11 ms·

Lessons we learned while bootstrapping

315 points by brianjackson 9y ago

Hnrobert42 9y ago
That's reasonably interesting article with decent tips. But the life he advocates sounds god-awful. God-awful.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN? All this really says is some combo of "like" and "don't like". Others can't learn from that. A more substantive comment might say what specifically is interesting, or point out something specific about "the life he advocates".
  - Danihan 9y ago
    Pretty sure he means section number 8, dealing with long and unpredictable hours. Did you read the article?
    - dang 9y ago
      That's separate from whether the comment was substantive.
- deadmetheny 9y ago
  It turns out that starting a real business is hard and takes a lot of time. Go figure.
- mlevental 9y ago
  better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
mlevental 9y ago
here's my problem if anyone is willing to lend a helping hand: i'm building an enterprise saas product that involves some cool buzzwords and potentially really adds value in the space i'm targeting but i'm getting no traction. i have an mvp (phone app and webapp) to demo to customers. i have the decks and sales pitch. i'm a reasonably smart and articulate person and communicate well (able to "speak sales"). yet because i have no company history, no clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i can't get any traction. at least i think this is the reason i'm not getting any bites? i had leads (through my FFF investors) - i've had probably 10-15 sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where (the latest one fizzled out yesterday). pricing isn't the issue because i've floated several different pricing schemes to customers and while some are more attractive than others it's never been the deal breaker. maybe i have poor product/market fit but i've experimented with adjusted the product offering too and no significant change in reception there either. now supposedly i should be learning something about my market segment but the problem is i constantly get contradictory signals - one customers says it's a great product but too early, another says it's not a useful product maybe i'd like to consider building such and such product, one customer says price is too high, another doesn't even mention it. i'm really at a complete loss for how to turn this thing around and i'm burning through cash (although i'm not above taking cost cutting measures - fired one of us three 3 weeks ago and cut my own pay this month).
- eqmvii 9y ago
  I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution, especially at the level of detail you provided. Marketing and selling anything is hard, but also highly domain specific.
- the_bear 9y ago
  Do you have to target enterprise customers rather than small businesses? Enterprises have very complicated decision-making processes that can be hard to navigate if you're not experienced, and even harder if you don't already have traction. Small businesses on the other hand will normally try out a demo of the product and decide on the spot if they like it or not. They aren't all that way, but if you talk to 50 10-person businesses, at least a couple of them will probably be willing to buy on the spot if your product solves a problem for them at a reasonable price. Go get some of those tiny customers even if they're not profitable for you, and then later move upmarket to the enterprise clients you really want. Or do what I do and just stay focused on small customers indefinitely because they're so much better to work with.
  - mlevental 9y ago
    it's true that one of the difficulties has been finding who exactly in the larger organizations to pitch the product to. early on we figured out that it should be people with a budget (i.e. those directly in charge of p&l) rather than executives or product teams but we've actually been "gatekept" from getting access to those people. but this is a good idea. i've tried cold outreach but to larger organizations. i'll try reaching out to smaller (tiny) customers. thank you
    - ju-st 9y ago
      I had success with pitching to consultancies. They have the right contacts and are probably interested in re-selling your cool and innovative product. Contact details of the right managers are usually published on their website because they want new customers to call them (but no one is stopping you to contact them for pitching :)).
    - 9y ago
tw1010 9y ago
Is it possible to block all websites from asking about enabling notifications? Every time I have allowed it have I regretted it, and every time I see the little dialog box asking for my permission do I feel slightly more desire to just close down the tab and read something else.
- hawkice 9y ago
  My recommendation: leave. Websites won't stop doing something intrusive and annoying until it costs them more than it gets them.
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    Yeah but how are they going to realize people are leaving because of that one specific thing?
    - guntars 9y ago
      They are doing A/B tests on something like that, right?
    - hawkice 9y ago
      There's a sense it which it isn't your responsibility to figure that out. If they never check, you avoid annoyance. If they do check (A/B test, eyeballing it, whatever), they'll see. If they're unwilling to turn it off no matter what then they're kind of terrible, and probably should lose lots of traffic.
    - ben-schaaf 9y ago
      Natural selection. Sites that use this tactic would get less revenue and thus have a higher chance of dying than those that don't. Therefore, over time, sites would trend towards not having that feature.
  - petercooper 9y ago
    Unfortunately that hasn't worked for those infuriating "sign up for our email!" popovers/interstitials. Indeed, they seem to work better than ever.
tabeth 9y ago
Random sidenote: I feel that a ton of sites have the exact same visual style as kinsta. Is this a template or something? If so, which one is it?
- mrisoli 9y ago
  More of a trend, I call it the Stripe-design language/style, since they are becoming famous for design a lot of people use that as inspiration, it probably converts well, observed common features: Gradients Diagonal limits between sessions, these escape a little bit from traditional HTML-boxed content and suggest scroll-down behavior. Top left Logo, top menubar for quick navigation. Text to the left, images to the right
