8 ms·

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our f

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 months. Happy to answer any questions. Looks like this is dead. Happy to answer any questions @dang ! Once kids are in high school, maybe will try something bigger!

nonane 6y ago
What is your preferred tech stack for quick iteration of ideas?
weakwire 6y ago
This thread totally hijacked the OP. Extremely interesting.
radihuq 6y ago
How much of the $30M expenditure do you spend on marketing?
- bootstrapper101 6y ago
  70% of expenses are marketing.
frongpik 6y ago
How did you get to the decision makers to pitch your idea? Unless you were already well connected, I presume it wasn't easy to get attention from the right people.
- bootstrapper101 6y ago
  I pitched my ideas just twice and got some funding for them. However either my approach was wrong or I wasn't working with the right people. I felt that funding was too big of a waste of time. Without traction, everything I did was being second guessed. And too much time was being wasted pitching. I haven't raised any money for 20+ of my ideas including the current one. But I can imagine it would be easier for me to raise money on better terms in future! I use the nanny vs parent analogy for involvement with a product. When you are working for someone else, you are a nanny. The product isn't your baby. Be careful how much you get invested. If you get sentimental and attached you will end up hurting yourself. If you own your company, it's like being the parent. You have sole responsibility but except government no one else can interfere. VC funded business can be like a wild ride. You may start as a parent, but you will eventually end up as a nanny. In some rare cases you can have majority voting rights till the end. Only famous case for that I know is Facebook.
  - frongpik 6y ago
    How did you approach other businesses to sell them something? I presume your business is b2b.
andi999 6y ago
This is fascinating. Is your product b2b? How fast did you discard the 25 ideas? It sounde like you needed 3 month at least, so 8 years? What did you live on during that time? So in short:please tell me more
- bootstrapper101 6y ago
  It's a consumer product. It is very draining. In today's world consumer don't want to pay for anything, unless they really want the product and they don't have a way to get it otherwise. Many users would use the product and then file chargebacks. Many users will go to any extend to get out of paying coming up with either sad stories, lies or threats. When it's a low cost, high volume product (5m+ paying customers over time) - you deal with too many of these and sometimes it's very demoralizing. I used to work for someone else in Saas and this wasn't such a big issue there. Next thing I do won't be in consumer. Some ideas where tried end to end in a week, some were run for 2 years. Did a lot of mistakes along the way.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Thanks a lot. A few follow up question:so it is a physical product? Also are you located in the US? And last, since customer contact it is so draining, did you consider to spend one of the 20 M profit and outsoure customer service (or hire 10-20 people to take of that)?
    - bootstrapper101 6y ago
      It is a digital product. I don't live in US. We do have outsourced customer service. But still I have to be aware of what the customers are complaining about. In some cases people are filing frivolous complaints to government agencies which you have to respond to. With Saas, I would go after the bad actors. With consumers the number of bad actors is endless.
      - andi999 6y ago
        For what do you spend the 30M difference between arr and profit?
breck 6y ago
Are there any small public companies (<50 employees) you admire?
- bootstrapper101 6y ago
  I don't know employee strength of many companies. Some companies which feel relatively small that I like are: 1Password (agilebits), Protonmail, Little Snitch (Objective Development). PS: I am getting throttled by HN algorithms. If someone can help get me unthrottled I will get around to answering all the questions.
  - navanchauhan 6y ago
    That is probably because you have a new account. Try contacting hn on their email.
warent 6y ago
Am I the only one reading a significant amount of ego and humblebrag from this post? It's pretty off-putting and distracting from where there could be value.
- TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
  I didn't read any such tone. He's quite fact oriented. You may want to introspect into what you are bringing into the reading as your own context.
  - warent 6y ago
    it's a combination of it being a brand new (potentially throwaway) account, me potentially misunderstanding what is meant by claiming 20m annual profit for 3 people is "staying low", and the limits of text communication
    - bootstrapper101 6y ago
      No worries. Glad that we could figure this out like reasonable adults.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      Why would someone humblebrag on a throwaway account?
- bootstrapper101 6y ago
  I am really sorry it came that way. It's been a long day. Thought this was a good opportunity to share my learnings and answer any questions. If there is any way I could help answer any question, I would love to!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - wuschel 6y ago
