Early on we were featured by Apple couple of times + podcasts, but now, mainly a mix of word of mouth content/SEO and honestly a lot of mystery.
Today HN :)
I hope it’s okay to ask a technical question:
How did you build push notifications (especially on mobile) with a single codebase? Do you use something like OneSignal?
Also, is your iOS app still using Cordova? It looks and feels so nice, which is a marked difference from the last time I tried that framework.
The single codebase for the client. We do have a server/API, which manages push notifications.
Yes, it is.
We had no web fame, Missive wasn't popular and it was a JavaScript app, let's say we were really surprised too.
At the end of the day, most of the users we got from those features, weren't really good fit. But it was good for our confidence.
Your story is amazing, but there is this tendency to conflate bootstrapping with re-investing-your-own-earnings which you admit to doing (from your other businesses). I'd rather call that "expanding" your existing business or "pivoting" rather than bootstrapping.
Sure, the line is fuzzy no matter how you look at it, but if you are not drawing from a fixed pot (eg. your personal savings), I don't like it being called "bootstrapping": the core difference is in the type of safety net you've got (and thus the risks you are really taking).
Profits from another business, in and itself, are technically also from personal savings.
But yeah, maybe our story doesn't subscribe to the purest form of bootstrapping.
Anyway, your story is enlightening and interesting regardless if it was "impurely" bootstrapped, so apologies if I made it seem as if that was the most important thing.
That seems like a crazy distinction. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps means not getting outside assistance. Growth through reinvesting your profits is entirely the deal. Otherwise what else on earth could it mean?
We started Cygnus with 15K (about 30K in today's dollars; it was 5K from each founder) and didn't take outside money for seven years at which point we have about 150 employees and had never had an unprofitable month after month 3 (though the three of us had to skip paychecks some months during the first year, and I gave the company free rent for a few months -- but staff always got a paycheck).
edit: It wasn't just the cash; we also had an old Sun-3 that Sun had somehow appeared -- still had a Sun property sticker -- plus we had the first production prototype of the "pizza box" sparcstation which had in fact been legitimately given away.
But the OP had profits from another business. Eg. imagine if Google decided to create a self-driving company with profits from their search/ad business. We wouldn't ever think of calling that self-driving company bootstrapped.
Lived the dream there: making a lot of money maintaining open source. Good stuff :D
In more than once case I sat in a conference room and was told by some exec that I (or we) was a fucking idiot while he (always he back then) handed me a P.O. or signed contract for $1MM. Needless to say I didn't care what they called as as long as they continued to pay.
Having to invent a whole new business model going into a mature market is hard and we worked hard at it. Also I had to write the first blanket assignment, the GNU library license (dynamic linking was Gilmore's great idea though), the fork-and-steering committee model (google for my message about splitting of GCC into egcs -- forking was super super controversial back then and was assumed by most people to be doom)... yes, fun times.
[1] https://medium.com/conference-badge/the-epiphany-behind-a-bo...