- raleigh_user 9y ago
  no clue but I also love the style. Seen it everywhere and can't seem to figure it out.
  - blizkreeg 9y ago
    where do people go to get those graphics/illustrations created? they all look in the same style.
    - raleigh_user 9y ago
      If anyone figures this out let me know. I want one
      - petercooper 9y ago
        The way we do stuff like this is hunt around Shutterstock till we find the right style, look at what the illustrator's other files are, download the ones we like, and join together elements to make whatever we want. I imagine said illustrators could be commissioned as well, but we've never done that. For example, I searched for "people working" and this was result #2 which is in a similar style: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/set-isometric-business-people-teamwork-meeting-438955813 https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/set-isometric-busi... .. and the illustrator in question has numerous graphics along a similar style: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/yindee https://www.shutterstock.com/g/yindee .. this was just the first one I found, there are hundreds of such illustrators, though. "isometric" is another good word to use in searches, BTW, see https://www.shutterstock.com/search?searchterm=isometric+elements https://www.shutterstock.com/search?searchterm=isometric+ele... for example.
buf 9y ago
I've been bootstrapping https://www.castingcall.club https://www.castingcall.club for about 2 years now. Although I don't have a team (just me) and I've not in the 7-figure range (still in 6), a lot of the lessons from Kinsta holds true. I wanted to point out one bullet though: Automation My product is a SaaS product. I've automated every single thing possible from self-creating wikis to recommendations. I stepped away to visit Japan for 3 weeks earlier this year and came back to a site that increased in value. I've thought about raising money for it so many times but I always come back to this. Answer to someone else, or keep growing it on my own terms.
- joshdance 9y ago
  What is your process for self creating wikis?
  - buf 9y ago
    User generated. They type a bunch of chaotic data in text fields and I do my best to structure them.
- graystevens 9y ago
  Agreed with the automation — I’m a fellow bootstrapper[0] in the SaaS space, and wouldn’t be without it. If there is anything that can be automated, even if slightly prematurely before the need to scale arises, I do so. In terms of infrastructure, this meant using Ansible for quickly deploying new servers where needed and adding them to the right load balancer. Currently all I need to do is spin up a new instance with the right tag & run the relevant Ansible script - this will grab a copy of the site from git, sort out dependencies and any other apps needed (supervisord and so on), and add it to the nginx loadbalancer config as a new upstream server. Same applies for things like billing. Yes I could have started off doing billing manually, sending out invoices etc, but these take time and realistically need to be automated to avoid any errors. These things definitely meant I didn’t get my MVP out in weeks, but meant I could still do this as a solo-bootstrapper and look after a young family and such. [0] https://breachinsider.com https://breachinsider.com
wheresmyusern 9y ago
this blog post is a kind of guide to starting your own company and making millions of dollars. this is a little unrelated but i just find it funny to read this guide because its very convoluted. there is actually a much simpler guide that their guide is a derivation of. here is the actual guide: step one: be more intelligent than most people behind almost every business, behind almost every professional success and behind almost any success in general that ive seen, is a highly intelligent person. i find it irritating to read because the concept of a guide is spelling things out so that anyone can follow the steps and get the same result. successful people always benefit from high intelligence, money and success will always be unfairly skewed to the benefit of those who happened to be born with better brains and into better developmental circumstances. nobody needs this guide because they are either smart and dont need a guide or dumb and in which case cant use this guide.
- bacongobbler 9y ago
  Sure, if you look at it from the closed mindset that nobody improves or can "git gud". It's been proven time and time again that humans can learn and adapt to achieve their own aspirations. Take one quick look at the special olympics; you'll see a very large group of individuals who have all overcome amazing obstacles to become olympians. Similarly, highly intelligent people may not have the domain knowledge required to understand how to bootstrap a company. Their knowledge domain may come from a completely different environment or culture which has its own mindset on how to bootstrap a company. Being smart does not necessarily make you more equipped than "dumb" (and highly motivated) people, but it does give you a decent head start.
  - chronic824 9y ago
    > Being smart does not necessarily make you more equipped than "dumb" (and highly motivated) people, but it does give you a decent head start. This is absurd. Of course if you are smart, you are far better equipped. Your line of thinking promotes the idea that "anyone can work hard and achieve their dreams." We both know this is not true.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
foobaw 9y ago
I admire them - they use 20+ SaaS products, and most of them are extremely useful for automation leading to saving tons of time and effort. Unfortunately, they're quite expensive for people just starting out with zero funding.
mikeokner 9y ago
The #1 best piece of advice in the article is: > The best way to get things done is to simply sit down and start working on them. So many people worry so much about failure that they don't even bother to start. You can't possibly plan for every roadblock and eventuality. The only thing you can control is your execution, and there are no short cuts. Hard work won't guarantee success, but lack of it will guarantee failure.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- LrnByTeach 9y ago
