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Ask HN: How many of you want to stay small, part-time, and manageable?
Hi HN, longtime reader, first time poster...
I've been bitten by the bootstrapping "bug" and I hope to launch my own micro-ISV in the next few months with a niche SaaS product. I've been inspired by many late nights of pouring over Patrick's (BingoCardCreator) blog, A Small Bear, Peldi's writings about getting Mockups off the ground and many others out there.
The thing I love most about HN is the diversity. There is the single-founder, bootstrapped "Shareware" guy with a handfull of lifetime solds having a discussion about sales techniques with a founder of a top SaaS firm and ego's never get involved.
With that said, I plan on being one those single-founder bootstrapped guys with a small number of customers. And I want to stay that way. I know I might be the minority here on HN and that is perfectly OK (each of us has different backgrounds, ambitions, and goals). A little bit more about my backgroud: I don't know what Series A funding is. I don't live near the Valley, San Francisco or NYC - I live in a small town in New Hampshire, USA. I don't Tweet, I'm shy, I've never met an angel investor and I don't have a blog. I provide these details because I hope they give you a little insight as to how much I'm not a loud, Twitter-happy founder ready to shake up the social media with a interweb 2.0 platform!
I enjoy writing software and also finding niche B2B voids to write software for. I've finally picked one and started writing some code. As I poke around HN and read the conversations, I'm curious how many of you are creating something small and manageable. I'm OK if my SaaS product, at $29/mo doesn't grow past 200 customers. Imagine that, grossing over 65K/yr to compliment my full-time software job! In fact, I don't think I want the headache that comes with 1,000 customers. At that point, you probably can't hold down your full-time job anymore. Then you're hiring, you're paying for additional accounting and legal fees, employees, taxes are increasingly complicated, multi-lingual releases, you need office space and your accountant wants you to become a Delaware corporation but some book you read said to incorporate in Nevada. My goodness!
Summary: Did you start out with small business plans but things took off? Do you sometimes wish your business was smaller and more manageable? Are a micro-ISV with just a few customers and absolutely love it? If someone popped up on HN and said they now have 200 SaaS paying subscribers and they are taking down the sign-up page to keep his/her business small and manageable rather than growing, would you laugh at the notion or, like me, completely understand his/her decision?
- hga 16y agoWhile his business is retail vs. B2B, you might want to check out Patrick McKenzie: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11
- joshkaufman 16y agoI'm definitely in this camp: I quit a management-track job at a Fortune 50 a year and a half ago to teach business full-time. Finished a book (to be published December 30), have a full roster of consulting clients, an online course, and a few big licensing deals in the works. I'm keeping the business small by design: I have absolutely no desire to manage/supervise the work of a large team - been there, done that, hated it. The maximum I'm willing to manage is a calling service and a part-time assistant, mostly to offload administrative work I'd rather not do. I'd rather make a very good living and keep it simple (particularly with a child on the way) than spend my life compensating for the complexity that any huge operation inevitably has.
- route3 16y ago>>I'm keeping the business small by design Fantastic comment, thank you for taking the time to speak up. "Small by design" is exactly how I feel about starting a business. That last sentence is a great statement. Larger operations can be complex and at some point it you might wake up one morning and not look forward to managing your business. That is not what I want to happen.
- SMrF 16y agoI don't think it's a coincidence that you don't live in the Valley and you're thinking of bootstrapping a small business. In the rest of the country I believe you are firmly in the majority, so welcome to the club! I've always wondered why this is. I'm from Chicago myself, and while we have a growing community of tech startups that is beginning to resemble the Valley, small business owners are much more the norm. My theory is a lack of infrastructure and culture. I think it's easier to find someone to quit their job and work with you on some big, "internet scale" project in SV because that's (almost) normal behavior there. Plus you have the venture capital ecosystem to back you up once it's time to scale. I know of a few great startups in New York that are struggling to secure VC, and I suspect their jobs would be much easier if they lived out West. Personally, I'd love to tackle a huge problem. I have some crazy, disruptive ideas. But I'm starting out smaller so I can pay my own way, Chicago-style.