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My Second Year as a Solo Developer

1066 points by mtlynch 7y ago

mtlynch 7y ago
Author here. Happy to answer any questions or hear any feedback about this post. Discussion from my first annual update last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19054150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19054150
- JacKTrocinskI 7y ago
  So 2 years and you earned $18,000? Seems rather bad, you think you can exponentially grow that in the next year or two?
  - icedchai 7y ago
    The totals on the first chart are wrong. In 2 years he lost $23k. (Or you could say the "totals" are correct, but calling it "net profit" is wrong.)
    - JacKTrocinskI 7y ago
      Yeah, either way, financially that would never make sense to me.
      - BlueTemplar 7y ago
        Most companies, especially small ones, lose money in their first 2-3 years...
      - bdcravens 7y ago
        OP has significant savings. They are their own VC. Think of it in terms of a startup, most of which don't turn profits for years.
  - tudelo 7y ago
    You know, I think there might be something to any publicity is good publicity in this case. It's controversial to do something 99.999 percent of the workforce would not. So, by posting even when there is no great success, he is growing his exposure and making it easier in the future.
- LaundroMat 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I really enjoy your writing style by the way. I'm interested how the "raising prices to avoid feature requests from people who wouldn't become a customer anyway" worked. I have built something for a friend of mine who is now my first customer. The tool solves a niche problem some of his peers struggle with too. When building it, I tried to make the data models as generic as possible so that other businesses would be able to use the tool with a minimum of effort from my side. Of course, I still foresee a lot of feature requests. How do/did you know zestful had the right basic functionality and feature-set for it to be useful to customers? In other words, how did you separate the must-have features from the nice-to-have ones (knowing that a must-have for a particular person could very well be a nice-to-have for the market)?
  - mtlynch 7y ago
    Thanks for reading and for the kind words. To preface, I'm definitely not an expert at this problem, because Zestful still only has a handful of customers, but I can tell you what was helpful for me. It is really hard to separate the nice-to-haves from the must-haves. Some customers will present their nice-to-haves as if they're must haves because they suspect that if they don't make it sound like a condition of buying, you'll never implement it, but they might buy anyway. Or they'd never buy regardless. One of the features that I think I correctly took on this year was linking Zestful's ingredients to USDA entries. A lot of customers either explicitly asked for that feature or for something similar. Later large customers cited that feature as something that made them choose Zestful, so I'm glad I added it. I think the signal there was the high proportion of customers asking for it. I think it is powerful to offer to implement that feature based on pre-payment of X months of service. It might drive away customers who don't feel comfortable letting you hold their money, but if your time continues getting burned by customers who request features and don't follow through, it's a good technique to keep in your back pocket.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  Just starting to have income near the two year mark is what I assume would happen. Assuming you still need to make income at some point, how long would you go before you decided it was time to go work for someone else? Three years? Four years? BTW: I'm more interested in how you self-reflect on your entrepreneurial abilities. How do you make decisions around that? How do you prevent yourself from falling in love with your work if it's not going to make money?
  - mtlynch 7y ago
    Thanks for reading! >Just starting to have income near the two year mark is what I assume would happen. Yeah, I'm encouraged by Cory Zue's progress. He's a couple years ahead of me, but I'm sort of matching up with his first few years of income: http://www.coryzue.com/writing/master-plan/#the-master-plan http://www.coryzue.com/writing/master-plan/#the-master-plan >Assuming you still need to make income at some point, how long would you go before you decided it was time to go work for someone else? Three years? Four years? Good question. At this point, I feel like I could do this indefinitely, even if I roughly broke even. The things that would change are if my life circumstances change and I need the money (e.g., having children, a catastrophic health event for me or someone in my family). >BTW: I'm more interested in how you self-reflect on your entrepreneurial abilities. How do you make decisions around that? How do you prevent yourself from falling in love with your work if it's not going to make money? I've found it helpful to set goals and hold myself accountable for achieving them. I do enjoy writing software for software's sake, but a lot of my satisfaction in being a solo dev comes from improving my skills on the business side. Given that, I'm probably not in danger of reaching complacency - failing to earn money would mean I'm not growing in the way that I want, so I wouldn't be satisfied with that.
- hopia 7y ago
  Pretty cool how you're able to come out in the open with all this stuff like this! Having checked Zestful's page out, I got a suggestion for you. How about building a client lib ready for developers for at least a few mainstream languages? This should be rather easily achievable if you type in the Swagger specs to your API. That allows you to generate (Swagger codegen) those libs with possibly just minimal tweaking left on your part.
  - mtlynch 7y ago
    Thanks for reading! >Having checked Zestful's page out, I got a suggestion for you. How about building a client lib ready for developers for at least a few mainstream languages? This should be rather easily achievable if you type in the Swagger specs to your API. That allows you to generate (Swagger codegen) those libs with possibly just minimal tweaking left on your part. This is something I've thought about. I'd really like to have a PyPI package that you can just pip install and it parses ingredients using the free tier, then prompts you to enter a license key when you reach the limit. Zestful's hard for me because I could spend a year pursuing all of the ideas I have for it, but historically, feature ideas I come up with myself haven't attracted new customers. I set a rule for myself to not implement any new features until a paying customer requests it, and customers haven't mentioned wanting language-specific libraries. I talked a bit more about that in my August 2019 retrospective: https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/08/#zestful-and-resisting-the-urge-to-fix-everything https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/08/#zestful-and-resis... I haven't looked into Swagger much, so I'll check that out and see if I can create language bindings more easily than I thought.
    - hopia 7y ago
      Right, I don't know if it makes sense business-wise or not. Probably not if no one is voicing out requests about it. However, writing Swagger API specs for your future projects while you develop them might make you more productive, plus you do get that code generation for free on top of it. Depending on what language you work with, it may come essentially for free or with non-marginal effort.
    - larrik 7y ago
- discordance 7y ago
  Are you targeting to gain revenue from your SaaS and blog alone? Have you considered consulting or remote dev for 2-3 months a year? - that could easily enable you to hit your targets.
- itroot 7y ago
  Hey, Michael! I was following you story since your first post two years ago. I just want to say that to succeed you need to sell something. As a software developers we can scale something (move from 1 to N, in terms of tech), but you need to find initial niche (from 0 to 1). I think that main success (as a business person) that you have is an audience reach that you had (almost every developer feels that things that you are described in your initial post). So why don't you try to play with your audience? Man, 2 years ago, when you posted you story of quitting, I was sitting in Yandex office at Moscow, and a lot of colleagues were talking about you and you story. Isn't that cool? I am not a real entrepreneur, but I really advice you to use your strengths (audience reach, mastery in writing, etc) along with you software development skills to find point of growth. Thanks for sharing and good luck!
  - mtlynch 7y ago
    Thanks for reading! >Man, 2 years ago, when you posted you story of quitting, I was sitting in Yandex office at Moscow, and a lot of colleagues were talking about you and you story. Isn't that cool? Definitely, that is really cool. That was one of the most fun parts of publishing that piece. I didn't expect it to be that interesting to people outside my circle of tech friends, but it was surprising to hear that it resonated with people in different countries and different industries. >I really advice you to use your strengths (audience reach, mastery in writing, etc) along with you software development skills to find point of growth. I've thought about this, especially when I first quit, but I could never think of a way to make money from my writing in a way that felt exciting to me. I think I just get more excited about building a product or service, but I do keep searching for ways to use my writing to complement my non-writing businesses.
- komali2 7y ago
  How's a burger with a bun keto friendly lol. There's a big picture of a bunned burger and no mention of "by the way this specifically refers to just the patty itself."
  - mtlynch 7y ago
    The article addresses how to handle buns, but that part of the article isn't in the screenshot: >Most people eat Beyond Burgers with ketchup and a bun, but those are hard to fit into a keto diet, so you might have to get creative. Consider crumbling your Beyond Burger over a salad with fresh tomatoes and a keto-friendly salad dressing. Or try out one of these delicious keto burger recipes. https://isitketo.org/beyond-burger https://isitketo.org/beyond-burger
- burnt_toast 7y ago
  Just wanted to say I've really enjoyed following your progress. It's awesome to see the changes over time and I really hope I can follow in your footsteps someday. I used to check your blog weekly hoping for a blog update to help pass the long afternoons that dragged on forever at work. By chance was it you that released the Rooster app? Apologies if it wasn't but I remember reading a blog post about an app that would text you in the morning or something and I could have sworn it was your blog. The post had a link to the app that I clicked on but little did I know that the app had been shut down and the URL was scooped up by a less appropriate website. I was greeted with a very NSFW web page while at work haha.
- drawkbox 7y ago
  Great read with the logical analysis and openness lends well to success and navigating this adventure. Doing your own products is definitely the way to go for sustainability. Just one big one or a few have to work. Focusing on products is nice as you don't have to work for clients but instead customers more which can be more rewarding and freeing. Having only a big client or a few end up dictating direction and freedom to pursue ideas. Overall the experience on the business, marketing and promotions side is very helpful in all aspects of life. I have been freelancing/contracting/product developing for 8 years full-time off of trying it for a year or two and have had to take clients/contracts here and there. This helps while you are building up products where needed. Though it isn't all bad doing contracts it can take time away but also help you, sometimes you learn about new problems and thus solutions that can become products when dealing with clients and unique industry problems. These problems can be hard to find if you aren't going through some of the pain points related to them. I will say most products do take multiple years to make it so fail quickly and press the gas on momentum and projects that you lean towards or are more interesting. Pay attention mostly to external product user experience and presentation at this stage. Good luck on your adventure and may your travels be rewarding personally and financially fruitful.
- fonosip 7y ago
  Interesting that as an ex-googler you dont use adwords ?
nonseobeliever 7y ago
I work at a big tech company and also have my own small firm for freelance work. Even though I don't have my own product and implement what customers need, ranging from new website to SIEMs and stuff, I find it pretty lucrative. And my prices are about $20/hr. But yes, I don't know if I can survive without working full job. LE: and revenue is not that small, about 25k per year.
- cambalache 7y ago
  $20/h is shockingly low. That is an effective rate of around 10 bucks an hour, at or below minimum wage level.
