Why we bootstrap
flagsmith.com
flagsmith.com
You spend 90% of the time doing the first half, and then 90% again for polish - because you have to. They can talk all they want about "you need to go to market before the product is even usable", but if you don't have the VC runway to keep failing and still being able to pay rent, for bootstrappers it's not an option. You get to roll that dice once.
People expect few bugs, good UI and UX. There is a LOT of upfront work. I made sure that my tech choices have almost no overhead, and it's still more than a full-time job.
It's pretty trivial these days to go get a Bootstrap Template and Tailwind Template, often times of the type of product you're trying to make anyway, and just wire together some backend stuff.
I use ArrowJS and ES6 directly, even lighter than anything you mentioned. You are probably just assuming I am technically incompetent, but I've been down a few rodeos in 20+ years of doing this.
We, currently, have a ton of nice things that they don’t have (thanks Bootstrap) to build very quick MVPs that look pretty darn decent.
Originally named Twitter Blueprint.
Try doing that when nobody knows who you are and you ask your potential customers to connect their GitHub account to your app. You need to at least make sure it does not look like a shoddy hacking operation.
I never met a VC that did that. Perhaps 1 VC in 20 does that? This sounds more like an excuse.
People/companies expect solutions for their problems. If the solution has bad UX and is still buggy but solves their problem "well enough", they'll usually pay for it.
Also empirically, you can still regularly see products both on HN and Product Hunt by "indie hackers" that end up being quite successful and were incredibly rough on initial release.
I've seen a lot of bad ui make a lot of money, because it found a market segment that had no other options.
I've brought some very, very unpolished products to market, but they were in a completely new category. They got traction because there were few-to-no other options and they were all the same level of "poor" polish. That's the the market tolerated.
Likewise, ChatGPT is arguably not a particularly polished product. Even more so when it came out. It was a slow, somewhat buggy chat experience with no bells or whistles. Overtime, they've iterated and iterated and iterated.
If ChatGPT came in as "just another search engine", they'd have been laughed at from day one. The power and flexibility of LLMs would have been completely lost against the benchmark of mature, decades old search engines.
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In my opinion, the value of the product you built is the ease of use. All of the major source control platforms have basic levels of assignment and notification. Your system must provide significant value on top of that or be a pleasure to work with.
You might have a VC-funded product that has 0 bugs, perfect UI and UX and still nobody is using it. I've seen this in practice, even a decade ago. I believe that bootstrapping actually forces you to think about how useful the thing that you're building is to people. And if it's useful and in a good niche, users will work with you through a couple bugs. That said, some products are harder to build in a bootstrapped way than others.
Also, having show-stopping bugs in your app is as bad today as it was 10 years ago no matter if you're bootstrapped or VC-funded. It's rare that people use something that doesn't work.
You can think all you want about it, but until it's in people's hands, it doesn't matter. And when it is, per the earlier comment above, the expectations - in many many many markets - is that the UI/UX matters. IMO it matters far more than it should in early days, but that's just me.
Functionality that solves real problems is ignored because ... well... could be any number of reasons. Didn't like the colors. No dark mode. Something not obvious to people. Not using their language/terms.
> some products are harder to build in a bootstrapped way than others.
Yes - the 'ease' of connecting to an audience of decision makers, and their expectations re: usability... it can be very different between markets and services. And again, per the earlier above comment, expectations are simply much higher than years ago. Competition is stronger in many markets, and often the competition is inertia. "Learn a new system" vs "keep emailing excel sheets around" is still a real thing in a lot of places.
The users have been spoiled by slick, polished products. This used to be NOT the case. You could build something stupid out of boredom in a few days and walk into riches.
Frankly, the HN comments here sound quite condescending and snooty, telling me to find a narrower niche, be a better entrepreneur, and just maybe I don't know how to write code.
Not the point.
But speaking as someone even lately who has produced new products in the last few years, the products don't need to be perfect. The PG (I think?) anecdote about PMF where your product should feel like selling water to someone who is lost in the desert and dying of thirst. You can DEFINITELY achieve that with a sub-optimal, still a little unpolished/buggy product. I have, myself, just in the last few months. You just need the right product and the right market.
