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Don't want to hi-jack the article, but we've built Bugfender using Go. The problem is, we thought this is an internal (experimental) project and so Go (as a new language) would be fun to try out. But then Bugfender started to take off and we ran into serious problems making Go scale. Not because it is a bad language, but simply we were new to it ourselves.

Today we're still running on go and we're more or less "ok" with it now, but it was a difficult path to get there and while it's fun to use a new language (or new anything) it's probably not the best choice for a startup product. Also when you need to hire people.

We've summarized our experiences here:

- https://bugfender.com/blog/one-year-using-go/

- https://bugfender.com/blog/go-pros-cons-using-go-programming...

- https://bugfender.com/blog/three-years-bugfender-9-5m-users/

Bugfender is part of Mobile Jazz, a service company that we've built over the past 5 years running with a 20 people team. Our products (e.g. Bugfender, Localname, etc.) are a more recent endeavor, although growing quickly as well and currently cover 10% of our overall revenue.

We do, have a look here: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/our-ceo-stefan-klumpps-interview...

Got it! So I'd stay we've two groups of people in the company: those that like the freedom to spend it at home and those that like the freedom to go traveling. To answer your question: the retreats we offer are voluntary so not everyone joins. But we do have a group of people who are strong travelers and also having kids now and they just take them with them. This is however quite now to us and we're planning a trip to Martinique where we are considering hiring a nanny as well.

Actually yes :-) http://mobilejazz.com/jobs

+1 this is exactly how we did it. Not that any of that was planned, but it worked out quite well for us. Although now we're struggling with that every business is struggling that makes the switch from services to products: the need to put more resources on the product to facilitate growth while the service clients also have their needs. But we're getting there, step by step. The good thing about being a profitable lifestyle business is that we're in no rush.

We're using Optimizely for that. We'll look into it and see how easily we could put it inside the content or at least at the bottom. Thanks for the constructive feedback :-)

> many points in the article make it clear that you are directly comparing lifestyle to a startup and saying that a startup is inferior

True. The whole point was to compare the two. And that one comes out better than the other is from my personal point of view. But again, just because I think mountain biking is better (for myself and other like minded people) doesn't mean it's the only way and road cycling is not acceptable and needs to be banned. But I guess we understand each other :-)

> I am just wondering why is that the content? Bugfender isn't just for freelancers

This post was actually originally created for another side project of mine (O4H) but we thought it also partially applies to one of our big audiences at Bugfender which are solo developers (freelancers), so we decided to cross post it.

However in general we share a lot of our work-life philosophy on our Mobile Jazz blog https://mobilejazz.com/blog/ and despite not addressing our target audience specifically, we've managed to create a lot of awareness for our company and brand and through that indirectly generated many interesting leads and people ended up working with us because of that.

Interesting point. We actually had set up the HN discount long time ago for the whole site. But I do get your point that it makes this look a bit scammy. Thanks for answering and pointing this out.

Minus the "interesting problems" for many people.

Very well put! I see it exactly the same way :-)

Genuine question: how do you know the article is empty if you haven't even read 20% of it?

I'd also argue that a small business is just a business where the goal is to provide goods or services to customers and work to employees, whereas a lifestyle business has a strong focus on creating and maintaining a good work-life balance for everyone. Which means in our case reinvesting the profit in our team's happiness.

Happiness: happiness being a very abstract word that I chose on purpose. Because it means different things for different people and it also changes over time.

Author here. Not sure if you are addressing this article in particular, but it was not my intention to describe "the one way", but rather to show how we do things and share it with the world.

Also IMHO sharing a way of doing things / a philosophy / an opinion doesn't always mean being against everything else. For example I prefer riding the mountain bike vs a road bike. Doesn't mean I'm against road cycling and the people doing it.

That said, to comment on what one of the siblings said, obviously these posts are being written with the intention of bringing more attention to what we're doing, also known as "marketing". I wouldn't however call it clickbait, as it is based on genuine thoughts and ideas and we've actually been doing it for real with a 20 people team for more than 5 years already.