  - benhurmarcel 7y ago
    Depends where
gbasin 7y ago
Encouraging to see your progress, keep it up! Reading about your projects, it strikes me that some have different potential than others for perhaps one clear reason: solving a problem vs not. Why not double down on Zestful? There is demand there, and some are willing to pay... This post I wrote recently may be helpful for you: https://tinyletter.com/garybasin/letters/how-to-know-what-people-want https://tinyletter.com/garybasin/letters/how-to-know-what-pe...
- edf13 7y ago
  Hate to be harsh - but I wouldn't call this progress... I would call this going backwards. From what I can see he is drastically cutting back his lifestyle and all living costs and calling it a profit? The business and enterprise of being s solo dev itself is failing enterprise. My advise (From experience) would be to be doing some outsourced/freelance work at this stage to help fund your projects.
  - sweetheart 7y ago
    Cutting back on one's cost of living can easily still be progress. If he's doing this to get rich, I would agree he is failing. However I don't think thats the idea. I think he wanted a different lifestyle, and one that was more self-directed. Through that lens, an astounding amount of progress has been made.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! >Why not double down on Zestful? There is demand there, and some are willing to pay... Mainly because I don't know of any action I can take to grow Zestful. Large companies have already rolled their own solution. Smaller companies who need ingredient parsing have figured out some solution and they usually don't see it as worthwhile for them to take a chance on a new service if their old one is working fine. Customers need to find me at the time they're building a product that needs Zestful, but I don't know other ways of helping them find me beyond the SEO steps I've already taken.
  - gbasin 7y ago
LeoNatan25 7y ago
I like how you call that home "a modest two-bedroom home" in the linked blog. I guess it's a matter of perspective. Here in Israel, where everything is cramped, this would be something I'd be very content with.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hopia 7y ago
  Probably off topic here but always perplexed me how Israel is so dead expensive with just about everything you can find. Particularly with locally produced items.
  - LeoNatan25 7y ago
    Well, yes, because of many factors. Terrible consumers, high taxes, little space, etc.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Haha, I moved here from Manhattan, where I lived in a 1 BR that was luxurious by Manhattan standards but tiny by real world standards. I'm very happy with my house, but I think it's probably smaller than what most software developers in the US would choose if they lived in an area this inexpensive.
  - LeoNatan25 7y ago
    If you don't have children, a larger space would be more burden than necessity. Be happy that you moved away from the jail cell. I'd move if I could too. ;-)
    - tudelo 7y ago
      At least the jail cell comes with an amazing variety of food and unrivaled convenience
bilekas 7y ago
How did you cut down so drastically on expenses in the second year, +50%, or was there a large investment in the first year, sorry I havent read last years update yet! Also, I'm just coming accross your Zestful service and can't believe that is exactly what i am looking for and actually started to write, but I have other stuff to do so no point re-inventing the wheel! Consider me a new client sir! PS: Congratulations !
- tristanperry 7y ago
  "in August, I bought a modest two-bedroom home in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Population: 17,500." "My living expenses here are ~$2k per month, which is close enough to the rate of return on my personal investments that I'm kind of at equilibrium." - i.e. Michael moved to a much lower cost of living area.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    If that "I bought a house" is literal then he doesn't have rent or a mortgage to pay. That's a big chunk of most people's outgoings.
    - mtlynch 7y ago
      Yep, paid in cash, so there's no mortgage or rent.
    - redisman 7y ago
      Outside of the super-star cities, housing is pretty affordable!
      - onion2k 7y ago
        Sure. Thankfully most people can afford their outgoings if they're sensible. It's still a lot easier if you don't have rent or a mortgage though. If you're trying to suggest houses are cheap enough that lots of people can afford to buy one outright then you're absolutely wrong regardless of where it is. Very, very few people manage that.
jakobegger 7y ago
I read your previous post about Zestful, and this years update, and I just don't understand who would buy this as a hosted API. To me, it sounds like this should be a library, not an API. For every use case that I can think of, having a library would be 100x better than an API. In my experience, APIs are generally slow, unreliable, and tend to change without notice. I don't understand what advantage an API has, except making it easier for the developer to charge based on usage. Do people really buy APIs like this? Am I missing something?
- fortzi 7y ago
  Supporting the business model is a legitimate consideration, amiwrong?
- agwa 7y ago
  Zestful uses machine learning, so there could be a fair amount of storage, CPU, and memory requirements that make using a hosted API preferable to a local library. Also, if you read Michael's posts on https://whatgotdone.com https://whatgotdone.com you'll see that he is frequently improving the model. With a hosted API, customers benefit from improved accuracy immediately without having to update anything.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    "Without having to update anything" seems a bit disingenuous - does this software even work offline, without having to ask for some data from an online server, just to load the front page?
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! The big advantages for the customer of a managed API are: * No costs of installing or upgrading * It's language independent I agree that it's lower risk to rely on a library that you have locally, but none of my customers have ever requested that. I do offer a self-hosted plan, and a few customers have inquired about that, but they lose interest when I tell them it costs 10% more than a managed plan. All of Zestful's commercial competitors are managed APIs as well, so I don't think customers view a locally-installed library as critical.
fredgrott 7y ago
last corner of graphic right bottom is a wrong amount. I use to be a number guy, ie accountant hacker. Its not 18k positive as far as net revenue increase from the two years. the percentage is probably right but not the sign before the net rev number. and note you have to reach profits soon per how you file with the IRS..sorry to burst your bubble. same sort of errors in the saas net rev numbers. bone up on your accounting stats as there are books out there on how to do it
- icedchai 7y ago
  I noticed that, too.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! >I use to be a number guy, ie accountant hacker. Its not 18k positive as far as net revenue increase from the two years. Can you clarify what you mean? What is the correct way for me to present this information? >and note you have to reach profits soon per how you file with the IRS..sorry to burst your bubble. Can you elaborate? Are you assuming that I file as a corporation or a sole proprietor?
swalsh 7y ago
Just some honest feedback. I have a use for Zestful, and the price is good. But playing around, it seems good at the easy stuff (but I can do the easy stuff myself) it's not so good at the hard stuff. For example the string "3/4 cup risotto rice, Arborio or Carnaroli" It identifies the unit and quantity fair enough, and it's right when it says "Risotto rice" is the product. But then it says "Arborio or Carnaroli" is a preparation method. I can totally see WHY it says that. But I'm not sure that's correct. At your price point though, I might still use it. Ultimatley to parse everything I need to parse it would be a lot cheaper than spending even an hour writing it myself. But that was my first thoughts playing around with it.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading and for testing out Zestful! >For example the string "3/4 cup risotto rice, Arborio or Carnaroli" >It identifies the unit and quantity fair enough, and it's right when it says "Risotto rice" is the product. But then it says "Arborio or Carnaroli" is a preparation method. I can totally see WHY it says that. But I'm not sure that's correct. Yeah, I'm constantly improving the model, but there will always be cases it gets wrong. For most of my customers, that's a mostly fine result, because very few of the clients actually use the preparation note field. Most care only about the quantity, unit, product, and USDA fields. I'll fix the bad result on the risotto example, but it's definitely a game of whack-a-mole. There are so many variations and corner cases that it'll never be 100%. >At your price point though, I might still use it. Ultimatley to parse everything I need to parse it would be a lot cheaper than spending even an hour writing it myself. But that was my first thoughts playing around with it. Haha, maybe I should raise my prices. But seriously, I'd be happy to have you as a customer. If you'd like to chat more about about your use case, shoot me an email at michael@zestfuldata.com.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Arborio is a kind, just like Granny Smith, bing, or Key. I wonder if it'd be easier just to have a dictionary of kinds of ingredient and anything else is a preparation.
xchaotic 7y ago
Sorry to say but this proves that for someone who actually has to work for a living ie earn money, corporate life is absolutely the correct choice. Even for Mr Lynch these experiments in charity wouldn’t be possible without the nest egg from google (which he acknowledged). To go from net 100k+ to below zero and still be unprofitable after two years is a financial disaster.
- gk1 7y ago
  It seems OP is perfectly happy creating small sites and products. One can earn perfectly good money from consulting or contracting, but OP chose not to.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  It's hard starting a business and most people (90%) don't earn anymore than an employee. None the less some of us just aren't cut out for the corporate life. I'd pick poverty over the lack of autonomy, petit politics and meaningless work any day.
  - xwdv 7y ago
    What if the poverty was really, REALLY bad? As in soul crushing, no way out, maybe-kill-yourself, type of poverty? I doubt you’d make that switch so easily.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      That's really another question, I have a lot of sympathy for people in that situation but it isn't what we are talking about here.
      - xwdv 7y ago
        I don’t think you understand what poverty is, if you are choosing poverty over “lack of autonomy in the workplace”. Poverty doesn’t liberate you, it restricts you, and not just in the workplace, but in your entire life. Want to go on a trip or eat fancy food? Too bad you can’t, because you don’t have money and you’re broke poor. Want to get a great career? Too bad, you got to work at fast food joint because you can’t afford the education. Want kids? Nope you can’t afford it so keep it in your pants, and women don’t want to get serious with some broke dude anyway. There is no way you’d choose poverty. There is little advantage to being poor in society that punishes being poor.
nautilus12 7y ago
Bye bye any hopes of raising a family.
- avl999 7y ago
  Nice of you to impose your outdated values on how to live on others. The OP might perfectly be happy to not raise a family or just be interested in being with a partner without having kids. If you don't have kids, this kind of lifestyle is perfectly sustainable and you can live happily on it. Kids are not a pre-requisite for happiness and it annoys me how so many discussions here start to equate standard of living and happiness to a situation where kids are involved.
  - nautilus12 7y ago
    Whoa, what an assumption, this says more about you than anything. I said goodbye "any" hopes of having children which says that "if" he wanted to have a family there is no way that he could do it in this way. What kind of chip do you have on your shoulder about children?
    - freehunter 7y ago
      Not the guy you’re responding to but I also have a chip on my shoulder about children: people won’t shut up about me having them. My wife and I made the decision to not have children but every conversation it gets brought up. We buy a two seater car: there goes any hope of having children. We go on a two week vacation: you won’t be able to do that if you have children. She quits her job: nows the perfect time to have children! It gets old REALLY quickly. Some people don’t want children. Ever. But there’s a lot of people just like you who can’t stop talking about children in every conversation. Why?
      - nautilus12 7y ago
        Seems like a really self centered worldview....
  - earth_walker 7y ago