    Hi, no worries, we all communicate with text here... misunderstandings happen regularly with a fraction users you interact with. Congratulations on your success! Here are some questions: Q1. What was the prerequisite for your success (product/service, team, market)? Q2 What technology space are you in? (Digital/brand vs high-tech)? Q3 What weré your difficultis when iterating over your product concepts, and what was the iteration frequency? Q4 How long did it take to take off? Would love to chat at some point, or connect. My email is the profile.
practicalpants 6y ago
Process question: What specifically would you do to get early customers or to market the mvp? How did this change over the 25 attempts? What was your criteria for "this one has failed let's do another one"?
- bootstrapper101 6y ago
  My other account (bootstrapper101) got throttled. Maybe @dang can help merge this tomorrow. I could maybe spend 5000 words and still not be able to say all I want to say about this. The ideas were all over the place: Social, Enterprise, Consumer, Saas. I learnt over time that once you have failed so many times, you start avoiding obvious mistakes. Mistakes like polishing your app before launch, wasting time on PR, building too many features, not spending enough time qualifying your users. Once you build enough products you start knowing the impact of things like: 1. Marketplace products: supplier and consumer chicken and egg problem) 2. Single player mode: you don't need your friends to be on the app and you can get immediate value as soon as you start. 3. Social products: Where degree matters. Most IM products can provide a lot of value of if 1-3 of your close friends are on it. But products like Facebook needs 50+ friends, Twitter needs strangers. 4. See if you LTV (life time value) > CAC (customer acquisition cost) + Operation cost + Development cost 5. Customer acquisition strategies: Programmatic (ads, crawler), Sales team, Referral, Content marketing There are so many other small things. These concepts are like different lego pieces and over time you find which one works better for your product and you use the right pieces. Biggest takeaway was how to do faster iteration, brutally prioritize and automate everything. Everything else is learning along the way!
  - everybodyknows 6y ago
    Could you tell us a bit about compensation/ownership for your other two on staff?
xuki 6y ago
How do you handle support with just 3 people? I imagine at that scale you either have a lot of customers, or small number of customers with very specific needs.
sigil 6y ago
Are you in a large market with competitors but still plenty of room, or have you more or less cornered a smaller one?
newusertoday 6y ago
what is the skillset of 3 people? 1 product, 1 sale/market, 1 developer or something else? how complex is the product in terms of technology?
- bootstrapper101 6y ago
  I will try to answer multiple questions here because I am being throttled: > How do you handle support with just 3 people? I imagine at that scale you either have a lot of customers, or small number of customers with very specific needs. We are highly automated. Very very few queries get through and they are contracted out. > what is the skillset of 3 people? 1 product, 1 sale/market, 1 developer or something else? how complex is the product in terms of technology? 2 developers (I am 1 of them) and 1 person for everything else. > Are you in a large market with competitors but still plenty of room, or have you more or less cornered a smaller one? It's a large market with 20+ competitors. Because our operational costs are so low and we are highly automated we could take over big chunk of business from our competitors. Essentially the dynamic is like Altavista vs Google. Our competitors sometimes do some really dark patterns. I am realizing that almost all companies do that (Google incognito tracking, Facebook charging kids in games etc). Somehow I can't get myself to do that. So I am thinking of moving to Saas so that I can deal with mature customers and ideally provide them value. > What are your skillsets? How did you get there? I am a programmer as my core skill. But I have also played product, marketing, sales, hiring through my career. To get good a these, I worked in my jobs as if I was the owner. That helped get me experience faster. If people want to do a startup, best advice for them would be join a startup with good team at an early stage. Bonus points if that startup is in a space you like. Learn, make good friends and then then do your own startup. I really recommend Naval's "How to get rich" podcast. It's as if he is talking about my life. He decided to move to more investing, but I still like building stuff myself. > What distinguished the successful attempts from the unsuccessful ones? > How did you know when it was time to move on? If I don't know how to keep growing the business, it's a dead-end and time to move on.
baxtr 6y ago
Super interesting. How did you make money when you were testing 25 ideas? How did you and your family survive and how did you finance the iterations? 25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?
- bootstrapper101 6y ago
  Timeline: 7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money 3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money 4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit. It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work for someone else. That kept me going. We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret.
  - randomsearch 6y ago
    > We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret. Don't answer if this is too personal - but why the regret? It sounds like you have had kids, so perhaps it got harder? Or you had fewer than you wanted. Why do you regret it?