  Wow !!! This is the Best Startup advice one can receive . > So many people worry so much about failure that they don't even bother to start >You can't possibly plan for every roadblock and eventuality. > The only thing you can control is your execution, and there are no short cuts. > Hard work won't guarantee success, but lack of it will guarantee failure.
- j_s 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602816 "stop trying to be clever and start trying to be done"
jimnotgym 9y ago
Please can we move on to a better term than 'bootstrapping'. It is non specific, means little to non-HN peeps and is just hard on the ears. How about self-funding?
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  If posts involving domain-specific jargon were not permitted on HN, this would be a very barren place.
  - jimnotgym 9y ago
    There was already business domain specific terms for all of the many things people regard as bootstrapping. In this case it seems like it is a mildly successful agency already earning enough to pay 4 people, realising they could make more money a different way. Maybe this is just business, jargonphiles might call it 'pivoting'. Seems a world away from someone else 'bootstrapping' without 2 dimes to rub together from their garage. Or indeed the truth of many more of these stories that read like 'I made a good bit of money at my old job so took a year off and started a saas business with significant sums of my own cash'. Maybe I'm just bitter. I guess one thing people might want to bear in mind if they are not in the US, you may find senior finance people in the UK, for instance, totally bemused by this term if you find you want to stop bootstrapping and look for funding.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  As a fellow pedant who has complained about tech lingo before ('legacy' always makes my skin crawl a bit), what's wrong with 'bootstrapping'? The term has a fairly rich history in computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping#Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping#Computing
  - jimnotgym 9y ago
    I'll take your 'legacy' and raise you an 'on-premise' (as in not in the cloud). I assume Oracle and Microsoft marketing want us to believe that premise is the singular of premises? I'm afraid I think different... Bootstrapping does have a fairly rich history in computing. It has found an excellent meaning or two. Does it need another not quite analogous one? I dunno, I was in business and in Private Equity (at a very junior level) for a long while before I was in computers, and prefer the jargon of classic finance I guess. Likewise I don't like 'burn-rate' and 'runway' as the naive twins of 'cash-flows'. I could go on but my stuffy finance background is never likely to win me a popularity contest...
wolco 9y ago
Hire cheap and hire people smarter than you. Good luck with that.
jcadam 9y ago
I’ve been building a SaaS product for the last year or so while working a day job and raising a family, and am only now close to the point of having something I consider beta-able (https://www.contabulo.com https://www.contabulo.com). I think I made the mistake of getting too fancy with the architecture (but designing architecture was too much fun to resist), so I’ve ended up with something that’s a collection of Clojure services on the backend, running on several linodes along with rabbitmq, elasticsearch, etc. Well, at least it should scale decently, if the need arises :fingers crossed: So this project has probably taken way too long to get to a MVP. But hey, the day job won’t let me do cool stuff like use FP languages, design architecture, do front end work, etc., so I need some sort of creative outlet :) Now if I can only find some folks willing to test this thing. So far I’ve only gotten a small handful of email sign ups via my landing page. Maybe it’s time to spend some money on AdWords, etc.
- patricklouys 9y ago
  Start with things that don't scale. Approach people directly.
- mikeokner 9y ago
  > Contabulo is Coming Soon > We’re currently working hard on getting Contabulo ready and hope to launch a beta in the very near future. That's probably killing you. My advice would be to get rid of that immediately. It sounds like in general you need to reprioritize and refocus. You use the words "SaaS product," "project," "creative outlet," and "this thing" to describe your efforts thus far. "Things" don't make money, businesses do. You need to stop being an engineer building a product and start building a business if you actually intend to generate income from this endeavor. To that end, I suggest a few immediate actions: - Give users the ability to sign up and pay you money. If users can't pay you, you'll never make a dime. Stop worrying about architecture or feature development or closed betas and focus 100% on attracting and retaining high-quality customers. Don't do any further development beyond bug fixes until you have paying customers and can articulate why additional features will drive growth. - Consider offering a free trial to get "testers" instead of a beta (but don't call them that). The free trial will allow you to collect feedback from real customers without establishing an ongoing expectation of free or reduced cost that can kill long-term revenue. In general, startups price too low. Read a few articles like https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... and https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-product/ https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-product/ - Spend a lot more time & effort on your branding/marketing. In particular, your site currently shows two screenshots that look quite similar to Trello + photo attachments, and has a bland tagline of "Organize. Collaborate. Get stuff done." Differentiate yourself from potential competitors and clearly communicate value. Also, minor nit but there's no reason a static landing page should show a loading bar before revealing the content. That alone is going to cost you real $$$ in page bounces.
juanmirocks 9y ago
Sorry: Wrong Thread. Does this study also consider that children remain living at their parents' for longer and longer? For example, it is not bizarrely uncommon in Spain to find people in their late twenties or thirties still living with their parents.
- kelukelugames 9y ago
  Wrong thread!
- tga 9y ago