The biggest mindshift required here is you need to really think what can technology solve. Most products being developed by bootstrappers are competing in a space where the problem is already solved. For example the nth job board. Yes in that case if yours look shitty people won't use it. But that is not a problem at all if you are solving a real problem.
I will give you one example, and this is me sharing one of my products for the first time: a custom mobile app for housekeepers in rich families in the UK. The mvp for this was built over a weekend using just basic ios tools. Important thing to understand in this market (custom apps for companies) is that you have to go after companies for whom the branding difference is whether they are number 1..3 or 4.. and 4.. companies die due to competition. So if you can in anyway help them stand out for a large annual contract, they will lap it up.
There are many opportunites like this. Instead if you are building the next app that you are seeing online, ya you are too late.
The other thing is alpha products that are rough around the edges still exist. Forget the Twitter screenshots. When you used Twitter for the first time, did it look like that screenshot? No it didn't. Because by the time it became popular enough, it had been polished a bit.
So what you are doing is comparing a product which is popular now vs a screenshot of the thing before it was popular. If you actually look at the first alpha version of things of popular apps now before they were popular, you will see that they are still rough around the edges. Maybe a little bit less so as a lot of ui frameworks are available now.
Also older stuff look rough around the edges even more because ui trends themselves have changed.
So don't fall for this myth.
Solve something hard using technology with a ready to go ui kit and get the v1 out there as soon as possible.
It is harder these days. Also, the product you mentioned "custom mobile app for housekeepers in rich families in the UK" I don't know how you're marketing that, but that seems like the hard part to me.
As for Twitter, people forget what it was like back when they were first starting. There were a ton of people you wanted to follow, but RSS couldn't handle the sheer numbers involved. Blogging had become so big and realistically you could only follow, say, 10 bloggers before being worn out with all the content. Twitter made it possible to get little nugget sized updates from thought leaders without having to eat the whole sandwich of some massive blogpost.
You're kind of agreeing with their point. Your example of success was where you were (at least perceived to be) solving a legit need with a real solution.
I agree with the grandparent - people will use a crappy looking app if it solves something they're desperate for (and by implication, isn't solved for already in the market).
Can I live with text files in folders as my notes? Yes. Would I rather use something like Evernote instead? Absolutely. Would I use it if it gave me problems all the time? Doubt it.
That's kinda exactly what this means :) -- don't contest that kind of space if you don't have the funding and great design/etc package.
Product 1 was a coding tool for a low/no code system that is really very good and provides amazing functionality, but most devs (the target audience, really) are - unsurprisingly - put off by the GUI based approach. We built a tool that allows developers to drive the platform using a DSL we developed. This was built based off the IntelliJ community edition platform.
The majority of the two years time we worked on this was spent on polish, and there was no end in sight. It is functional and really fills a solid niche, but the product is not something I would consider ready for production use by other developers. Given the amount of work left to be done, the possibly imited target market even when finished, and the growing realisation that to make this profitable we’d have to go enterprise B2B (again a massive hurdle) we left it at that, and started looking at something else to build. We spent a year on product 2, think saltstack, but better, but my partner was already on their last legs, emotionally and financially, and they called it quits a few weeks before v1.0 of product 2, leaving me in a position where the product is nearly there, but we are unable to cross the finish line on account of me not being able to quit my job and work on this full time. It is beyond frustrating.
In hindsight, there are many things I could have done different or better, but bootstrapping is hard for anything but the simplest products. I have two major products that are totally cool but unfinished due to the need for polish, life altering bills left over from this adventure, and I am facing a job/project market that is aggressively ageist (I’m officially an Old) and no outlook on better professional and financial prospects (boo-hoo, poor me, I know).
I guess that this is why I don't have a bootstrapped startup - I wouldn't even consider building something like this out as a SaaS.
In addition, I needed to transform the culture fast, and not wait around for people to implement a custom library for internal use.
Having said that, I have built in house flag implementations or used OSS projects and would much prefer those to using a third party.
It may very well be that the polished product is a better fit for many businesses than the quickly put together custom feature that does the bare minimum, though.
You may be able to hack together a basic feature flagging product in 2-3 days, but like many domains, it goes incredibly deep and there’s a lot of hidden nuance if you focus on it. If the value doesn’t drop off for those long-tail “deep” features and people will pay extra for you to handle the nuance - voila, you have an amazing SaaS, potentially.