    - bootstrapper101 6y ago
      Every year you delay having kids, you are reducing the amount of time you will spend with your kids and grandkids. As you get older, the quality of time you spend with them will also get worse. My wife went through lot of difficulties in her pregnancies. It would have been easier for her body, if we had kids earlier. My drive to get out of the corporate slavery was the reason for the delay. So I regret the delay.
      - herodoturtle 6y ago
        Hey man, if it's any consolation, my folks had me when they were very young, and I barely spent any time with them whilst growing up. As immigrants we had it pretty tough financially, and they were always working long hours (always for someone else) to try make ends meet. They harbour significant regret about not being more present in my childhood. These days they're of course much older, and I am in the lucky position to be able to look after them financially, but they're also filled with added regret about depending on me - they feel like failures because rely on me to cover all their expenses - despite my best efforts to assure them that it's ok. So to your point, whilst having kids younger means you can spend more time with them when you're older, it's not necessarily the better solution if it requires a trade-off in terms of first establishing yourself financially - and from reading your other comments - it sounds like you and I both started off in life with relatively little, so I think the choice to first secure ourselves financially before having kids makes more sense. I delayed having kids with my wife until relatively late (I was 37 she was 33), and whilst I know this will probably reduce the amount of time I'll get to spend with my children when I'm much older, the peace of mind that has come with having first established my SaaS before starting a family is immense. In fact one could argue that the reduced stress alone will probably add 10 years on to my life :-) Thanks for sharing your inspirational comments above and below. Enjoyed reading all of them. And congratulations on the success - I'm sure it is well deserved.
akritrime 6y ago
What are your skillsets? How did you get there?
artemonster 6y ago
How did you stumble on all the ideas to try? I am at a point that I want to try literally anything, but its is exceptionally hard to judge success chances if the target niche is absolutely outside your domain/experience. How did you find all these 20 ideas?
- BackBlast 6y ago
  I spent years and years in the "I just need a good idea" rut. In reality they are everywhere. Every spreadsheet sitting on a company computer, doing some work no other system will do, is a potential SaaS niche. It does help to elevate your exposure to industries and companies. Go to trade shows for your hobbies, learn their pain points. Consider switching jobs more frequently, or find some work at a consulting firm which can get you on a different contract every few months. Seeing the inside of more companies will give you more exposure and will help you see where they struggle. Working on an idea (even a bad one!), doing the deep dive, will result in logical branches out to other ideas. You need to work on your execution anyway, because the best idea in the world won't take you far if you fail to deliver. Since I started trying to build my ideas, I find that I have far more than I could possibly build myself.
- heliodor 6y ago
  You sound like you might think ideas have to be innovative but go look at how many CRM solutions are out there. CMS. Email marketing automation. Etc. None of them are perfect. None of them can satisfy every single potential customer. You can build yet another one to satisfy some small unhappy segment of the huge market.
- austinjp 6y ago
  Personally I have at least one business idea every day, probably due to some neuro-divergence issues. The problem is determining which are worth pursuing. By their own admission, OP's 20+ ideas didn't work. You only need one, it just has to be the right one :) Snark aside, I guess receptivity to novelty is critical when pivoting. At that point, though, the pivot should be based on data. Creativity is still required, constrained by the data. I believe that's more amenable to being 'engineered' rather than just waiting for the muse to arrive.
byefruit 6y ago
How did you ensure you'd given each iteration a proper go? Are there any tips you can share for validating them that were effective?
- bootstrapper101 6y ago
  We kept an iteration going as long as we saw a reasonable and viable path to keep growing the business. One of the product was consumer and had a hockey stick growth curve obvious in the first week. So it was obvious to keep going on. Another product was profitable and we could acquire new customers through advertising. So it was obvious to keep going on. For the one's that didn't do good, initially I wasted a lot of time doing things which won't meaningfully help with adoption. Some of them are: 1. Building too many features. 2. Building too many platforms at launch. 3. Spending time on PR 4. Figuring out the perfect font for the website. 5. UI polish. Over time you develop better heuristics. You can't ever be fully right but you just get somewhat better judgement.
  - byefruit 6y ago
    Super interesting. Thank you.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
nj999999 6y ago
This sounds awesome. Link to the product? Love seeing these kinds of businesses thrive.