  Just curious, how do you manage to post a comment in the wrong thread? Are you using some kind of client?
  - vhost- 9y ago
    though, I can't remember what thread it was in, I saw this happen yesterday too.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      This has been happening for a long long time but it is rare enough that it is super hard to track and fix.
- baxtr 9y ago
  I upvoted this because it’s nicely bizarre
treis 9y ago
I wonder how profitable these I make $X,XXX,XXX in revenue and here's how type posts are. I counted 17 people in one of their pictures and if you assume they cost $100,000 each, that's $1,700,000 in salary cost alone. Then there's 3 offices and all of the other overhead/costs they have to pay. I've worked on some hobby SAAS stuff and every time I look at the numbers to see what it would take to equal my salary the numbers are staggering.
- telesilla 9y ago
  >$100,000 each I think that's the key point made here, that these high salaries are not demanded if you aren't hiring on the U.S. west coast.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    Parent may be saying that 100k is a reasonable per-clueful-person cost pretty much anywhere. I'm in the middle of the USA and I wouldn't expect to hire a competent engineer for less than $100k.
    - beberlei 9y ago
      Anywhere in the us maybe, nowhere else in the world except maybe switzerland. The blog post specifically mentions being remote and not all in the US
      - treis 9y ago
        Yeah, I'm sure it's cheaper in other areas. It's mostly just an observation. I wonder what sort of profitability companies like this have and how it would compare to someone's salary that manages a department of ~20.
- Axsuul 9y ago
  You're assuming that every person is an engineer that demands a high salary. I'm willing to put $100k on the fact that most likely only 1/3 are engineers and the rest are support and ancillary staff.
uladzislau 9y ago
The first tip - red ocean/blue ocean strategy contradicts what these guys have been doing themselves - 1. take a proven "premium WordPress hosting/WPengine" model 2. use hip violet cartoonish website design as hundreds of other startups. 3. run affiliate program with huge payouts $500/referral (potentially). Now I'd take every advice mentioned with a grain of salt.
ttul 9y ago
There is no boot strapping. You’re always either leveraging capital, or people. And by “people” I mean yourself too as the founder. And by “capital” I mean the rich parents who provided a cushion for you when times were tight personally.
dilyevsky 9y ago
> Wait to receive 50, 100 or even more applications. Make sure you have a big pool of candidates because that’s how you’ll find your next dream employee. > After that, we start narrowing down the list to the top 5 or 10 candidates. We have multiple rounds of job interviews, usually 2 or 3. Thanks to this we are able to narrow down our list to the top 3 candidates and make the final decision. Yes, this process takes time, usually weeks. If you’re not in a hurry you should follow this slow method, trust me, it’s worth the time. Perfect strategy to only have people who are desperate/lazy enough to have nothing else lined up during that time! Not sure about "best" though but they sure as hell will be cheap.
- adventured 9y ago
  By the time they're done compiling that massive list, and then narrowing it down, in this job market (which is set to get even tighter), their dream candidate is long gone. Far more realistic: you have to constantly adapt to the labor market a lot more than their rigid premise suggests. There is no actual dream candidate (just like the article's premise is a fantasy), they do not exist, they have never existed, they will never exist; smart compromise is an always present requirement of success and that goes for team building as well as anything else. Or to steal from a related concept: a great candidate hired today, is better than a fantasy dream candidate hired at some unknown time in the future.
- albedoa 9y ago
  Yup, followed by "Oh you've received other offers? We'll see if we can accelerate the process on our end". No thanks, I'll just go with the existing offer from a company that doesn't hoist neon red flags during their interview process.
nathan_f77 9y ago
There's a few other comments in here talking about their own experiences, so I'll add mine as well. I'm working on a bootstrapped startup called FormAPI: https://formapi.io https://formapi.io I launched about a month ago, and my MRR is 3 figures. Here's a few of the marketing ideas I've tried. * I spent around $100 on AdWords, but didn't get any conversions. I think my ad was pretty good, but my theory is that most of my target audience are using ad-blockers. * I started a blog, and wrote a post about Rails/React development [1]. It was included in the Ruby Weekly newsletter, which was great, although it didn't get too many views (< 1,000). The blog post doesn't mention an author, so they used "FORMAPI BLOG" as the subtitle. This was a nice surprise, since sponsored links are very expensive. (I'm booking a sponsored link for early next year.) * I ran a "Bitcoin Treasure Hunt" [2] with a few programming challenges. I had a good spike of about 60,000 views, so some programmers might remember the service next time they need to generate PDFs. I couldn't get any attention on Reddit or Hacker News, but maybe I'll have better luck next time. I learned a lot from this experience, so the next one will be much more interesting, and it won't have any ambiguities or mistakes. It will be less of a "scavenger hunt", and will have more fun challenges with algorithms and logic puzzles. (There's a signup form at the bottom of the post, if you're interested.) * I paid for a short marketing consultation with someone who has a lot of relevant experience. They've been really awesome, and have provided a lot of great advice that I'll be implementing soon. Lots of things to improve around pricing, SEO, UX, social, PR, etc. The initial launch went pretty well on HN and Product Hunt, but that traffic has died down, so now I've just got to put in consistent work over the next few years. [1] https://formapi.io/blog/posts/json-patch-with-rails-5-and-react/ https://formapi.io/blog/posts/json-patch-with-rails-5-and-re... [2] https://formapi.io/blog/posts/bitcoin-treasure-hunt/ https://formapi.io/blog/posts/bitcoin-treasure-hunt/

