today isn't what it started with. Flickr and Slack started as gaming companies. Google today is very different from what they started with.
It would help if you pick a good space. Ideally something which you know about, is big enough that there would be enough users.
And make sure you enjoy the process of going for it. If you set out with a sole goal to get rich and get famous, it can be very demotivating when things are not going your way.
(Just as a disclaimer, I started earning enough income from side projects for both my wife and myself to quit our full-time jobs about a year ago and start a family, but we're nowhere near the multi-millions in yearly profit that OP or bootstrapper10x are.)
Congrats on your journey and best of luck for the future!
It does help to elevate your exposure to industries and companies. Go to trade shows for your hobbies, learn their pain points. Consider switching jobs more frequently, or find some work at a consulting firm which can get you on a different contract every few months. Seeing the inside of more companies will give you more exposure and will help you see where they struggle.
Working on an idea (even a bad one!), doing the deep dive, will result in logical branches out to other ideas. You need to work on your execution anyway, because the best idea in the world won't take you far if you fail to deliver.
Since I started trying to build my ideas, I find that I have far more than I could possibly build myself.
None of them are perfect. None of them can satisfy every single potential customer. You can build yet another one to satisfy some small unhappy segment of the huge market.
One of the product was consumer and had a hockey stick growth curve obvious in the first week. So it was obvious to keep going on.
Another product was profitable and we could acquire new customers through advertising. So it was obvious to keep going on.
For the one's that didn't do good, initially I wasted a lot of time doing things which won't meaningfully help with adoption. Some of them are:
1. Building too many features.
2. Building too many platforms at launch.
3. Spending time on PR
4. Figuring out the perfect font for the website.
5. UI polish.
Over time you develop better heuristics. You can't ever be fully right but you just get somewhat better judgement.
However either my approach was wrong or I wasn't working with the right people. I felt that funding was too big of a waste of time. Without traction, everything I did was being second guessed. And too much time was being wasted pitching.
I haven't raised any money for 20+ of my ideas including the current one. But I can imagine it would be easier for me to raise money on better terms in future!
I use the nanny vs parent analogy for involvement with a product.
When you are working for someone else, you are a nanny. The product isn't your baby. Be careful how much you get invested. If you get sentimental and attached you will end up hurting yourself.
If you own your company, it's like being the parent. You have sole responsibility but except government no one else can interfere.
VC funded business can be like a wild ride. You may start as a parent, but you will eventually end up as a nanny. In some rare cases you can have majority voting rights till the end. Only famous case for that I know is Facebook.
6. You've never heard about.
I love going to industrial estates and checking out what is going on in there for this exact reason. CNC machine, 3D printing, endless engineering all of which will never be appreciated or create a fan boy cult but they will keep many, many other businesses operational and growing.
These places actually build things too, real tangible things that have requirements and so forth.
These advantages exist for mass retail. The medium-sized businesses who tried to compete with Walmart and Amazon had to adapt fast or fail. These advantages do not (EDIT: have not been shown to) exist for commercial real estate; WeWork was a dud. Most American commerce is, and should be, in the hands of these medium-sized businesses, if for nothing else than resilience and local optimisation.
My worry is the advantage of centralising customer data is too general. That lets a single entity exert broad scaling advantage, which is scary and inefficient. I increasingly think this should be a measure for antitrust enforcement: does a company possess an edge that gives it a competitive advantage in almost any market it tries to compete in. If so, it’s an economic nerve bundle and at the very least needs to be regulated.
WeWork was a dud. That doesn’t show in any way that these advantages can’t work for commercial real estate, just that nobody’s done it yet.
Many Walmarts were shutdown for multiple days to disinfect the store after an excessive number of employees tested positive for COVID.
Mom and pop stores would reduce spread simply because there is less concentration of people.
Saint Louis is also pretty centrally located from an Internet infrastructure standpoint and as far as I'm aware they've not amounted to much of anything from an IT standpoint since ftp.wustl.edu. It looks like Boeing, Square, and a bunch of banks have offices there.
That may have to do with secondary issues like the quality of education in Missouri. Undergrads might not give a damn but founders and VCs might care quite a bit.
There are a number of hubs in the country now, with most outside the valley focusing on one or more niches. Some of these are:
- Nanotechnology in Boston and Middlesex-essex, MA
- Healthcare Boston, New York City, and the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Big investments though are being made in Kansas, Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania
- SaaS in Austin,TX
- Education in Boston
- Fintech in New York City
Yes. By its very nature.
Plus, SaaS is more like a horizontal niche (though I would really call it a layer, with, e.g. shrink-wrapped software being another horizontal layer), while fintech, healthcare etc. are vertical layers[1]. In fact, the industry jargon term (outside of the narrow world of tech, at least), is "verticals". Ask any marketing guy. Verticals are usually defined by the business domain they apply to.
[1] E.g.: you can have a fintech SaaS and a healthcare shrinkwrapped app, and vice versa, and so on.
That doesn't mean it won't ever come to pass, but I am still skeptical. (And I live in Austin now... but the startup I work for is still fundamentally based in the Bay.)
And yet, and yet, and yet the same centers of industry persist. Movies in LA, Oil in Houston, Finance in NYC and tech in San Fran.
I am sure the arguments for the persistence are well rehearsed and can be looked up but I just want to underscore one feature: winner take all.
Whichever argument you find compelling as to why these industries congregate, (networking is easier, money is easier to get, you have everything you need in one place, ambitious people go there and so on) it has to be such that the #1 place has an enormous advantage over the #2 place. If your argument does not have that structure, it doesn't really explain why everyone congregates.
And if your argument does have that property (some winner-take-all mechanism), then after covid and zoom force a redistribution, so long as that small advantage maintains, the dominant city will re-assert itself.
Pittsburgh,Detriot were never in a position to overtake the valley. California offers too much and the valley is not moving to another citt. But less companies feel the need to be in the valley because the internet provides a virtual space.
Oil is being replaced with renewable power so that shift won't affect who the oil capital is but it will reduce it's imporance.
Finance and New York fit culturally well together like California dreams and high tech startups.
That's not really the case. It's people moving out of SF. The Bay Area (and surrounding suburbs) real estate market is hotter than ever. Just had a friend move there and finding a place to buy is basically you willing to bid over asking price.
valley hardware/software anchors - Berkeley and Stanford
boston tech anchors - MIT, Harvard
NYC fintech anchor - Wall St.
etc.