nonane 6y ago

What is your preferred tech stack for quick iteration of ideas?

weakwire 6y ago

This thread totally hijacked the OP. Extremely interesting.

radihuq 6y ago

How much of the $30M expenditure do you spend on marketing?

bootstrapper101 6y ago
70% of expenses are marketing.

frongpik 6y ago

How did you get to the decision makers to pitch your idea? Unless you were already well connected, I presume it wasn't easy to get attention from the right people.

bootstrapper101 6y ago
I pitched my ideas just twice and got some funding for them. However either my approach was wrong or I wasn't working with the right people. I felt that funding was too big of a waste of time. Without traction, everything I did was being second guessed. And too much time was being wasted pitching. I haven't raised any money for 20+ of my ideas including the current one. But I can imagine it would be easier for me to raise money on better terms in future! I use the nanny vs parent analogy for involvement with a product. When you are working for someone else, you are a nanny. The product isn't your baby. Be careful how much you get invested. If you get sentimental and attached you will end up hurting yourself. If you own your company, it's like being the parent. You have sole responsibility but except government no one else can interfere. VC funded business can be like a wild ride. You may start as a parent, but you will eventually end up as a nanny. In some rare cases you can have majority voting rights till the end. Only famous case for that I know is Facebook.
- frongpik 6y ago
  How did you approach other businesses to sell them something? I presume your business is b2b.

andi999 6y ago

This is fascinating. Is your product b2b? How fast did you discard the 25 ideas? It sounde like you needed 3 month at least, so 8 years? What did you live on during that time? So in short:please tell me more

bootstrapper101 6y ago
It's a consumer product. It is very draining. In today's world consumer don't want to pay for anything, unless they really want the product and they don't have a way to get it otherwise. Many users would use the product and then file chargebacks. Many users will go to any extend to get out of paying coming up with either sad stories, lies or threats. When it's a low cost, high volume product (5m+ paying customers over time) - you deal with too many of these and sometimes it's very demoralizing. I used to work for someone else in Saas and this wasn't such a big issue there. Next thing I do won't be in consumer. Some ideas where tried end to end in a week, some were run for 2 years. Did a lot of mistakes along the way.
- andi999 6y ago
  Thanks a lot. A few follow up question:so it is a physical product? Also are you located in the US? And last, since customer contact it is so draining, did you consider to spend one of the 20 M profit and outsoure customer service (or hire 10-20 people to take of that)?
  - bootstrapper101 6y ago
    It is a digital product. I don't live in US. We do have outsourced customer service. But still I have to be aware of what the customers are complaining about. In some cases people are filing frivolous complaints to government agencies which you have to respond to. With Saas, I would go after the bad actors. With consumers the number of bad actors is endless.
    - andi999 6y ago
      For what do you spend the 30M difference between arr and profit?

breck 6y ago

Are there any small public companies (<50 employees) you admire?

bootstrapper101 6y ago
I don't know employee strength of many companies. Some companies which feel relatively small that I like are: 1Password (agilebits), Protonmail, Little Snitch (Objective Development). PS: I am getting throttled by HN algorithms. If someone can help get me unthrottled I will get around to answering all the questions.
- navanchauhan 6y ago
  That is probably because you have a new account. Try contacting hn on their email.

warent 6y ago

Am I the only one reading a significant amount of ego and humblebrag from this post? It's pretty off-putting and distracting from where there could be value.

TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
I didn't read any such tone. He's quite fact oriented. You may want to introspect into what you are bringing into the reading as your own context.
- warent 6y ago
  it's a combination of it being a brand new (potentially throwaway) account, me potentially misunderstanding what is meant by claiming 20m annual profit for 3 people is "staying low", and the limits of text communication
  - bootstrapper101 6y ago
    No worries. Glad that we could figure this out like reasonable adults.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Why would someone humblebrag on a throwaway account?
bootstrapper101 6y ago
I am really sorry it came that way. It's been a long day. Thought this was a good opportunity to share my learnings and answer any questions. If there is any way I could help answer any question, I would love to!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wuschel 6y ago
  Hi, no worries, we all communicate with text here... misunderstandings happen regularly with a fraction users you interact with. Congratulations on your success! Here are some questions: Q1. What was the prerequisite for your success (product/service, team, market)? Q2 What technology space are you in? (Digital/brand vs high-tech)? Q3 What weré your difficultis when iterating over your product concepts, and what was the iteration frequency? Q4 How long did it take to take off? Would love to chat at some point, or connect. My email is the profile.