315 points by brianjackson 9y ago

Hnrobert42 9y ago

That's reasonably interesting article with decent tips. But the life he advocates sounds god-awful. God-awful.

dang 9y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN? All this really says is some combo of "like" and "don't like". Others can't learn from that. A more substantive comment might say what specifically is interesting, or point out something specific about "the life he advocates".
- Danihan 9y ago
  Pretty sure he means section number 8, dealing with long and unpredictable hours. Did you read the article?
  - dang 9y ago
    That's separate from whether the comment was substantive.
deadmetheny 9y ago
It turns out that starting a real business is hard and takes a lot of time. Go figure.
mlevental 9y ago
better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

mlevental 9y ago

here's my problem if anyone is willing to lend a helping hand: i'm building an enterprise saas product that involves some cool buzzwords and potentially really adds value in the space i'm targeting but i'm getting no traction. i have an mvp (phone app and webapp) to demo to customers. i have the decks and sales pitch. i'm a reasonably smart and articulate person and communicate well (able to "speak sales"). yet because i have no company history, no clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i can't get any traction. at least i think this is the reason i'm not getting any bites? i had leads (through my FFF investors) - i've had probably 10-15 sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where (the latest one fizzled out yesterday). pricing isn't the issue because i've floated several different pricing schemes to customers and while some are more attractive than others it's never been the deal breaker. maybe i have poor product/market fit but i've experimented with adjusted the product offering too and no significant change in reception there either. now supposedly i should be learning something about my market segment but the problem is i constantly get contradictory signals - one customers says it's a great product but too early, another says it's not a useful product maybe i'd like to consider building such and such product, one customer says price is too high, another doesn't even mention it. i'm really at a complete loss for how to turn this thing around and i'm burning through cash (although i'm not above taking cost cutting measures - fired one of us three 3 weeks ago and cut my own pay this month).

eqmvii 9y ago
I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution, especially at the level of detail you provided. Marketing and selling anything is hard, but also highly domain specific.
the_bear 9y ago
Do you have to target enterprise customers rather than small businesses? Enterprises have very complicated decision-making processes that can be hard to navigate if you're not experienced, and even harder if you don't already have traction. Small businesses on the other hand will normally try out a demo of the product and decide on the spot if they like it or not. They aren't all that way, but if you talk to 50 10-person businesses, at least a couple of them will probably be willing to buy on the spot if your product solves a problem for them at a reasonable price. Go get some of those tiny customers even if they're not profitable for you, and then later move upmarket to the enterprise clients you really want. Or do what I do and just stay focused on small customers indefinitely because they're so much better to work with.
- mlevental 9y ago
  it's true that one of the difficulties has been finding who exactly in the larger organizations to pitch the product to. early on we figured out that it should be people with a budget (i.e. those directly in charge of p&l) rather than executives or product teams but we've actually been "gatekept" from getting access to those people. but this is a good idea. i've tried cold outreach but to larger organizations. i'll try reaching out to smaller (tiny) customers. thank you
  - ju-st 9y ago
    I had success with pitching to consultancies. They have the right contacts and are probably interested in re-selling your cool and innovative product. Contact details of the right managers are usually published on their website because they want new customers to call them (but no one is stopping you to contact them for pitching :)).
  - 9y ago

tw1010 9y ago

Is it possible to block all websites from asking about enabling notifications? Every time I have allowed it have I regretted it, and every time I see the little dialog box asking for my permission do I feel slightly more desire to just close down the tab and read something else.

hawkice 9y ago
My recommendation: leave. Websites won't stop doing something intrusive and annoying until it costs them more than it gets them.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  Yeah but how are they going to realize people are leaving because of that one specific thing?
  - guntars 9y ago
    They are doing A/B tests on something like that, right?
  - hawkice 9y ago
    There's a sense it which it isn't your responsibility to figure that out. If they never check, you avoid annoyance. If they do check (A/B test, eyeballing it, whatever), they'll see. If they're unwilling to turn it off no matter what then they're kind of terrible, and probably should lose lots of traffic.
  - ben-schaaf 9y ago
    Natural selection. Sites that use this tactic would get less revenue and thus have a higher chance of dying than those that don't. Therefore, over time, sites would trend towards not having that feature.
- petercooper 9y ago
  Unfortunately that hasn't worked for those infuriating "sign up for our email!" popovers/interstitials. Indeed, they seem to work better than ever.

tabeth 9y ago

Random sidenote: I feel that a ton of sites have the exact same visual style as kinsta. Is this a template or something? If so, which one is it?