avl999 7y ago
Thanks for writing this. It is good to see a perspective where a business is being built up slowly as opposed to the typical "I quit my job and now my side project makes $30k a month two months in" posts we usually see. Do you ever feel issues with motivation when you don't see growth as quickly as you'd like?
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! >Do you ever feel issues with motivation when you don't see growth as quickly as you'd like? Good question. For me, the more dominant feeling is frustration when I do something that I expect will bring growth, and then there's no measurable effect. That happened over and over again with Is It Keto. It was especially tough because the site's growth depends so heavily on Google, and there seems to be a lag time of weeks or months before Google reacts to certain changes or decides certain pages are worth putting at the #1 slot for related queries. It was tough to make a site change or publish a new post and think, "Okay, I guess I'll just wait 6-8 weeks to see what Google thinks of this."
aty268 7y ago
These businesses all seem like something that very well could make you money, but would never scale into a growth startup. And it seems the time it takes to build one of these or a growth startup isn't going to be too different. I might even say that you similar chances of making a similar amount of money from either. So why not shoot for the larger moon?
- gk1 7y ago
  I think you’re underestimating the effort and luck involved in building a successful growth startup. > Why not shoot for the moon? Some times it’s better to throw a few things at the wall and see what sticks, before going all-in on one idea.
- m_ke 7y ago
  Ingredient line parsing is a really small market and something that sounds like a fun project to work on but is probably not a business venture that has room to grow. The number of companies that have enough recipes to justify automation, profits to justify paying for it and nobody inhouse who can implement it is really small. There's no viable price point for a product like this when you factor in the cost of customer acquisition. Content based consumer sites are also really hard to get off the ground and it's not something that I'd recommend any bootstrapper to try unless you can charge for it. I'm sure it's all a great learning experience though and if Michael keeps iterating the way he is now he'll definitely end up finding a worthwhile business venture.
  - riku_iki 7y ago
    > Ingredient line parsing if he can scale his tech to more general cases, it can be very strong proposition.
ingend88 7y ago
@mtlynch what tech stack do you use?
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Different things for different projects. I'm trying to move toward mostly Go + Vue stuff. * Zestful: Python + Docker + CRF++ * Is It Keto: Flask + AppEngine * What Got Done: Go + Vue + AppEngine (https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone) * WanderJest: Go + Vue + AppEngine * mtlynch.io: Hugo (https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io)
  - usr42 7y ago
    @mtlynch I've directly recognized the coder theme you use for the blog. I like it pretty much. How do you host it? Do you use github pages?
    - mtlynch 7y ago
      Cool, I like it too! I host on Firebase. You can check out my deployment script here: https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io/blob/f35d9cf947a3d2c2341775ad34f92dc0ea9a1224/.circleci/config.yml https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io/blob/f35d9cf947a3d2c23...
  - influx 7y ago
    Do you use any web frameworks with Go?
usr42 7y ago
Interesting analysis. I especially like your personal goals and the "Raise prices, even if nobody's buying". This is a really valuable insight. Thanks for sharing that. I have one question: Do you have a feeling about the market size you are in and how does this influence your planning?
rs23296008n1 7y ago
Good stuff. I've seen a bit of negativity about this being a waste of time since you're not making equivalent money to old job. For those people: This isn’t any different from spending time earning a degree by returning to full-time study. And your attempts are growing. The compound interest from these investments in time and effort will help you regardless. Even if you fail on every business at first you'll still get so much experience and momentum you can't help but do better next time. And I doubt any will actually fail: each will have an element that wasn't good enough but still capable of being tweaked to fix it. Even if you don't fix it, you've still learnt something in the attempt.
- TAForObvReasons 7y ago
  There's a simpler explanation, and the post actually touches on the point when discussing Is It Keto: > I abandoned the site in April but came back four months later after realizing that it had grown by itself without me. As a salaried employee, you aren't actually building anything that accretes value to yourself in that way. You don't show up for work for 4 months and you'll likely be fired. Obviously it never works out forever, but the value you build when striking out on your own has a much longer potency than getting paid in cash and stock.
  - jldugger 7y ago
    I just don't understand how you can set up a business and not noticed the increased revenue.
- tempsy 7y ago
  OP isn't explicit about it but he's effectively F.I.R.E'd. These are projects to keep the mind fresh in what is early retirement. If that weren't the case building an actual business requires a lot more time, energy, resources even as a solo founder than what I'm getting from the blog post.
  - ronyfadel 7y ago
    Or OP could be T.I.R.E.D. :) He’s doing his best to bootstrap his multiple products, but is prioritizing intellectual curiosity, building neat things while not burning out. At least, that’s my view of it.
davnicwil 7y ago
Great post Micheal, and awesome to see it hit the top of HN - a reminder I guess that the core bootstrapper/hacker community is on here and strong as ever! The numbers and stuff aside (which are looking promising, btw, congrats - look forward to see how the trends continue in y3) the part I liked best was the I still love it section. It's incredibly important and, I'm sure you know, the real driver behind doing what you're doing, not money. I think there's a tendency, maybe especially for technical people, to want to quantify and maximise etc, and money is an easy metric for doing that with and therefore to focus on. But on reflection, it's pretty obviously not the main reason we do what we do.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading, David! >It's incredibly important and, I'm sure you know, the real driver behind doing what you're doing, not money. Yeah, definitely. I ultimately do need to figure out a way to make some money, but I'd be happy to work for myself for 1/10th the compensation I'd get at a FAANG.
patio11 7y ago
Two cents offered because this post really strikes a chord with me, and I also spent some time chasing down rabbit holes early in my software business: These products do not appear obviously commercializable and multiple years invested into them without materially improving the businesses does not decrease my confidence in that snap judgment. You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (appropriately priced; hundreds to thousands of dollars per year) product against those problems, build contingent on getting 10 commits to buy, and be at +/- $100k in 12 to 18 months. Many people with less technical and writing ability have done this in e.g. the MicroConf community. If you want the best paint-by-numbers approach to it I've seen, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=2s (I'll note that What Got Done is probably a viable boutique SaaS business if you somehow figured out distribution for it, at price points between $50 and $200 per month. My confidence on this approaches total. HNers skeptical because it is technically trivial should probably reflect for a moment on how much time is spent on standups at a company with 20 or 200 engineers, what one hour of their time is worth, and how likely that company is to put an engineer on this project specifically.) If you run an API-based business in the future: Usage-based billing is a really tricky business model for a solo developer. Note that you can say "Usage-based billing but we have a minimum commitment", and probably should prior to doing speculative integration engineering work. Your minimum commitment should be north of $1,000 per month; practically nobody can integrate with your API for cheaper than a thousand dollars of engineering time, right. This also counsels aiming at problems amenable to solutions with APIs which are trivially worth $1,000++ a month to many businesses which can hire engineers. Parsing recipe ingredients seems like a very constrained problem space. Consider e.g. parsing W-2s or bank statements or similar; many more businesses naturally care about intake of those documents, getting accurate data from them, and introducing that data into a lucrative business process that they have. I would encourage you, to the maximum extent compatible with your sanity, to prioritize "Will this get me more customers?" over behind-the-scenes investments like CI/CD which are very appropriate to Google but will under no circumstance show up in next year's report as One Of The Most Important Things I Did This Year. For similar reasons, I would suggest devoting approximately zero cycles to cost control. You don't have a cost problem and no amount of cost control will bend the curve of your current businesses to sustainability. You have a revenue problem. Your desired state in the medium term will make it economically irrational for you to think for more than a minute about a $50 a month SaaS expense; marketing and sales gets you to that desired state, not cost control.
nlh 7y ago
All personal stuff aside (and on that note - I’m a huge fan of this story Mike and love what you’re doing!) This is a great piece of advice for solo devs out there: > Great! You can pre-pay for three months of service, and your billing cycle won't start until that feature is available. > I've never been burned on a feature request since. I imagine it’s super easy to fall into the custom feature trap when the temptation of a big new customer is right around the corner, and this seems like an excellent solution!
bkinnard 7y ago
Reading the post makes me most curious about how you live so cheaply? Halfing your burn rate doubles your time to death which more than doubles your chances of success
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! >Reading the post makes me most curious about how you live so cheaply? 90% of it is just location. When I was in Manhattan, I was spending ~$7k/month. Part of that was higher cost of my apartment and health insurance, but another big part is just the culture. In NYC, it wouldn't be unusual for me to go out to a $80/person dinner, spend $25 on drinks afterwards, another $25 on Ubers, then another $20 on brunch in the morning. In Western Mass, I do make efforts to live cheaply, but so much of it is just the ease of not spending money when nobody in your social circle spends like that.
microcolonel 7y ago
Side note: when presenting a simple revenue-expense-profit-loss chart, it can help to chart the expenses as cutting from the bottom of the revenue (tough though, when you are funding the expenses externally, in this case you have to put the loss below the zero line). Anyway, it makes it clear when your expenses intersect your revenue, and you switch to profit rather than loss.
morango 7y ago
This proves that the even in the modern creative economy, the bourgeoisie still holds the means of production - through contacts/venture capital/market manipulation. EAT THE RICH.
christiansakai 7y ago
I read your original post 2 years ago, and was waiting for the conclusion. Thank you for posting this.
epicgiga 7y ago
Very illustrative warning to other devs. Just because you're coding and building things, doesn't mean you're doing work, or that you're going to make any money. Most devs are salarymen because that's the best role they can play in society. Their employer plugs them into what the market actually wants. 99% of them are inequipped to perform any that business aspect themselves. They just want to build stuff. Like this devs projects -- a hobby not an enterprise. The best thing any likeminded dev can do is this: do not write a single line of code until you've vigorously screened for market demand. If you can't pick up a phone and talk to businesses, this isn't for you, or you need to partner with a so called "extrovert" or sales type. Do not even so much as ponder the technical implementation of an idea for at least a month, don't touch a terminal, and don't type a single char of code. If you can't restrain yourself from doing so, save yourself the wasted time, money, and energy. If you want a hiatus, just have a real hiatus and fly to a Thai island for 6 months.
- heipei 7y ago