practicalpants 6y ago

Process question: What specifically would you do to get early customers or to market the mvp? How did this change over the 25 attempts? What was your criteria for "this one has failed let's do another one"?

bootstrapper101 6y ago
My other account (bootstrapper101) got throttled. Maybe @dang can help merge this tomorrow. I could maybe spend 5000 words and still not be able to say all I want to say about this. The ideas were all over the place: Social, Enterprise, Consumer, Saas. I learnt over time that once you have failed so many times, you start avoiding obvious mistakes. Mistakes like polishing your app before launch, wasting time on PR, building too many features, not spending enough time qualifying your users. Once you build enough products you start knowing the impact of things like: 1. Marketplace products: supplier and consumer chicken and egg problem) 2. Single player mode: you don't need your friends to be on the app and you can get immediate value as soon as you start. 3. Social products: Where degree matters. Most IM products can provide a lot of value of if 1-3 of your close friends are on it. But products like Facebook needs 50+ friends, Twitter needs strangers. 4. See if you LTV (life time value) > CAC (customer acquisition cost) + Operation cost + Development cost 5. Customer acquisition strategies: Programmatic (ads, crawler), Sales team, Referral, Content marketing There are so many other small things. These concepts are like different lego pieces and over time you find which one works better for your product and you use the right pieces. Biggest takeaway was how to do faster iteration, brutally prioritize and automate everything. Everything else is learning along the way!
- everybodyknows 6y ago
  Could you tell us a bit about compensation/ownership for your other two on staff?

xuki 6y ago

How do you handle support with just 3 people? I imagine at that scale you either have a lot of customers, or small number of customers with very specific needs.

sigil 6y ago

Are you in a large market with competitors but still plenty of room, or have you more or less cornered a smaller one?

newusertoday 6y ago

what is the skillset of 3 people? 1 product, 1 sale/market, 1 developer or something else? how complex is the product in terms of technology?

bootstrapper101 6y ago
I will try to answer multiple questions here because I am being throttled: > How do you handle support with just 3 people? I imagine at that scale you either have a lot of customers, or small number of customers with very specific needs. We are highly automated. Very very few queries get through and they are contracted out. > what is the skillset of 3 people? 1 product, 1 sale/market, 1 developer or something else? how complex is the product in terms of technology? 2 developers (I am 1 of them) and 1 person for everything else. > Are you in a large market with competitors but still plenty of room, or have you more or less cornered a smaller one? It's a large market with 20+ competitors. Because our operational costs are so low and we are highly automated we could take over big chunk of business from our competitors. Essentially the dynamic is like Altavista vs Google. Our competitors sometimes do some really dark patterns. I am realizing that almost all companies do that (Google incognito tracking, Facebook charging kids in games etc). Somehow I can't get myself to do that. So I am thinking of moving to Saas so that I can deal with mature customers and ideally provide them value. > What are your skillsets? How did you get there? I am a programmer as my core skill. But I have also played product, marketing, sales, hiring through my career. To get good a these, I worked in my jobs as if I was the owner. That helped get me experience faster. If people want to do a startup, best advice for them would be join a startup with good team at an early stage. Bonus points if that startup is in a space you like. Learn, make good friends and then then do your own startup. I really recommend Naval's "How to get rich" podcast. It's as if he is talking about my life. He decided to move to more investing, but I still like building stuff myself. > What distinguished the successful attempts from the unsuccessful ones? > How did you know when it was time to move on? If I don't know how to keep growing the business, it's a dead-end and time to move on.

baxtr 6y ago

Super interesting. How did you make money when you were testing 25 ideas? How did you and your family survive and how did you finance the iterations? 25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?