mrisoli 9y ago
More of a trend, I call it the Stripe-design language/style, since they are becoming famous for design a lot of people use that as inspiration, it probably converts well, observed common features: Gradients Diagonal limits between sessions, these escape a little bit from traditional HTML-boxed content and suggest scroll-down behavior. Top left Logo, top menubar for quick navigation. Text to the left, images to the right
raleigh_user 9y ago
no clue but I also love the style. Seen it everywhere and can't seem to figure it out.
- blizkreeg 9y ago
  where do people go to get those graphics/illustrations created? they all look in the same style.
  - raleigh_user 9y ago
    If anyone figures this out let me know. I want one
    - petercooper 9y ago
      The way we do stuff like this is hunt around Shutterstock till we find the right style, look at what the illustrator's other files are, download the ones we like, and join together elements to make whatever we want. I imagine said illustrators could be commissioned as well, but we've never done that. For example, I searched for "people working" and this was result #2 which is in a similar style: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/set-isometric-business-people-teamwork-meeting-438955813 https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/set-isometric-busi... .. and the illustrator in question has numerous graphics along a similar style: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/yindee https://www.shutterstock.com/g/yindee .. this was just the first one I found, there are hundreds of such illustrators, though. "isometric" is another good word to use in searches, BTW, see https://www.shutterstock.com/search?searchterm=isometric+elements https://www.shutterstock.com/search?searchterm=isometric+ele... for example.

buf 9y ago

I've been bootstrapping https://www.castingcall.club https://www.castingcall.club for about 2 years now. Although I don't have a team (just me) and I've not in the 7-figure range (still in 6), a lot of the lessons from Kinsta holds true. I wanted to point out one bullet though: Automation My product is a SaaS product. I've automated every single thing possible from self-creating wikis to recommendations. I stepped away to visit Japan for 3 weeks earlier this year and came back to a site that increased in value. I've thought about raising money for it so many times but I always come back to this. Answer to someone else, or keep growing it on my own terms.

joshdance 9y ago
What is your process for self creating wikis?
- buf 9y ago
  User generated. They type a bunch of chaotic data in text fields and I do my best to structure them.
graystevens 9y ago
Agreed with the automation — I’m a fellow bootstrapper[0] in the SaaS space, and wouldn’t be without it. If there is anything that can be automated, even if slightly prematurely before the need to scale arises, I do so. In terms of infrastructure, this meant using Ansible for quickly deploying new servers where needed and adding them to the right load balancer. Currently all I need to do is spin up a new instance with the right tag & run the relevant Ansible script - this will grab a copy of the site from git, sort out dependencies and any other apps needed (supervisord and so on), and add it to the nginx loadbalancer config as a new upstream server. Same applies for things like billing. Yes I could have started off doing billing manually, sending out invoices etc, but these take time and realistically need to be automated to avoid any errors. These things definitely meant I didn’t get my MVP out in weeks, but meant I could still do this as a solo-bootstrapper and look after a young family and such. [0] https://breachinsider.com https://breachinsider.com

wheresmyusern 9y ago

this blog post is a kind of guide to starting your own company and making millions of dollars. this is a little unrelated but i just find it funny to read this guide because its very convoluted. there is actually a much simpler guide that their guide is a derivation of. here is the actual guide: step one: be more intelligent than most people behind almost every business, behind almost every professional success and behind almost any success in general that ive seen, is a highly intelligent person. i find it irritating to read because the concept of a guide is spelling things out so that anyone can follow the steps and get the same result. successful people always benefit from high intelligence, money and success will always be unfairly skewed to the benefit of those who happened to be born with better brains and into better developmental circumstances. nobody needs this guide because they are either smart and dont need a guide or dumb and in which case cant use this guide.

bacongobbler 9y ago
Sure, if you look at it from the closed mindset that nobody improves or can "git gud". It's been proven time and time again that humans can learn and adapt to achieve their own aspirations. Take one quick look at the special olympics; you'll see a very large group of individuals who have all overcome amazing obstacles to become olympians. Similarly, highly intelligent people may not have the domain knowledge required to understand how to bootstrap a company. Their knowledge domain may come from a completely different environment or culture which has its own mindset on how to bootstrap a company. Being smart does not necessarily make you more equipped than "dumb" (and highly motivated) people, but it does give you a decent head start.
- chronic824 9y ago
  > Being smart does not necessarily make you more equipped than "dumb" (and highly motivated) people, but it does give you a decent head start. This is absurd. Of course if you are smart, you are far better equipped. Your line of thinking promotes the idea that "anyone can work hard and achieve their dreams." We both know this is not true.
3pt14159 9y ago

foobaw 9y ago

I admire them - they use 20+ SaaS products, and most of them are extremely useful for automation leading to saving tons of time and effort. Unfortunately, they're quite expensive for people just starting out with zero funding.

mikeokner 9y ago

The #1 best piece of advice in the article is: > The best way to get things done is to simply sit down and start working on them. So many people worry so much about failure that they don't even bother to start. You can't possibly plan for every roadblock and eventuality. The only thing you can control is your execution, and there are no short cuts. Hard work won't guarantee success, but lack of it will guarantee failure.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
LrnByTeach 9y ago
Wow !!! This is the Best Startup advice one can receive . > So many people worry so much about failure that they don't even bother to start >You can't possibly plan for every roadblock and eventuality. > The only thing you can control is your execution, and there are no short cuts. > Hard work won't guarantee success, but lack of it will guarantee failure.
j_s 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602816 "stop trying to be clever and start trying to be done"

jimnotgym 9y ago

Please can we move on to a better term than 'bootstrapping'. It is non specific, means little to non-HN peeps and is just hard on the ears. How about self-funding?