  Part of the problem that I have with some of these accounts is that they so often focus on tiny and mundane problems that individuals have. I don't know if this is a conscious decision or just an unintended consequence of the fact that B2C ideas are easy to find (you just watch your own daily routines) and are more shiny since everyone knows about customer-facing products but fewer people know all the gears that power corporations large and small. The "Is it Keto" site is a nice hobby but if I seriously wanted to make money with a product/SaaS/platform I'd ring up everyone I knew from previous jobs and ask them which problem I should solve to save them hours of work every day. If you do that your product will become irreplaceable, while a site for helping you with your Keto diet is probably the first thing anyone would cut out if they wanted to save some money. That's the issue I have when founders focus so much on these lifestyle and purely optional products.
  - epicgiga 7y ago
    It's worth noting quite how vigorously you have to apply this concept. My first business attempt _did_ factor in market demand, but didn't consider the depth or capacity to pay ("nice to have" vs "take my money"). So I burned out doing 70 hr weeks for something that was never going to make real money vs what I could get as a salaryman or contractor. If you're starting out, you really really shouldn't be aiming for a new unique solution to something, unless you're planning on the VC route. It is far wiser to copycat. Aim for a massive crowded market (e.g. weight loss), because your chance of missing is hundreds of times lower. Indeed an even more effective tactic is to buy an existing business in a space, and develop it. It rips out all the market risk. This is how freelancer.com started for instance.
localhost 7y ago
I think it's especially important to make sure that you interview customers and find out what their problems are before you even think about writing a single line of code. You should strive to get a mix of qualitative (because the stories you hear will let you empathize with the customer problems) as well as quantitative via surveys / small ad experiments. Once you have some signal, then proceed to start exploring solutions (and again, this isn't about writing code, you can do this entirely with mockups/napkin drawings, whatever it takes to get your point across) and test those solutions with the customers you interviewed earlier. Once you have some evidence that a) you have a problem that customers will pay to solve, and b) you have a solution that you have validated THEN you proceed to start writing the code. The biggest change at my company is doing product development this way: understand the customer problem and the solution before writing code. Hope this helps.
segmondy 7y ago
I admire your being able to quit and start your own biz. I admire you staying the course, but I feel very sad at your progress. You seem to be more of a builder than a business man. Everyone one of your project makes me yawn, I'm sure many have said it. With that said, you need to find some good ideas. Forget originality since you're not doing great on that, just find something making money and clone it. Or find a co-founder that can sell and come up with good ideas.
cdiddy2 7y ago
Are health insurance costs included in your current $2k monthly expenses? Did you buy the house outright?
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Yep and yep. Health insurance in MA is $250/month for a high deductible plan (I was paying $500 in NY). This year, my insurance is only $40/month because I qualified for a subsidized plan based on my 2019 income (or lack thereof).
  - cdiddy2 7y ago
    Interesting. I am in MA as well and it seems health insurance would be 500 a month for me(1 person). Maybe thats the higher end plans though.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
senderista 7y ago
If you're netting at best a few grand a year and need to survive on savings anyway, why not just drop the business pretense and work for free on stuff you actually find interesting? A popular open-source project could yield more long-term value for one's career than an unprofitable or barely profitable "lifestyle business".
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! The plan is for my income to increase over time. The benefit of launching businesses is that each time, I learn skills to increase my chances of success in the next attempt.
- icebraining 7y ago
  > A popular open-source project could yield more long-term value for one's career than an unprofitable or barely profitable "lifestyle business". Only as a launchpad for another job or consulting gigs, no? What if he wants to work solo?
say_it_as_it_is 7y ago
@mtlynch you're brave for sharing your experiences and struggles with the world. What kind of help are you searching for?
alexellisuk 7y ago
If folks liked this story, check in with Daniel Vassallo who quit a job at Amazon on well over 500k / year salary and benefits to start out on his own as a solo, small-business founder. https://twitter.com/dvassallo https://twitter.com/dvassallo He shares lots of personal stats like his incoming & expenditure - quite inspirational and can show that circumstances and luck can also play a part.
willj 7y ago
Naive question by someone who’s never started a business: when bootstrapping companies while keeping your day job, how do you deal with intellectual property clauses in employment contracts, such that your employer owns the “inventions” you create in your free time, on your own equipment, unrelated to the business area you work in? I know laws vary by state, but I would find it especially disheartening if you spent years of effort and sacrificed your social life only to have your product snatched away from you once it finally became profitable or popular. My non-lawyer reading of the internet’s opinions suggest that you need to discuss it with your company, or possibly edit your employment contract before signing, but the latter seems a bad suggestion if you’re afraid of not getting a job. I’ve also read that these kinds of clauses can even apply several months after you terminate at your day job, which suggests that you can’t even start on the product until months after you’ve left. All of that makes me unlikely to try to build a business in tech, since I would never have the capital to take such a long break away from a company, nor to build a product for a long time before it’s profitable without having a day job to support me.
- pid_0 7y ago
  >how do you deal with intellectual property clauses in employment contracts, such that your employer owns the “inventions” you create in your free time, on your own equipment, unrelated to the business area you work in? By not signing those things, plain and simple. I have never signed an employment contract and I never will.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Does that mean you never worked for a company (in an IP-related job), or actually managed to find companies who hired you without signing a contract? If the latter, what kind of companies do that?
    - pid_0 7y ago
      I literally have never once signed an employment contract. I only work in devops/cloud/security consulting firms
dhruvkar 7y ago
So awesome seeing your posts at the top of HN! >> I've also noticed that readers are less interested in business lessons unless the story involves thousands of dollars — earning or losing large sums both seem to work. I would love to read more about the mundane, small business lessons, because that's where I am. And I'm positive I'm not the only one. Keep writing about the smaller day-to-day struggles, you got readers!
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Hey Dhruv, thanks for reading! Always fun to hear from you again.
sealthedeal 7y ago
love it! If my two cents matter to you... I did a similar thing for a few years, and it wasnt until I went all in on one product/problem did I finally start to see some great returns. With that said, I have a friends dad who owns like 10 different businesses and he has people manage all of them, while he sits back and collects. These are not software businesses they are more brick and mortar like long term storage, etc, but maybe you can build the same model with online businesses! :) Good luck, and thanks for posting, really enjoy reading the content!
rickitan 7y ago
I see a lot of comments criticizing your path and progress. Making remarks like "why didn't you stay at Google". I applaud your decision, effort, and perseverance. I admire your risk taking and having skin in the game. Trying to make it out on your own. People forget the journey is not just about the money. It's about learning, growing and bringing your ideas to life. Being an artist, and expressing yourself through products. Keep on going my friend. There's no doubt you'll get there.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading and the kind words! I think you and I see it similarly that there's satisfaction in growing and learning even if the money part hasn't fallen into place.
- qmmmur 7y ago
  I don't think I've cringed more than 'expressing yourself through products'.
  - spiffytech 7y ago
    The arts and crafts world is full of people expressing themselves through products. Independent software doesn't have to be different.
    - qmmmur 7y ago
      The arts is full of people expressing themselves for pay below the poverty line, often not expected or wanted as remuneration for their expression. Treating business as expression and calling it the same thing as actual art is quite oblivious to the reality.
      - jshevek 7y ago
        Both kinds of activities, the one that you characterize and the one that the parent comment characterizes, occur in the art world.
      - 7y ago
iamlily 7y ago
God bless you for writing such a good post
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
oliv__ 7y ago
FYI: on isitketo.org/cream-cheese, the link to "keto dessert recipes" is broken (it's an internal link). Looks like it's being prefixed with the domain and the url ends up having two http segments.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Fixed! Thanks for the heads up.
let_var 7y ago
Michael - firstly, kudos for sticking to your solo dev plans. Hiccups are part and parcel of the game. I like your Is This Keto app. And second, keep at it!
m0zg 7y ago
What Got Done is basically Google's internal Snippets. I wish there was an on-prem setup to do that. The idea is basically every week you write, in free form text, what you've done, and possibly what you're planning to do, and your team mates get to view it, and subscribe to updates conveniently. If you're anything like me, you will find this valuable not only day to day, but also when the review time comes and you need to beat your chest a little. I tend to forget how much I've done.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  I wish I'd found you when I was trying to gather enough customers to make What Got Done a business! Yeah, I loved Snippets as well. I wrote a little ode to them last year.[0] >I wish there was an on-prem setup to do that. What Got Done is open source now. The standard version has a dependency on Google Cloud Firestore, but I have a working branch that runs on Redis.[1] You'd need to implement a new auth solution because What Got Done depends on UserKit, which is still in closed beta, but you can still use their dummy backend (configured in What Got Done by default) which accepts "password" for any username. [0] https://mtlynch.io/status-updates-to-nobody/ https://mtlynch.io/status-updates-to-nobody/ [1] https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/tree/redis-persist https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/tree/redis-persist
gramakri 7y ago
Great read, thanks for writing this. One of the hardest parts of doing a bootstrapped startup is the peer pressure and the perceived opportunity cost. The numbers won't add up for a bootstrapped business for many years (I am talking upwards of 5 years even). The only thing that keeps you going is your ambition ('this is what i want to do', 'nothing else i would rather do'). The best way I have learnt to deal with this is to surround myself with people who think similar.
snambi 7y ago
Question: why did he leave a job to build these sites? He could have built them while continuing a full-time job.
smnplk 7y ago
The data for North Korea is missing.
alexellisuk 7y ago
I'm also a solo developer, or at least building a Ltd company starting at one. I wrote up about my developer setup here, and thought it might be of interest. https://blog.alexellis.io/building-a-linux-desktop-for-cloud-native-development/ https://blog.alexellis.io/building-a-linux-desktop-for-cloud... Would folks like to see more posts about branching out and working for yourself? I'd consider writing-up my perspective from the UK if it was interesting to people here.
mpurham 7y ago
I can closely relate to this post. Often times I build and develop software that is simply not worth my time. I think one important thing that you are doing well is capturing data for revenue. I think you should also take your hourly rate and multiply it by the amount of time it is taking you and that will give you a better idea of what this is costing you to build. I've started to capture this data for myself (https://marcell.me https://marcell.me) to get a better idea of what it is actually costing me.