That's the market; it's shocking (to me) how little knowledge even the largest and most highly rated "Mobile Agencies" actually have with systems which have a lifetime measures in decades vs months. Silly as I've worked with these "wordpress agencies" a lot and they've always been thin/wide skill wise (devs skills which are teachable in a few months but with designers + marketing added to the mix).
Your story is inspiring, thanks for sharing. I hope that I can eventually get over my blind spot as it is a career goal to build a small/medium sized company (with annual revenue around the $1M+ mark).
If I can take X to drop in a 3rd party feature flag system, that is almost always going to be more valuable than building it in house. It gets me back to mainline work.
It's incredible to see something that would take 2-3 days make $1.5M ARR :(
It's incredible to see something that would take 2-3 days make $1.5M ARR :)
Transcend ego and come drink your fill at the font of easy money. Don't let pride hold you back from what is probably the best ROI you can make as a SWE.
I think the reason you don't have a bootstrapped startup is because you don't see the difference between trivial and valuable.
Would it be easy for you to build out a feature flag app? Yes, most devs probably can without a huge problem. But it will take them time to do it, and it will require maintenance over time. If it takes a senior dev two weeks of dev time in sum total over 4 years, it would be "cheaper" to pay $100/mo for this service. This type of product product has value as it allows us to spend our limited dev time more on forward feature development that drives future revenue and less on infrastructure.
This is the math that companies buying SaaS products will make. I don't want my eng team to spend hours on trivial stuff, I want them to work on the things that move the needle for the company. I'll gladly pay $$$ for certain features and functionalities that are not part of our core competencies so that the team can focus on the things that are. And once we're a Big Company paying Enterprise tier prices to a feature flag company or whatever, we can have the chat about in-housing it or building Feature #137,221
In a sense it's better to be broke because the opportunity cost is lower and incentive is higher. Golden weights slow you down. This is why most BigTech founders want VC money to make the reward potentially bigger and justify the effort.
On the other hand, if you make a lot of money - some types of bootstrapped companies are slow burn and you can subsidize yourself and just wait until it surpasses your income, but it's hard to have a healthy life balance.
You start a company because you have to. You have that idea that you must build or you cannot stand the corporate hypocrisy of large tech companies anymore (my case).
Currently working in one of those tech companies right now, has made me appreciate my friend’s bootstrapped tech company, as it can evolve naturally with common sense decision making.
Edit: there was an article posted on HN two years ago or so about a SV tech founder coming to this exact realization after having laid off all his employees because he couldn’t get the next round of funding. I felt sorry for him and all others who were/will be in the position.
Gumroad. Also typo, unless you actually meant South Carolinian VCs.
As much as I love South Carolina, yes I meant Silicon Valley. :)
I'm really excited for what will happen next year but I'm also have to manage my expectations, and always tell myself "there's no guarantee this will work". The only silver lining to this is also knowing that because we're not taking VC cash and have a low burn, we have more time than most to "figure it out" before the thing goes bust.
https://polychromecapital.substack.com/p/our-investment-in-f...
https://www.axial.net/forum/want-to-grow-your-software-busin...
According to Axial Flagsmith is a 50/50 joint venture with a private equity firm:
> Then came Polychrome. Through a VC connection Rometsch was introduced to Polychrome Capital, a long-term investment firm focused on helping small but budding software companies grow their businesses through market outreach and strategic expertise. The chemistry between Rometsch and Polychrome’s founders was immediate via phone, and in September 2020 – during the midst of the pandemic – Rometsch and the Polychrome founders structured a 50-50 joint venture, before they even met in person.
> “We set up the deal so we didn’t get that ownership stake until we had fulfilled our promise of growing the business,” said San Francisco-based Alex Boswell, a co-founder and partner at Polychrome. Initially, Polychrome offered Flagsmith 25% equity in exchange for a cash investment, and after Flagsmith hit a certain milestone, the other 25% equity was granted. Two years later, Flagsmith has grown by 20-times revenue, he noted.
For us (polychrome) at the time, the money came directly from the bank accounts of myself and my two co-founders. It was pretty scary for us all!