Cyberdog 9y ago
If posts involving domain-specific jargon were not permitted on HN, this would be a very barren place.
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  There was already business domain specific terms for all of the many things people regard as bootstrapping. In this case it seems like it is a mildly successful agency already earning enough to pay 4 people, realising they could make more money a different way. Maybe this is just business, jargonphiles might call it 'pivoting'. Seems a world away from someone else 'bootstrapping' without 2 dimes to rub together from their garage. Or indeed the truth of many more of these stories that read like 'I made a good bit of money at my old job so took a year off and started a saas business with significant sums of my own cash'. Maybe I'm just bitter. I guess one thing people might want to bear in mind if they are not in the US, you may find senior finance people in the UK, for instance, totally bemused by this term if you find you want to stop bootstrapping and look for funding.
HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
As a fellow pedant who has complained about tech lingo before ('legacy' always makes my skin crawl a bit), what's wrong with 'bootstrapping'? The term has a fairly rich history in computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping#Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping#Computing
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  I'll take your 'legacy' and raise you an 'on-premise' (as in not in the cloud). I assume Oracle and Microsoft marketing want us to believe that premise is the singular of premises? I'm afraid I think different... Bootstrapping does have a fairly rich history in computing. It has found an excellent meaning or two. Does it need another not quite analogous one? I dunno, I was in business and in Private Equity (at a very junior level) for a long while before I was in computers, and prefer the jargon of classic finance I guess. Likewise I don't like 'burn-rate' and 'runway' as the naive twins of 'cash-flows'. I could go on but my stuffy finance background is never likely to win me a popularity contest...

wolco 9y ago

Hire cheap and hire people smarter than you. Good luck with that.

jcadam 9y ago

I’ve been building a SaaS product for the last year or so while working a day job and raising a family, and am only now close to the point of having something I consider beta-able (https://www.contabulo.com https://www.contabulo.com). I think I made the mistake of getting too fancy with the architecture (but designing architecture was too much fun to resist), so I’ve ended up with something that’s a collection of Clojure services on the backend, running on several linodes along with rabbitmq, elasticsearch, etc. Well, at least it should scale decently, if the need arises :fingers crossed: So this project has probably taken way too long to get to a MVP. But hey, the day job won’t let me do cool stuff like use FP languages, design architecture, do front end work, etc., so I need some sort of creative outlet :) Now if I can only find some folks willing to test this thing. So far I’ve only gotten a small handful of email sign ups via my landing page. Maybe it’s time to spend some money on AdWords, etc.

patricklouys 9y ago
Start with things that don't scale. Approach people directly.
mikeokner 9y ago
> Contabulo is Coming Soon > We’re currently working hard on getting Contabulo ready and hope to launch a beta in the very near future. That's probably killing you. My advice would be to get rid of that immediately. It sounds like in general you need to reprioritize and refocus. You use the words "SaaS product," "project," "creative outlet," and "this thing" to describe your efforts thus far. "Things" don't make money, businesses do. You need to stop being an engineer building a product and start building a business if you actually intend to generate income from this endeavor. To that end, I suggest a few immediate actions: - Give users the ability to sign up and pay you money. If users can't pay you, you'll never make a dime. Stop worrying about architecture or feature development or closed betas and focus 100% on attracting and retaining high-quality customers. Don't do any further development beyond bug fixes until you have paying customers and can articulate why additional features will drive growth. - Consider offering a free trial to get "testers" instead of a beta (but don't call them that). The free trial will allow you to collect feedback from real customers without establishing an ongoing expectation of free or reduced cost that can kill long-term revenue. In general, startups price too low. Read a few articles like https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... and https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-product/ https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-product/ - Spend a lot more time & effort on your branding/marketing. In particular, your site currently shows two screenshots that look quite similar to Trello + photo attachments, and has a bland tagline of "Organize. Collaborate. Get stuff done." Differentiate yourself from potential competitors and clearly communicate value. Also, minor nit but there's no reason a static landing page should show a loading bar before revealing the content. That alone is going to cost you real $$$ in page bounces.

juanmirocks 9y ago

Sorry: Wrong Thread. Does this study also consider that children remain living at their parents' for longer and longer? For example, it is not bizarrely uncommon in Spain to find people in their late twenties or thirties still living with their parents.

kelukelugames 9y ago
Wrong thread!
tga 9y ago
Just curious, how do you manage to post a comment in the wrong thread? Are you using some kind of client?
- vhost- 9y ago
  though, I can't remember what thread it was in, I saw this happen yesterday too.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    This has been happening for a long long time but it is rare enough that it is super hard to track and fix.
baxtr 9y ago
I upvoted this because it’s nicely bizarre

treis 9y ago

I wonder how profitable these I make $X,XXX,XXX in revenue and here's how type posts are. I counted 17 people in one of their pictures and if you assume they cost $100,000 each, that's $1,700,000 in salary cost alone. Then there's 3 offices and all of the other overhead/costs they have to pay. I've worked on some hobby SAAS stuff and every time I look at the numbers to see what it would take to equal my salary the numbers are staggering.