1066 points by mtlynch 7y ago

Author here. Happy to answer any questions or hear any feedback about this post. Discussion from my first annual update last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19054150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19054150

JacKTrocinskI 7y ago
So 2 years and you earned $18,000? Seems rather bad, you think you can exponentially grow that in the next year or two?
- icedchai 7y ago
  The totals on the first chart are wrong. In 2 years he lost $23k. (Or you could say the "totals" are correct, but calling it "net profit" is wrong.)
  - JacKTrocinskI 7y ago
    Yeah, either way, financially that would never make sense to me.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Most companies, especially small ones, lose money in their first 2-3 years...
    - bdcravens 7y ago
      OP has significant savings. They are their own VC. Think of it in terms of a startup, most of which don't turn profits for years.
- tudelo 7y ago
  You know, I think there might be something to any publicity is good publicity in this case. It's controversial to do something 99.999 percent of the workforce would not. So, by posting even when there is no great success, he is growing his exposure and making it easier in the future.
LaundroMat 7y ago
Thanks for sharing. I really enjoy your writing style by the way. I'm interested how the "raising prices to avoid feature requests from people who wouldn't become a customer anyway" worked. I have built something for a friend of mine who is now my first customer. The tool solves a niche problem some of his peers struggle with too. When building it, I tried to make the data models as generic as possible so that other businesses would be able to use the tool with a minimum of effort from my side. Of course, I still foresee a lot of feature requests. How do/did you know zestful had the right basic functionality and feature-set for it to be useful to customers? In other words, how did you separate the must-have features from the nice-to-have ones (knowing that a must-have for a particular person could very well be a nice-to-have for the market)?
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading and for the kind words. To preface, I'm definitely not an expert at this problem, because Zestful still only has a handful of customers, but I can tell you what was helpful for me. It is really hard to separate the nice-to-haves from the must-haves. Some customers will present their nice-to-haves as if they're must haves because they suspect that if they don't make it sound like a condition of buying, you'll never implement it, but they might buy anyway. Or they'd never buy regardless. One of the features that I think I correctly took on this year was linking Zestful's ingredients to USDA entries. A lot of customers either explicitly asked for that feature or for something similar. Later large customers cited that feature as something that made them choose Zestful, so I'm glad I added it. I think the signal there was the high proportion of customers asking for it. I think it is powerful to offer to implement that feature based on pre-payment of X months of service. It might drive away customers who don't feel comfortable letting you hold their money, but if your time continues getting burned by customers who request features and don't follow through, it's a good technique to keep in your back pocket.
gwbas1c 7y ago
Just starting to have income near the two year mark is what I assume would happen. Assuming you still need to make income at some point, how long would you go before you decided it was time to go work for someone else? Three years? Four years? BTW: I'm more interested in how you self-reflect on your entrepreneurial abilities. How do you make decisions around that? How do you prevent yourself from falling in love with your work if it's not going to make money?
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! >Just starting to have income near the two year mark is what I assume would happen. Yeah, I'm encouraged by Cory Zue's progress. He's a couple years ahead of me, but I'm sort of matching up with his first few years of income: http://www.coryzue.com/writing/master-plan/#the-master-plan http://www.coryzue.com/writing/master-plan/#the-master-plan >Assuming you still need to make income at some point, how long would you go before you decided it was time to go work for someone else? Three years? Four years? Good question. At this point, I feel like I could do this indefinitely, even if I roughly broke even. The things that would change are if my life circumstances change and I need the money (e.g., having children, a catastrophic health event for me or someone in my family). >BTW: I'm more interested in how you self-reflect on your entrepreneurial abilities. How do you make decisions around that? How do you prevent yourself from falling in love with your work if it's not going to make money? I've found it helpful to set goals and hold myself accountable for achieving them. I do enjoy writing software for software's sake, but a lot of my satisfaction in being a solo dev comes from improving my skills on the business side. Given that, I'm probably not in danger of reaching complacency - failing to earn money would mean I'm not growing in the way that I want, so I wouldn't be satisfied with that.
hopia 7y ago
Pretty cool how you're able to come out in the open with all this stuff like this! Having checked Zestful's page out, I got a suggestion for you. How about building a client lib ready for developers for at least a few mainstream languages? This should be rather easily achievable if you type in the Swagger specs to your API. That allows you to generate (Swagger codegen) those libs with possibly just minimal tweaking left on your part.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! >Having checked Zestful's page out, I got a suggestion for you. How about building a client lib ready for developers for at least a few mainstream languages? This should be rather easily achievable if you type in the Swagger specs to your API. That allows you to generate (Swagger codegen) those libs with possibly just minimal tweaking left on your part. This is something I've thought about. I'd really like to have a PyPI package that you can just pip install and it parses ingredients using the free tier, then prompts you to enter a license key when you reach the limit. Zestful's hard for me because I could spend a year pursuing all of the ideas I have for it, but historically, feature ideas I come up with myself haven't attracted new customers. I set a rule for myself to not implement any new features until a paying customer requests it, and customers haven't mentioned wanting language-specific libraries. I talked a bit more about that in my August 2019 retrospective: https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/08/#zestful-and-resisting-the-urge-to-fix-everything https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/08/#zestful-and-resis... I haven't looked into Swagger much, so I'll check that out and see if I can create language bindings more easily than I thought.
  - hopia 7y ago
    Right, I don't know if it makes sense business-wise or not. Probably not if no one is voicing out requests about it. However, writing Swagger API specs for your future projects while you develop them might make you more productive, plus you do get that code generation for free on top of it. Depending on what language you work with, it may come essentially for free or with non-marginal effort.
  - larrik 7y ago
discordance 7y ago
Are you targeting to gain revenue from your SaaS and blog alone? Have you considered consulting or remote dev for 2-3 months a year? - that could easily enable you to hit your targets.
itroot 7y ago
Hey, Michael! I was following you story since your first post two years ago. I just want to say that to succeed you need to sell something. As a software developers we can scale something (move from 1 to N, in terms of tech), but you need to find initial niche (from 0 to 1). I think that main success (as a business person) that you have is an audience reach that you had (almost every developer feels that things that you are described in your initial post). So why don't you try to play with your audience? Man, 2 years ago, when you posted you story of quitting, I was sitting in Yandex office at Moscow, and a lot of colleagues were talking about you and you story. Isn't that cool? I am not a real entrepreneur, but I really advice you to use your strengths (audience reach, mastery in writing, etc) along with you software development skills to find point of growth. Thanks for sharing and good luck!
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! >Man, 2 years ago, when you posted you story of quitting, I was sitting in Yandex office at Moscow, and a lot of colleagues were talking about you and you story. Isn't that cool? Definitely, that is really cool. That was one of the most fun parts of publishing that piece. I didn't expect it to be that interesting to people outside my circle of tech friends, but it was surprising to hear that it resonated with people in different countries and different industries. >I really advice you to use your strengths (audience reach, mastery in writing, etc) along with you software development skills to find point of growth. I've thought about this, especially when I first quit, but I could never think of a way to make money from my writing in a way that felt exciting to me. I think I just get more excited about building a product or service, but I do keep searching for ways to use my writing to complement my non-writing businesses.
komali2 7y ago
How's a burger with a bun keto friendly lol. There's a big picture of a bunned burger and no mention of "by the way this specifically refers to just the patty itself."
- mtlynch 7y ago
  The article addresses how to handle buns, but that part of the article isn't in the screenshot: >Most people eat Beyond Burgers with ketchup and a bun, but those are hard to fit into a keto diet, so you might have to get creative. Consider crumbling your Beyond Burger over a salad with fresh tomatoes and a keto-friendly salad dressing. Or try out one of these delicious keto burger recipes. https://isitketo.org/beyond-burger https://isitketo.org/beyond-burger
burnt_toast 7y ago
Just wanted to say I've really enjoyed following your progress. It's awesome to see the changes over time and I really hope I can follow in your footsteps someday. I used to check your blog weekly hoping for a blog update to help pass the long afternoons that dragged on forever at work. By chance was it you that released the Rooster app? Apologies if it wasn't but I remember reading a blog post about an app that would text you in the morning or something and I could have sworn it was your blog. The post had a link to the app that I clicked on but little did I know that the app had been shut down and the URL was scooped up by a less appropriate website. I was greeted with a very NSFW web page while at work haha.
drawkbox 7y ago
Great read with the logical analysis and openness lends well to success and navigating this adventure. Doing your own products is definitely the way to go for sustainability. Just one big one or a few have to work. Focusing on products is nice as you don't have to work for clients but instead customers more which can be more rewarding and freeing. Having only a big client or a few end up dictating direction and freedom to pursue ideas. Overall the experience on the business, marketing and promotions side is very helpful in all aspects of life. I have been freelancing/contracting/product developing for 8 years full-time off of trying it for a year or two and have had to take clients/contracts here and there. This helps while you are building up products where needed. Though it isn't all bad doing contracts it can take time away but also help you, sometimes you learn about new problems and thus solutions that can become products when dealing with clients and unique industry problems. These problems can be hard to find if you aren't going through some of the pain points related to them. I will say most products do take multiple years to make it so fail quickly and press the gas on momentum and projects that you lean towards or are more interesting. Pay attention mostly to external product user experience and presentation at this stage. Good luck on your adventure and may your travels be rewarding personally and financially fruitful.
fonosip 7y ago
Interesting that as an ex-googler you dont use adwords ?

nonseobeliever 7y ago

I work at a big tech company and also have my own small firm for freelance work. Even though I don't have my own product and implement what customers need, ranging from new website to SIEMs and stuff, I find it pretty lucrative. And my prices are about $20/hr. But yes, I don't know if I can survive without working full job. LE: and revenue is not that small, about 25k per year.

cambalache 7y ago
$20/h is shockingly low. That is an effective rate of around 10 bucks an hour, at or below minimum wage level.
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  Depends where

gbasin 7y ago

Encouraging to see your progress, keep it up! Reading about your projects, it strikes me that some have different potential than others for perhaps one clear reason: solving a problem vs not. Why not double down on Zestful? There is demand there, and some are willing to pay... This post I wrote recently may be helpful for you: https://tinyletter.com/garybasin/letters/how-to-know-what-people-want https://tinyletter.com/garybasin/letters/how-to-know-what-pe...

