Ask HN: How much did you invest in your bootstrapped startup?
Just curious how much others have put into their own business.
Also, did you see a return on that money? In other words, get the investment back plus some?
Also, did you see a return on that money? In other words, get the investment back plus some?
Having said that, I haven't had much success. Although I've had a fair amount of traffic and a significant number of comments to the effect that my site is really well executed, I haven't had any sales so far two weeks after launch. I guess it's early days but it's hard not to be disheartened and question if the idea is viable. It's hard working alone and not having anyone to motivate and bounce ideas off of.
My site is http://www.devtest.net if you're interested in having a look.
I am asking because I expect hosting costs to be my most expensive item while in the MVP stage, and I don't have a lot of cash to throw at my project.
With this setup, I've tested 200 concurrent users with no major problems, and would support easily tens of thousands of hits per day.
Having too many users is a problem I would love to have!
Good luck, and I hope you end up with a scaling problem to solve.
If you're inexperienced in server administration, go with Heroku I'd say. It's a great service and works really well and if you do get a load of traffic, it's really easy to scale up. There's a guide here to using unicorn to get 4X the performance out of it:
http://blog.railsonfire.com/2012/05/06/Unicorn-on-Heroku.htm...
You're correct in saying $40 per month for hosting until I gain more users. If someone would sign up to my "pro" plan I'd be breaking even :)
However I don't think that even if it does take off it will be as profitable as it sounds. It seems customer acquisition is going to be my biggest problem and so I'll probably end up spending lots on adwords and other promotional avenues.
That marketing plan I sent you covers only the basics, but perhaps with enough consistent effort the basics might be enough to drive initial traffic.
As I said, if there's anything I can do, let me know.
I am a unique case because I am also applying for a E2 Investor visa, and $70k was the number recommended by my immigration attorney to satisfy the visa application. If I didn't have that requirement I would have spent less on legal fees and hopefully would have launched the MVP for around $10k. I still haven't launched, but am about to start a closed beta program.
Very interested to hear how it goes!