I guess it means whatever is important to you: for some it means going surfing in the morning, for others skiing in the afternoon and for some it is as simple as spending more time with your friends and family.

I personally do not have kids yet, but some of our employees have kids and even newborn babies. One of them just came back from a trip to Norway. It's all doable and probably less of a problem than people think :-)

Totally agree. It's a very personal thing. For us at Mobile Jazz it means to work on technical challenges, while at the same time working on "startup-like products" (e.g. Bugfender or Localname), while not having any pressure from investors and as you said spending also more time on other things in life.

This probably excludes a lot of product types that are highly competitive or time critical, but there's still a lot left to work on, especially niche products. In our case that niche are developer tools, which all came up organically as we built our own developer tools for ourselves anyway.

Just in case people are more interested in the details of the business we run, Indie Hackers recently ran an interview with us https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/bugfender

Author here. For us it means optimizing for happiness instead of profit. More practically speaking what we do is ensuring everyone has a sufficient base salary, but then also participates in a quarterly bonus program (profit sharing). But the key is actually that everyone can work from wherever they want and as much as they want (as long as it is properly planned in advance). And then on top of that we organize fun retreats like spending a month in Cape Town or Martinique, or going skiing together in Austria or just a few days ago we went together to the Italian Alps for a week of hiking.

So this is what lifestyle business means for us: having a good time with great people.

Author here. The author doesn't think that for everyone. But for himself and the people working with him :-) But I do get your point.

Author here. Sorry for that. We didn't expect this to go #1 on HN. We're working on scaling up this small machine hosting our blog and also providing an alternative source as a backup.

We are always looking for talented people at Mobile Jazz[1] and Bugfender[2]. Best is to apply via our Jobs API[3]

[1] https://mobilejazz.com

[2] http://bugfender.com

[3] http://mobilejazz.com/jobs

I'm from there :-) Just curious how this made the HN front page?

Co-founder here. We've also written recently about the 3 years of Bugfender, how we almost killed the product and how we managed to get now to over 10M installs: https://bugfender.com/blog/three-years-bugfender-9-5m-users/

We're going to send out more invites on a weekly basis. So you should get something this week.

We've started building Bugfender using GORM and it was good for the initial job, but we now decided to remove it completely and continue on a lower level.

We've summarized our whole experience with Go here: https://bugfender.com/one-year-using-go and we're just wrapping up another blog post with the Go pros and cons (from our point of view), which should be out soon as well.

The biggest problem with go is, that it is still a very fast and changing ecosystem. Which is great for a new language, but didn't serve us too well for building something stable.

That is true, if you build a company for growth. We built our company for lifestyle. We don't need to show off that we have 200 employees and make X million in revenue. While other people are busy bragging about it, we go skiing together. Different mindset.

Why would you want to change something that works perfectly fine for everyone?

Totally agree. A lot of it is based on trust and a future that no one can predict nor guarantee. We're a small company of 20 (in my opinion) great people and we just have a different relationship with our employees than most other business owners.

While I totally get that the future is always uncertain, I think past actions of myself and our management team (which also includes employees) speak a lot for how we are probably gonna do things in the future. Our philosophy is called Optimizing for Happiness, because we try to base our decisions on what is best for everyone's happiness, even if it means to sometimes make less of an profit as long as the overall profit is still positive.

It's difficult to explain how we do things, but to give you one example of the past. We had always very successful quarters, except of one where we couldn't pay bonuses. In that quarter people did not complain, but also offered us to voluntarily work less (and get paid less) to overcome this situation. In the end it didn't come that far but I highly appreciated it. And I think this can only happen if it's a give and take from both sides and everyone genuinely caring about each other.

Never said we don't care about money. But we care also about other things than just money. And that a lot more than most other for-profit companies out there.

There's nothing wrong with making a profit either. The more profit we make the better. But it's important to decide what you do with that profit. And I much rather pay for our employees to join me for a week of skiing in the Alps than buying myself a Ferrari.

I don't want to make this look like marketing (as you already mentioned), but if you're really curious I talked a bit about it just recently on this podcast: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/our-ceo-stefan-klumpps-interview...