edf13 7y ago
Hate to be harsh - but I wouldn't call this progress... I would call this going backwards. From what I can see he is drastically cutting back his lifestyle and all living costs and calling it a profit? The business and enterprise of being s solo dev itself is failing enterprise. My advise (From experience) would be to be doing some outsourced/freelance work at this stage to help fund your projects.
- sweetheart 7y ago
  Cutting back on one's cost of living can easily still be progress. If he's doing this to get rich, I would agree he is failing. However I don't think thats the idea. I think he wanted a different lifestyle, and one that was more self-directed. Through that lens, an astounding amount of progress has been made.
mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading! >Why not double down on Zestful? There is demand there, and some are willing to pay... Mainly because I don't know of any action I can take to grow Zestful. Large companies have already rolled their own solution. Smaller companies who need ingredient parsing have figured out some solution and they usually don't see it as worthwhile for them to take a chance on a new service if their old one is working fine. Customers need to find me at the time they're building a product that needs Zestful, but I don't know other ways of helping them find me beyond the SEO steps I've already taken.
- gbasin 7y ago

LeoNatan25 7y ago

I like how you call that home "a modest two-bedroom home" in the linked blog. I guess it's a matter of perspective. Here in Israel, where everything is cramped, this would be something I'd be very content with.

deleted 7y ago
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hopia 7y ago
Probably off topic here but always perplexed me how Israel is so dead expensive with just about everything you can find. Particularly with locally produced items.
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  Well, yes, because of many factors. Terrible consumers, high taxes, little space, etc.
mtlynch 7y ago
Haha, I moved here from Manhattan, where I lived in a 1 BR that was luxurious by Manhattan standards but tiny by real world standards. I'm very happy with my house, but I think it's probably smaller than what most software developers in the US would choose if they lived in an area this inexpensive.
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  If you don't have children, a larger space would be more burden than necessity. Be happy that you moved away from the jail cell. I'd move if I could too. ;-)
  - tudelo 7y ago
    At least the jail cell comes with an amazing variety of food and unrivaled convenience

bilekas 7y ago

How did you cut down so drastically on expenses in the second year, +50%, or was there a large investment in the first year, sorry I havent read last years update yet! Also, I'm just coming accross your Zestful service and can't believe that is exactly what i am looking for and actually started to write, but I have other stuff to do so no point re-inventing the wheel! Consider me a new client sir! PS: Congratulations !

tristanperry 7y ago
"in August, I bought a modest two-bedroom home in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Population: 17,500." "My living expenses here are ~$2k per month, which is close enough to the rate of return on my personal investments that I'm kind of at equilibrium." - i.e. Michael moved to a much lower cost of living area.
- onion2k 7y ago
  If that "I bought a house" is literal then he doesn't have rent or a mortgage to pay. That's a big chunk of most people's outgoings.
  - mtlynch 7y ago
    Yep, paid in cash, so there's no mortgage or rent.
  - redisman 7y ago
    Outside of the super-star cities, housing is pretty affordable!
    - onion2k 7y ago
      Sure. Thankfully most people can afford their outgoings if they're sensible. It's still a lot easier if you don't have rent or a mortgage though. If you're trying to suggest houses are cheap enough that lots of people can afford to buy one outright then you're absolutely wrong regardless of where it is. Very, very few people manage that.

jakobegger 7y ago

I read your previous post about Zestful, and this years update, and I just don't understand who would buy this as a hosted API. To me, it sounds like this should be a library, not an API. For every use case that I can think of, having a library would be 100x better than an API. In my experience, APIs are generally slow, unreliable, and tend to change without notice. I don't understand what advantage an API has, except making it easier for the developer to charge based on usage. Do people really buy APIs like this? Am I missing something?

fortzi 7y ago
Supporting the business model is a legitimate consideration, amiwrong?
agwa 7y ago
Zestful uses machine learning, so there could be a fair amount of storage, CPU, and memory requirements that make using a hosted API preferable to a local library. Also, if you read Michael's posts on https://whatgotdone.com https://whatgotdone.com you'll see that he is frequently improving the model. With a hosted API, customers benefit from improved accuracy immediately without having to update anything.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  "Without having to update anything" seems a bit disingenuous - does this software even work offline, without having to ask for some data from an online server, just to load the front page?
mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading! The big advantages for the customer of a managed API are: * No costs of installing or upgrading * It's language independent I agree that it's lower risk to rely on a library that you have locally, but none of my customers have ever requested that. I do offer a self-hosted plan, and a few customers have inquired about that, but they lose interest when I tell them it costs 10% more than a managed plan. All of Zestful's commercial competitors are managed APIs as well, so I don't think customers view a locally-installed library as critical.

fredgrott 7y ago

last corner of graphic right bottom is a wrong amount. I use to be a number guy, ie accountant hacker. Its not 18k positive as far as net revenue increase from the two years. the percentage is probably right but not the sign before the net rev number. and note you have to reach profits soon per how you file with the IRS..sorry to burst your bubble. same sort of errors in the saas net rev numbers. bone up on your accounting stats as there are books out there on how to do it

icedchai 7y ago
I noticed that, too.
mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading! >I use to be a number guy, ie accountant hacker. Its not 18k positive as far as net revenue increase from the two years. Can you clarify what you mean? What is the correct way for me to present this information? >and note you have to reach profits soon per how you file with the IRS..sorry to burst your bubble. Can you elaborate? Are you assuming that I file as a corporation or a sole proprietor?

swalsh 7y ago

Just some honest feedback. I have a use for Zestful, and the price is good. But playing around, it seems good at the easy stuff (but I can do the easy stuff myself) it's not so good at the hard stuff. For example the string "3/4 cup risotto rice, Arborio or Carnaroli" It identifies the unit and quantity fair enough, and it's right when it says "Risotto rice" is the product. But then it says "Arborio or Carnaroli" is a preparation method. I can totally see WHY it says that. But I'm not sure that's correct. At your price point though, I might still use it. Ultimatley to parse everything I need to parse it would be a lot cheaper than spending even an hour writing it myself. But that was my first thoughts playing around with it.

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading and for testing out Zestful! >For example the string "3/4 cup risotto rice, Arborio or Carnaroli" >It identifies the unit and quantity fair enough, and it's right when it says "Risotto rice" is the product. But then it says "Arborio or Carnaroli" is a preparation method. I can totally see WHY it says that. But I'm not sure that's correct. Yeah, I'm constantly improving the model, but there will always be cases it gets wrong. For most of my customers, that's a mostly fine result, because very few of the clients actually use the preparation note field. Most care only about the quantity, unit, product, and USDA fields. I'll fix the bad result on the risotto example, but it's definitely a game of whack-a-mole. There are so many variations and corner cases that it'll never be 100%. >At your price point though, I might still use it. Ultimatley to parse everything I need to parse it would be a lot cheaper than spending even an hour writing it myself. But that was my first thoughts playing around with it. Haha, maybe I should raise my prices. But seriously, I'd be happy to have you as a customer. If you'd like to chat more about about your use case, shoot me an email at michael@zestfuldata.com.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Arborio is a kind, just like Granny Smith, bing, or Key. I wonder if it'd be easier just to have a dictionary of kinds of ingredient and anything else is a preparation.

xchaotic 7y ago

Sorry to say but this proves that for someone who actually has to work for a living ie earn money, corporate life is absolutely the correct choice. Even for Mr Lynch these experiments in charity wouldn’t be possible without the nest egg from google (which he acknowledged). To go from net 100k+ to below zero and still be unprofitable after two years is a financial disaster.

gk1 7y ago
It seems OP is perfectly happy creating small sites and products. One can earn perfectly good money from consulting or contracting, but OP chose not to.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
It's hard starting a business and most people (90%) don't earn anymore than an employee. None the less some of us just aren't cut out for the corporate life. I'd pick poverty over the lack of autonomy, petit politics and meaningless work any day.
- xwdv 7y ago
  What if the poverty was really, REALLY bad? As in soul crushing, no way out, maybe-kill-yourself, type of poverty? I doubt you’d make that switch so easily.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    That's really another question, I have a lot of sympathy for people in that situation but it isn't what we are talking about here.
    - xwdv 7y ago
      I don’t think you understand what poverty is, if you are choosing poverty over “lack of autonomy in the workplace”. Poverty doesn’t liberate you, it restricts you, and not just in the workplace, but in your entire life. Want to go on a trip or eat fancy food? Too bad you can’t, because you don’t have money and you’re broke poor. Want to get a great career? Too bad, you got to work at fast food joint because you can’t afford the education. Want kids? Nope you can’t afford it so keep it in your pants, and women don’t want to get serious with some broke dude anyway. There is no way you’d choose poverty. There is little advantage to being poor in society that punishes being poor.

nautilus12 7y ago

Bye bye any hopes of raising a family.

avl999 7y ago
Nice of you to impose your outdated values on how to live on others. The OP might perfectly be happy to not raise a family or just be interested in being with a partner without having kids. If you don't have kids, this kind of lifestyle is perfectly sustainable and you can live happily on it. Kids are not a pre-requisite for happiness and it annoys me how so many discussions here start to equate standard of living and happiness to a situation where kids are involved.
- nautilus12 7y ago
  Whoa, what an assumption, this says more about you than anything. I said goodbye "any" hopes of having children which says that "if" he wanted to have a family there is no way that he could do it in this way. What kind of chip do you have on your shoulder about children?
  - freehunter 7y ago
    Not the guy you’re responding to but I also have a chip on my shoulder about children: people won’t shut up about me having them. My wife and I made the decision to not have children but every conversation it gets brought up. We buy a two seater car: there goes any hope of having children. We go on a two week vacation: you won’t be able to do that if you have children. She quits her job: nows the perfect time to have children! It gets old REALLY quickly. Some people don’t want children. Ever. But there’s a lot of people just like you who can’t stop talking about children in every conversation. Why?
    - nautilus12 7y ago
      Seems like a really self centered worldview....
- earth_walker 7y ago

avl999 7y ago

Thanks for writing this. It is good to see a perspective where a business is being built up slowly as opposed to the typical "I quit my job and now my side project makes $30k a month two months in" posts we usually see. Do you ever feel issues with motivation when you don't see growth as quickly as you'd like?

