Lessons from bootstrapped companies founded by software engineers
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Oi, hindsight is great. The '87 high was about $3.50. ADSK is sitting at $210 today or $2.2B for that 500k investment.
You have to remember that 90% of the startup successes we hear about are VC funded, so can make a significant loss on sales and marketing. To fund it from cashflow makes the game even harder still.
It seems to be common advice to bootstrap your business, but at some point you need a salesperson to get the product into the hands of users. The only exception to this is if it is something truly revolutionary like the next Google/Amazon/etc.
B2C bootstrapping seems even harder because you really need to know how to acquire users.
Google the search engine was paid for by Google Ads past the initial period and those are certainly marketing and sales.
Amazon certainly focused on sales stuff early on. And while AWS is a technical marvel the pricing scheme of hiding costs behind outbound data costs was brilliant. Evil but brilliant.
Having a good product is the goal of Engineering and that is the bare minimum.
Instead of working fixed hours, I frequently spread out my work throughout the day and week. This is a distinct part of Formspree culture, that comes from how my cofounder and I prefer to work.
We encourage our team to choose their own hours, so if you don’t feel like working a particular afternoon, you can just take it off. On the flip side, when you feel the itch to get something done on the weekend, it’s ok to push code.
FWIW, I love this mentality for healthy, work/life-balanced teams. It works if you structure around it. I often get the itch during the weekend to do a little work, so I go for it, because I can balance my days as I see fit. Ride the wave of creativity when it arrives, go do something else — like taking a hike, or running errands — when you can’t get shit done.
I imagine the only people who would think otherwise have some pretty dysfunctional repo setups and/or policies.
You revert that commit, then. It's broken. A revert shouldn't be take as some mark of failure or personal offense, it's just that your commit breaks the build, so it's getting removed from `main` until such a time as it doesn't do that. It happens to us all, from time to time. Those reverts almost always carry what at any profession organization should be an implied "feel free to bring this in a PR again, with fixes".
(And ideally, a bit of introspection as to "why didn't CI catch the failure when it was still on a branch?")
Personally I don't see why it's likely to cause major issues to allow people to merge PRs outside of business hours either, but depending on your team workflow and build pipeline (which may not be fully automated for any number of reason) it's not that hard to imagine cases where it's preferable to ensure all pushes to trunk occur during business hours (e.g. for cost saving reasons maybe you don't keep particular services running 24x7 that are needed to allow your integration test suite to run fully).
We did this at an employ of mine. They were on-demand, and spun up when you committed.
I was mostly responding to what appeared to be the fear of "but what if someone broke main off hours!"
This isn't just lip-service, either. May be hard to believe from a US perspective, but for a Norwegian based company, it can be taken at face value. It's the best place I've worked in my 22+ years.
Minor asterisk; we do have a few hours every week where you should be present (check-ins, meetings, all-hands, etc), but it's <5h/week for most people.
It’s usually best to stick with a “normal schedule” for family/socializing reasons, anyway.
But, it’s incredibly freeing, being able to work when the mood strikes. I used to be a night-owl, often getting super creative in the evenings. I could force myself to bed, sure, but a 3-4 hour stint in the evening would regularly produced outsized returns. 8-9am+ couldn’t remotely compete, creativity-wise, so why force it? Build a culture around trust and impact, it works out a lot better than anything else I’ve seen in practice.
I rarely do late nights anymore, having transitioned to 6-7am starts, an hour or two hiking around lunch with the dogs, and a small handful of hours of wrapping up & planning for tomorrow. But that was all my choice :)
What's the ultimately goal then? :) (it took me forever to learn than penultimate means "second most" so I am passing it on!)