telesilla 9y ago
>$100,000 each I think that's the key point made here, that these high salaries are not demanded if you aren't hiring on the U.S. west coast.
- dboreham 9y ago
  Parent may be saying that 100k is a reasonable per-clueful-person cost pretty much anywhere. I'm in the middle of the USA and I wouldn't expect to hire a competent engineer for less than $100k.
  - beberlei 9y ago
    Anywhere in the us maybe, nowhere else in the world except maybe switzerland. The blog post specifically mentions being remote and not all in the US
    - treis 9y ago
      Yeah, I'm sure it's cheaper in other areas. It's mostly just an observation. I wonder what sort of profitability companies like this have and how it would compare to someone's salary that manages a department of ~20.
Axsuul 9y ago
You're assuming that every person is an engineer that demands a high salary. I'm willing to put $100k on the fact that most likely only 1/3 are engineers and the rest are support and ancillary staff.

uladzislau 9y ago

The first tip - red ocean/blue ocean strategy contradicts what these guys have been doing themselves - 1. take a proven "premium WordPress hosting/WPengine" model 2. use hip violet cartoonish website design as hundreds of other startups. 3. run affiliate program with huge payouts $500/referral (potentially). Now I'd take every advice mentioned with a grain of salt.

ttul 9y ago

There is no boot strapping. You’re always either leveraging capital, or people. And by “people” I mean yourself too as the founder. And by “capital” I mean the rich parents who provided a cushion for you when times were tight personally.

dilyevsky 9y ago

> Wait to receive 50, 100 or even more applications. Make sure you have a big pool of candidates because that’s how you’ll find your next dream employee. > After that, we start narrowing down the list to the top 5 or 10 candidates. We have multiple rounds of job interviews, usually 2 or 3. Thanks to this we are able to narrow down our list to the top 3 candidates and make the final decision. Yes, this process takes time, usually weeks. If you’re not in a hurry you should follow this slow method, trust me, it’s worth the time. Perfect strategy to only have people who are desperate/lazy enough to have nothing else lined up during that time! Not sure about "best" though but they sure as hell will be cheap.

adventured 9y ago
By the time they're done compiling that massive list, and then narrowing it down, in this job market (which is set to get even tighter), their dream candidate is long gone. Far more realistic: you have to constantly adapt to the labor market a lot more than their rigid premise suggests. There is no actual dream candidate (just like the article's premise is a fantasy), they do not exist, they have never existed, they will never exist; smart compromise is an always present requirement of success and that goes for team building as well as anything else. Or to steal from a related concept: a great candidate hired today, is better than a fantasy dream candidate hired at some unknown time in the future.
albedoa 9y ago
Yup, followed by "Oh you've received other offers? We'll see if we can accelerate the process on our end". No thanks, I'll just go with the existing offer from a company that doesn't hoist neon red flags during their interview process.

nathan_f77 9y ago

There's a few other comments in here talking about their own experiences, so I'll add mine as well. I'm working on a bootstrapped startup called FormAPI: https://formapi.io https://formapi.io I launched about a month ago, and my MRR is 3 figures. Here's a few of the marketing ideas I've tried. * I spent around $100 on AdWords, but didn't get any conversions. I think my ad was pretty good, but my theory is that most of my target audience are using ad-blockers. * I started a blog, and wrote a post about Rails/React development [1]. It was included in the Ruby Weekly newsletter, which was great, although it didn't get too many views (< 1,000). The blog post doesn't mention an author, so they used "FORMAPI BLOG" as the subtitle. This was a nice surprise, since sponsored links are very expensive. (I'm booking a sponsored link for early next year.) * I ran a "Bitcoin Treasure Hunt" [2] with a few programming challenges. I had a good spike of about 60,000 views, so some programmers might remember the service next time they need to generate PDFs. I couldn't get any attention on Reddit or Hacker News, but maybe I'll have better luck next time. I learned a lot from this experience, so the next one will be much more interesting, and it won't have any ambiguities or mistakes. It will be less of a "scavenger hunt", and will have more fun challenges with algorithms and logic puzzles. (There's a signup form at the bottom of the post, if you're interested.) * I paid for a short marketing consultation with someone who has a lot of relevant experience. They've been really awesome, and have provided a lot of great advice that I'll be implementing soon. Lots of things to improve around pricing, SEO, UX, social, PR, etc. The initial launch went pretty well on HN and Product Hunt, but that traffic has died down, so now I've just got to put in consistent work over the next few years. [1] https://formapi.io/blog/posts/json-patch-with-rails-5-and-react/ https://formapi.io/blog/posts/json-patch-with-rails-5-and-re... [2] https://formapi.io/blog/posts/bitcoin-treasure-hunt/ https://formapi.io/blog/posts/bitcoin-treasure-hunt/