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading! >Do you ever feel issues with motivation when you don't see growth as quickly as you'd like? Good question. For me, the more dominant feeling is frustration when I do something that I expect will bring growth, and then there's no measurable effect. That happened over and over again with Is It Keto. It was especially tough because the site's growth depends so heavily on Google, and there seems to be a lag time of weeks or months before Google reacts to certain changes or decides certain pages are worth putting at the #1 slot for related queries. It was tough to make a site change or publish a new post and think, "Okay, I guess I'll just wait 6-8 weeks to see what Google thinks of this."

aty268 7y ago

These businesses all seem like something that very well could make you money, but would never scale into a growth startup. And it seems the time it takes to build one of these or a growth startup isn't going to be too different. I might even say that you similar chances of making a similar amount of money from either. So why not shoot for the larger moon?

gk1 7y ago
I think you’re underestimating the effort and luck involved in building a successful growth startup. > Why not shoot for the moon? Some times it’s better to throw a few things at the wall and see what sticks, before going all-in on one idea.
m_ke 7y ago
Ingredient line parsing is a really small market and something that sounds like a fun project to work on but is probably not a business venture that has room to grow. The number of companies that have enough recipes to justify automation, profits to justify paying for it and nobody inhouse who can implement it is really small. There's no viable price point for a product like this when you factor in the cost of customer acquisition. Content based consumer sites are also really hard to get off the ground and it's not something that I'd recommend any bootstrapper to try unless you can charge for it. I'm sure it's all a great learning experience though and if Michael keeps iterating the way he is now he'll definitely end up finding a worthwhile business venture.
- riku_iki 7y ago
  > Ingredient line parsing if he can scale his tech to more general cases, it can be very strong proposition.

ingend88 7y ago

@mtlynch what tech stack do you use?

mtlynch 7y ago
Different things for different projects. I'm trying to move toward mostly Go + Vue stuff. * Zestful: Python + Docker + CRF++ * Is It Keto: Flask + AppEngine * What Got Done: Go + Vue + AppEngine (https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone) * WanderJest: Go + Vue + AppEngine * mtlynch.io: Hugo (https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io)
- usr42 7y ago
  @mtlynch I've directly recognized the coder theme you use for the blog. I like it pretty much. How do you host it? Do you use github pages?
  - mtlynch 7y ago
    Cool, I like it too! I host on Firebase. You can check out my deployment script here: https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io/blob/f35d9cf947a3d2c2341775ad34f92dc0ea9a1224/.circleci/config.yml https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io/blob/f35d9cf947a3d2c23...
- influx 7y ago
  Do you use any web frameworks with Go?

usr42 7y ago

Interesting analysis. I especially like your personal goals and the "Raise prices, even if nobody's buying". This is a really valuable insight. Thanks for sharing that. I have one question: Do you have a feeling about the market size you are in and how does this influence your planning?

rs23296008n1 7y ago

Good stuff. I've seen a bit of negativity about this being a waste of time since you're not making equivalent money to old job. For those people: This isn’t any different from spending time earning a degree by returning to full-time study. And your attempts are growing. The compound interest from these investments in time and effort will help you regardless. Even if you fail on every business at first you'll still get so much experience and momentum you can't help but do better next time. And I doubt any will actually fail: each will have an element that wasn't good enough but still capable of being tweaked to fix it. Even if you don't fix it, you've still learnt something in the attempt.

TAForObvReasons 7y ago
There's a simpler explanation, and the post actually touches on the point when discussing Is It Keto: > I abandoned the site in April but came back four months later after realizing that it had grown by itself without me. As a salaried employee, you aren't actually building anything that accretes value to yourself in that way. You don't show up for work for 4 months and you'll likely be fired. Obviously it never works out forever, but the value you build when striking out on your own has a much longer potency than getting paid in cash and stock.
- jldugger 7y ago
  I just don't understand how you can set up a business and not noticed the increased revenue.
tempsy 7y ago
OP isn't explicit about it but he's effectively F.I.R.E'd. These are projects to keep the mind fresh in what is early retirement. If that weren't the case building an actual business requires a lot more time, energy, resources even as a solo founder than what I'm getting from the blog post.
- ronyfadel 7y ago
  Or OP could be T.I.R.E.D. :) He’s doing his best to bootstrap his multiple products, but is prioritizing intellectual curiosity, building neat things while not burning out. At least, that’s my view of it.

davnicwil 7y ago

Great post Micheal, and awesome to see it hit the top of HN - a reminder I guess that the core bootstrapper/hacker community is on here and strong as ever! The numbers and stuff aside (which are looking promising, btw, congrats - look forward to see how the trends continue in y3) the part I liked best was the I still love it section. It's incredibly important and, I'm sure you know, the real driver behind doing what you're doing, not money. I think there's a tendency, maybe especially for technical people, to want to quantify and maximise etc, and money is an easy metric for doing that with and therefore to focus on. But on reflection, it's pretty obviously not the main reason we do what we do.

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading, David! >It's incredibly important and, I'm sure you know, the real driver behind doing what you're doing, not money. Yeah, definitely. I ultimately do need to figure out a way to make some money, but I'd be happy to work for myself for 1/10th the compensation I'd get at a FAANG.

patio11 7y ago

Two cents offered because this post really strikes a chord with me, and I also spent some time chasing down rabbit holes early in my software business: These products do not appear obviously commercializable and multiple years invested into them without materially improving the businesses does not decrease my confidence in that snap judgment. You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (appropriately priced; hundreds to thousands of dollars per year) product against those problems, build contingent on getting 10 commits to buy, and be at +/- $100k in 12 to 18 months. Many people with less technical and writing ability have done this in e.g. the MicroConf community. If you want the best paint-by-numbers approach to it I've seen, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=2s (I'll note that What Got Done is probably a viable boutique SaaS business if you somehow figured out distribution for it, at price points between $50 and $200 per month. My confidence on this approaches total. HNers skeptical because it is technically trivial should probably reflect for a moment on how much time is spent on standups at a company with 20 or 200 engineers, what one hour of their time is worth, and how likely that company is to put an engineer on this project specifically.) If you run an API-based business in the future: Usage-based billing is a really tricky business model for a solo developer. Note that you can say "Usage-based billing but we have a minimum commitment", and probably should prior to doing speculative integration engineering work. Your minimum commitment should be north of $1,000 per month; practically nobody can integrate with your API for cheaper than a thousand dollars of engineering time, right. This also counsels aiming at problems amenable to solutions with APIs which are trivially worth $1,000++ a month to many businesses which can hire engineers. Parsing recipe ingredients seems like a very constrained problem space. Consider e.g. parsing W-2s or bank statements or similar; many more businesses naturally care about intake of those documents, getting accurate data from them, and introducing that data into a lucrative business process that they have. I would encourage you, to the maximum extent compatible with your sanity, to prioritize "Will this get me more customers?" over behind-the-scenes investments like CI/CD which are very appropriate to Google but will under no circumstance show up in next year's report as One Of The Most Important Things I Did This Year. For similar reasons, I would suggest devoting approximately zero cycles to cost control. You don't have a cost problem and no amount of cost control will bend the curve of your current businesses to sustainability. You have a revenue problem. Your desired state in the medium term will make it economically irrational for you to think for more than a minute about a $50 a month SaaS expense; marketing and sales gets you to that desired state, not cost control.

nlh 7y ago

All personal stuff aside (and on that note - I’m a huge fan of this story Mike and love what you’re doing!) This is a great piece of advice for solo devs out there: > Great! You can pre-pay for three months of service, and your billing cycle won't start until that feature is available. > I've never been burned on a feature request since. I imagine it’s super easy to fall into the custom feature trap when the temptation of a big new customer is right around the corner, and this seems like an excellent solution!

bkinnard 7y ago

Reading the post makes me most curious about how you live so cheaply? Halfing your burn rate doubles your time to death which more than doubles your chances of success

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading! >Reading the post makes me most curious about how you live so cheaply? 90% of it is just location. When I was in Manhattan, I was spending ~$7k/month. Part of that was higher cost of my apartment and health insurance, but another big part is just the culture. In NYC, it wouldn't be unusual for me to go out to a $80/person dinner, spend $25 on drinks afterwards, another $25 on Ubers, then another $20 on brunch in the morning. In Western Mass, I do make efforts to live cheaply, but so much of it is just the ease of not spending money when nobody in your social circle spends like that.

microcolonel 7y ago

Side note: when presenting a simple revenue-expense-profit-loss chart, it can help to chart the expenses as cutting from the bottom of the revenue (tough though, when you are funding the expenses externally, in this case you have to put the loss below the zero line). Anyway, it makes it clear when your expenses intersect your revenue, and you switch to profit rather than loss.

morango 7y ago

This proves that the even in the modern creative economy, the bourgeoisie still holds the means of production - through contacts/venture capital/market manipulation. EAT THE RICH.

christiansakai 7y ago

I read your original post 2 years ago, and was waiting for the conclusion. Thank you for posting this.

epicgiga 7y ago

Very illustrative warning to other devs. Just because you're coding and building things, doesn't mean you're doing work, or that you're going to make any money. Most devs are salarymen because that's the best role they can play in society. Their employer plugs them into what the market actually wants. 99% of them are inequipped to perform any that business aspect themselves. They just want to build stuff. Like this devs projects -- a hobby not an enterprise. The best thing any likeminded dev can do is this: do not write a single line of code until you've vigorously screened for market demand. If you can't pick up a phone and talk to businesses, this isn't for you, or you need to partner with a so called "extrovert" or sales type. Do not even so much as ponder the technical implementation of an idea for at least a month, don't touch a terminal, and don't type a single char of code. If you can't restrain yourself from doing so, save yourself the wasted time, money, and energy. If you want a hiatus, just have a real hiatus and fly to a Thai island for 6 months.