In that sense; we do think of ourselves as bootstrapped. We (polychrome) did not (and still have not) take a dollar in compensation for the business. We’ve worked directly on the business for 3 years with the founders. I have been selling the software in Europe and my partner, Greg, in the US/Asia until we got revenue high enough to hire our head of sales, Mike and head of marketing, Anna. While doing this, we (Polychrome) paid ourselves by doing consulting for venture baked companies. Ben (Flagsmith CEO) was being paid by the business and his existing agency.
This is definitely not venture. FWIW - I have built two venture backed companies - Optimizely & Amplitude which took typical venture rounds and would not be bootstrapped IMO.
> Polychrome is a PE firm focused on acquiring 50% or greater equity positions in B2B software companies. That’s our primary focus and that’s what we do pretty much every day. [...] So we are open to full buyouts, we’re open to partial buyouts. Our core structure though, is typically keeping the founder in place. And we are typically partnering with technical founders who don’t have, the go-to-market expertise or who just don’t want to sell or the go-to-market is what’s keeping the company from taking that next step in their growth trajectory. And so what we’ve done and what our typical structure is we’ll do cash, let’s say for 25% of the business.
When you talk about "typically keeping the founder in place" you're not 50/50 partners. You're the senior partner.
Congratulations!
Gone are the days of the VC era of 'blitzscaling' and cheap money, bootstrapping looks to be the way to go really.
I hope that more companies reject the predatory nature of the VC world rushing to get an exit.
From a pure employment perspective, what are the clear unique advantages of working in some of those bootstrap businesses?
I think I might write this up as a separate post as there's a lot to unpack. There are pros to working for a bootstrapped company, but they less concrete than the pros of working for someone with a massive B round.
At least for me was more or less felt less about an employee in the sense of not having a lot of Kool-Aid as a VC/larger company, and more about having a clear boundary that I was selling a service in a stable for-profit company in a specific niche.
For a few months I was in discussions to be CTO of a company that was kinda-sorta bootstrapping. (They had a very small amount of angel money.)
Ultimately, they wanted me to quit my job without pay; I realized they were 3 cents short on a dollar; and we parted ways.
Given their space, they really needed to raise money for what they want to do. (More than the fact that I need to get paid,) The space they're operating in needs someone to grow fast because there won't be a lot of room for lots of small players.
But, if this was five (or more) years ago, I think bootstrapping would really work in their favor. (Different market conditions and expectations.) I might have even been able to take a lot more sweat equity at the time, too.
Starting with an agency can be a bit like enabling cheat mode in many ways.
I can't stress the importance of this enough. Everything mainstream gets canibalized by endless venture capital money, killing competition and stifling innovation, and, most important, drasticly reducing the odds of success for independent businesses. Finding a niche and sticking to it is the only option. As some said: start small, stay small. I am thoroughly impressed by people that manage to achieve this.
I think from a bootstrappers perspective, there are two things to take from this:
1. Having a source of income that gives you the "margins" to also do a SaaS (time and money) is a big, important (almost required) factor 2. This might be an outlier - Not a lot of agency owners successfully convert over to a SaaS - both because SaaS is hard-mode business and because agency life is so distracting with the aforementioned work native to agency-style business.
Just because you see a need as an agency doesn't mean customers will pay for the SaaS version of the "thing" that fulfills that need. Flagsmith appears to have found a product that is a SaaS that people pay for.
A question on their distribution: I wonder what their customer acquisition story is - is it from their agency work (self-referrals) or what?
There's room and then there's room for 10 different players https://openfeature.dev/ecosystem
- CRM
- databases
- IDEs
- security
- marketing email
- project management
- social media tools
- helpdesk
- expense management
- shipping
These are all markets that are over 20 years old, where there has been ample time to consolidate to a small number of providers. Markets are bigger than normally thought. This is especially true for bootstrapped companies, who can do well financially without having to ever hit a $1b revenue run rate.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611136
It is an application of authorization.
HOWEVER!
In our experience, it's one of those features that people think they need, but then when you dig into the use cases, most people don't need it.
Was thinking about the architecture reading your code and imagined I'd build that at its core and go with a more event/usage based model. Great business, product, and success story none the less. I'll keep it in mind for future projects. Nice job.