bootstrapper101 6y ago
Timeline: 7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money 3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money 4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit. It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work for someone else. That kept me going. We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret.
- randomsearch 6y ago
  > We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret. Don't answer if this is too personal - but why the regret? It sounds like you have had kids, so perhaps it got harder? Or you had fewer than you wanted. Why do you regret it?
  - bootstrapper101 6y ago
    Every year you delay having kids, you are reducing the amount of time you will spend with your kids and grandkids. As you get older, the quality of time you spend with them will also get worse. My wife went through lot of difficulties in her pregnancies. It would have been easier for her body, if we had kids earlier. My drive to get out of the corporate slavery was the reason for the delay. So I regret the delay.
    - herodoturtle 6y ago
      Hey man, if it's any consolation, my folks had me when they were very young, and I barely spent any time with them whilst growing up. As immigrants we had it pretty tough financially, and they were always working long hours (always for someone else) to try make ends meet. They harbour significant regret about not being more present in my childhood. These days they're of course much older, and I am in the lucky position to be able to look after them financially, but they're also filled with added regret about depending on me - they feel like failures because rely on me to cover all their expenses - despite my best efforts to assure them that it's ok. So to your point, whilst having kids younger means you can spend more time with them when you're older, it's not necessarily the better solution if it requires a trade-off in terms of first establishing yourself financially - and from reading your other comments - it sounds like you and I both started off in life with relatively little, so I think the choice to first secure ourselves financially before having kids makes more sense. I delayed having kids with my wife until relatively late (I was 37 she was 33), and whilst I know this will probably reduce the amount of time I'll get to spend with my children when I'm much older, the peace of mind that has come with having first established my SaaS before starting a family is immense. In fact one could argue that the reduced stress alone will probably add 10 years on to my life :-) Thanks for sharing your inspirational comments above and below. Enjoyed reading all of them. And congratulations on the success - I'm sure it is well deserved.

akritrime 6y ago

What are your skillsets? How did you get there?

artemonster 6y ago

How did you stumble on all the ideas to try? I am at a point that I want to try literally anything, but its is exceptionally hard to judge success chances if the target niche is absolutely outside your domain/experience. How did you find all these 20 ideas?

BackBlast 6y ago
I spent years and years in the "I just need a good idea" rut. In reality they are everywhere. Every spreadsheet sitting on a company computer, doing some work no other system will do, is a potential SaaS niche. It does help to elevate your exposure to industries and companies. Go to trade shows for your hobbies, learn their pain points. Consider switching jobs more frequently, or find some work at a consulting firm which can get you on a different contract every few months. Seeing the inside of more companies will give you more exposure and will help you see where they struggle. Working on an idea (even a bad one!), doing the deep dive, will result in logical branches out to other ideas. You need to work on your execution anyway, because the best idea in the world won't take you far if you fail to deliver. Since I started trying to build my ideas, I find that I have far more than I could possibly build myself.
heliodor 6y ago
You sound like you might think ideas have to be innovative but go look at how many CRM solutions are out there. CMS. Email marketing automation. Etc. None of them are perfect. None of them can satisfy every single potential customer. You can build yet another one to satisfy some small unhappy segment of the huge market.
austinjp 6y ago
Personally I have at least one business idea every day, probably due to some neuro-divergence issues. The problem is determining which are worth pursuing. By their own admission, OP's 20+ ideas didn't work. You only need one, it just has to be the right one :) Snark aside, I guess receptivity to novelty is critical when pivoting. At that point, though, the pivot should be based on data. Creativity is still required, constrained by the data. I believe that's more amenable to being 'engineered' rather than just waiting for the muse to arrive.

byefruit 6y ago

How did you ensure you'd given each iteration a proper go? Are there any tips you can share for validating them that were effective?

bootstrapper101 6y ago
We kept an iteration going as long as we saw a reasonable and viable path to keep growing the business. One of the product was consumer and had a hockey stick growth curve obvious in the first week. So it was obvious to keep going on. Another product was profitable and we could acquire new customers through advertising. So it was obvious to keep going on. For the one's that didn't do good, initially I wasted a lot of time doing things which won't meaningfully help with adoption. Some of them are: 1. Building too many features. 2. Building too many platforms at launch. 3. Spending time on PR 4. Figuring out the perfect font for the website. 5. UI polish. Over time you develop better heuristics. You can't ever be fully right but you just get somewhat better judgement.
- byefruit 6y ago
  Super interesting. Thank you.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

nj999999 6y ago

This sounds awesome. Link to the product? Love seeing these kinds of businesses thrive.