heipei 7y ago
Part of the problem that I have with some of these accounts is that they so often focus on tiny and mundane problems that individuals have. I don't know if this is a conscious decision or just an unintended consequence of the fact that B2C ideas are easy to find (you just watch your own daily routines) and are more shiny since everyone knows about customer-facing products but fewer people know all the gears that power corporations large and small. The "Is it Keto" site is a nice hobby but if I seriously wanted to make money with a product/SaaS/platform I'd ring up everyone I knew from previous jobs and ask them which problem I should solve to save them hours of work every day. If you do that your product will become irreplaceable, while a site for helping you with your Keto diet is probably the first thing anyone would cut out if they wanted to save some money. That's the issue I have when founders focus so much on these lifestyle and purely optional products.
- epicgiga 7y ago
  It's worth noting quite how vigorously you have to apply this concept. My first business attempt _did_ factor in market demand, but didn't consider the depth or capacity to pay ("nice to have" vs "take my money"). So I burned out doing 70 hr weeks for something that was never going to make real money vs what I could get as a salaryman or contractor. If you're starting out, you really really shouldn't be aiming for a new unique solution to something, unless you're planning on the VC route. It is far wiser to copycat. Aim for a massive crowded market (e.g. weight loss), because your chance of missing is hundreds of times lower. Indeed an even more effective tactic is to buy an existing business in a space, and develop it. It rips out all the market risk. This is how freelancer.com started for instance.

localhost 7y ago

I think it's especially important to make sure that you interview customers and find out what their problems are before you even think about writing a single line of code. You should strive to get a mix of qualitative (because the stories you hear will let you empathize with the customer problems) as well as quantitative via surveys / small ad experiments. Once you have some signal, then proceed to start exploring solutions (and again, this isn't about writing code, you can do this entirely with mockups/napkin drawings, whatever it takes to get your point across) and test those solutions with the customers you interviewed earlier. Once you have some evidence that a) you have a problem that customers will pay to solve, and b) you have a solution that you have validated THEN you proceed to start writing the code. The biggest change at my company is doing product development this way: understand the customer problem and the solution before writing code. Hope this helps.

segmondy 7y ago

I admire your being able to quit and start your own biz. I admire you staying the course, but I feel very sad at your progress. You seem to be more of a builder than a business man. Everyone one of your project makes me yawn, I'm sure many have said it. With that said, you need to find some good ideas. Forget originality since you're not doing great on that, just find something making money and clone it. Or find a co-founder that can sell and come up with good ideas.

cdiddy2 7y ago

Are health insurance costs included in your current $2k monthly expenses? Did you buy the house outright?

mtlynch 7y ago
Yep and yep. Health insurance in MA is $250/month for a high deductible plan (I was paying $500 in NY). This year, my insurance is only $40/month because I qualified for a subsidized plan based on my 2019 income (or lack thereof).
- cdiddy2 7y ago
  Interesting. I am in MA as well and it seems health insurance would be 500 a month for me(1 person). Maybe thats the higher end plans though.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

senderista 7y ago

If you're netting at best a few grand a year and need to survive on savings anyway, why not just drop the business pretense and work for free on stuff you actually find interesting? A popular open-source project could yield more long-term value for one's career than an unprofitable or barely profitable "lifestyle business".

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading! The plan is for my income to increase over time. The benefit of launching businesses is that each time, I learn skills to increase my chances of success in the next attempt.
icebraining 7y ago
> A popular open-source project could yield more long-term value for one's career than an unprofitable or barely profitable "lifestyle business". Only as a launchpad for another job or consulting gigs, no? What if he wants to work solo?

say_it_as_it_is 7y ago

@mtlynch you're brave for sharing your experiences and struggles with the world. What kind of help are you searching for?

alexellisuk 7y ago

If folks liked this story, check in with Daniel Vassallo who quit a job at Amazon on well over 500k / year salary and benefits to start out on his own as a solo, small-business founder. https://twitter.com/dvassallo https://twitter.com/dvassallo He shares lots of personal stats like his incoming & expenditure - quite inspirational and can show that circumstances and luck can also play a part.

willj 7y ago

Naive question by someone who’s never started a business: when bootstrapping companies while keeping your day job, how do you deal with intellectual property clauses in employment contracts, such that your employer owns the “inventions” you create in your free time, on your own equipment, unrelated to the business area you work in? I know laws vary by state, but I would find it especially disheartening if you spent years of effort and sacrificed your social life only to have your product snatched away from you once it finally became profitable or popular. My non-lawyer reading of the internet’s opinions suggest that you need to discuss it with your company, or possibly edit your employment contract before signing, but the latter seems a bad suggestion if you’re afraid of not getting a job. I’ve also read that these kinds of clauses can even apply several months after you terminate at your day job, which suggests that you can’t even start on the product until months after you’ve left. All of that makes me unlikely to try to build a business in tech, since I would never have the capital to take such a long break away from a company, nor to build a product for a long time before it’s profitable without having a day job to support me.

pid_0 7y ago
>how do you deal with intellectual property clauses in employment contracts, such that your employer owns the “inventions” you create in your free time, on your own equipment, unrelated to the business area you work in? By not signing those things, plain and simple. I have never signed an employment contract and I never will.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Does that mean you never worked for a company (in an IP-related job), or actually managed to find companies who hired you without signing a contract? If the latter, what kind of companies do that?
  - pid_0 7y ago
    I literally have never once signed an employment contract. I only work in devops/cloud/security consulting firms

dhruvkar 7y ago

So awesome seeing your posts at the top of HN! >> I've also noticed that readers are less interested in business lessons unless the story involves thousands of dollars — earning or losing large sums both seem to work. I would love to read more about the mundane, small business lessons, because that's where I am. And I'm positive I'm not the only one. Keep writing about the smaller day-to-day struggles, you got readers!

mtlynch 7y ago
Hey Dhruv, thanks for reading! Always fun to hear from you again.

sealthedeal 7y ago

love it! If my two cents matter to you... I did a similar thing for a few years, and it wasnt until I went all in on one product/problem did I finally start to see some great returns. With that said, I have a friends dad who owns like 10 different businesses and he has people manage all of them, while he sits back and collects. These are not software businesses they are more brick and mortar like long term storage, etc, but maybe you can build the same model with online businesses! :) Good luck, and thanks for posting, really enjoy reading the content!

rickitan 7y ago

I see a lot of comments criticizing your path and progress. Making remarks like "why didn't you stay at Google". I applaud your decision, effort, and perseverance. I admire your risk taking and having skin in the game. Trying to make it out on your own. People forget the journey is not just about the money. It's about learning, growing and bringing your ideas to life. Being an artist, and expressing yourself through products. Keep on going my friend. There's no doubt you'll get there.

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading and the kind words! I think you and I see it similarly that there's satisfaction in growing and learning even if the money part hasn't fallen into place.
qmmmur 7y ago
I don't think I've cringed more than 'expressing yourself through products'.
- spiffytech 7y ago
  The arts and crafts world is full of people expressing themselves through products. Independent software doesn't have to be different.
  - qmmmur 7y ago
    The arts is full of people expressing themselves for pay below the poverty line, often not expected or wanted as remuneration for their expression. Treating business as expression and calling it the same thing as actual art is quite oblivious to the reality.
    - jshevek 7y ago
      Both kinds of activities, the one that you characterize and the one that the parent comment characterizes, occur in the art world.
    - 7y ago

iamlily 7y ago

God bless you for writing such a good post

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

oliv__ 7y ago

FYI: on isitketo.org/cream-cheese, the link to "keto dessert recipes" is broken (it's an internal link). Looks like it's being prefixed with the domain and the url ends up having two http segments.

mtlynch 7y ago
Fixed! Thanks for the heads up.

let_var 7y ago

Michael - firstly, kudos for sticking to your solo dev plans. Hiccups are part and parcel of the game. I like your Is This Keto app. And second, keep at it!

m0zg 7y ago

What Got Done is basically Google's internal Snippets. I wish there was an on-prem setup to do that. The idea is basically every week you write, in free form text, what you've done, and possibly what you're planning to do, and your team mates get to view it, and subscribe to updates conveniently. If you're anything like me, you will find this valuable not only day to day, but also when the review time comes and you need to beat your chest a little. I tend to forget how much I've done.

mtlynch 7y ago
I wish I'd found you when I was trying to gather enough customers to make What Got Done a business! Yeah, I loved Snippets as well. I wrote a little ode to them last year.[0] >I wish there was an on-prem setup to do that. What Got Done is open source now. The standard version has a dependency on Google Cloud Firestore, but I have a working branch that runs on Redis.[1] You'd need to implement a new auth solution because What Got Done depends on UserKit, which is still in closed beta, but you can still use their dummy backend (configured in What Got Done by default) which accepts "password" for any username. [0] https://mtlynch.io/status-updates-to-nobody/ https://mtlynch.io/status-updates-to-nobody/ [1] https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/tree/redis-persist https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/tree/redis-persist

gramakri 7y ago

Great read, thanks for writing this. One of the hardest parts of doing a bootstrapped startup is the peer pressure and the perceived opportunity cost. The numbers won't add up for a bootstrapped business for many years (I am talking upwards of 5 years even). The only thing that keeps you going is your ambition ('this is what i want to do', 'nothing else i would rather do'). The best way I have learnt to deal with this is to surround myself with people who think similar.

snambi 7y ago

Question: why did he leave a job to build these sites? He could have built them while continuing a full-time job.

smnplk 7y ago

The data for North Korea is missing.

alexellisuk 7y ago

I'm also a solo developer, or at least building a Ltd company starting at one. I wrote up about my developer setup here, and thought it might be of interest. https://blog.alexellis.io/building-a-linux-desktop-for-cloud-native-development/ https://blog.alexellis.io/building-a-linux-desktop-for-cloud... Would folks like to see more posts about branching out and working for yourself? I'd consider writing-up my perspective from the UK if it was interesting to people here.

mpurham 7y ago

I can closely relate to this post. Often times I build and develop software that is simply not worth my time. I think one important thing that you are doing well is capturing data for revenue. I think you should also take your hourly rate and multiply it by the amount of time it is taking you and that will give you a better idea of what this is costing you to build. I've started to capture this data for myself (https://marcell.me https://marcell.me) to get a better idea of what it is actually costing me.