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I've been a solopreneur and founder of a bootstrapped startup for 8 years. I reached 20k MRR this summer. The sentence "It's a marathon not a sprint" suits well
by giorgioz 5y ago
I've been a solopreneur and founder of a bootstrapped startup for 8 years. I reached 20k MRR this summer.
The sentence "It's a marathon not a sprint" suits well my schedule and mentality.
For the first 6 years of my bootstrapped startup I used to work 6-12 hours each day. (when I became dad 2 years ago it became harder to work few hours on the weekend though).
I used to work every day, also during the weekend.
That's because I'm most efficient just after waking up, both in the morning and in the afternoon after a 30 minutes power nap.
You might not be efficient in the morning but in general I recommend everyone to find out when it's the time of day when they are most efficient and work that time every day. Better to work less hours but working every day during the golden hours.
It's important that you love to do your daily work. In my case is coding, I love coding.
If you don't love the core work necessary for your startup to succeed you will not be able to keep at it for several years.
I recommend always sleeping those 7-9 hours per night that make you feel full rested.
There is no point in overworking now if you will be tired or burnout later.
If you are single and able to move, I recommend becoming a digital nomad and living in cheap/nice places.
You can move to Thailand or Colombia or Portugal and pay less for rent and food and fun and all the savings will allow you a longer time to work on your startup.
That said, even if you have more time you shouldn't waste it.
Try to earn money from your project as soon as possible. In general it will take you 3-10 more times than expected to earn your first dollar. So if you have savings for 1 year you should do plan to earn your first dollar in 1-3 months.
The podcast Startup for the Rest of Us has been invaluable in my journey:
https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/
- tofukid 5y agoWhat’s your product/SaaS?
- giorgioz 5y agowaiterio.com an order management system for restaurants. Started as a mobile app 8 years ago and shifted to SaaS 5 years ago. For bootstrapped solopreneur I recommend making products for piers like marketers/developers/sales/tech. Having non-tech savvy restaurateurs as customers has been an uphill battle I would probably not do again.
- fakedang 5y agoJust to let you know that when I tried your website from my current country (UAE), it showed price units in the lowest denomination rather than in the standard denomination. It would be like quoting 49 cents per month instead of $49.
- giorgioz 5y agoThank you @fakedang, we support pricing in several dozens currencies with Stripe and some have not been tested much. I think we only ever had 1-3 paying restaurants from UAE. Would you like to consult and/or help me improving our marketing to UAE? Please write me an email to info AT waiterio DOT com
- em-bee 5y agowhat were the challenges you had with non-tech savvy customers? on the other hand, aren't tech savvy customers harder to sell to? they are much more selective in what they are buying because they can figure out things themselves. it would have to be something that they don't want to do that they would be willing to pay for. sounds to me like an uphill battle either way.
- giorgioz 5y agoWe implemented a very prominent badge "No internet connection" when the device is in airplane mode because users were complaining "The app doesn't work" when they had placed the device in airplane-mode. Still to this day we receive several support tickets a year from users that forgot their password and never went through a forgot password process on another website. yes on the tech-savvy VS non-tech savvy I think there are pros and cons. Of course it also depends on the amount of solutions available to the users. I might be suffering from the "the grass is always greener on the other side"
- RustyConsul 5y agodo you get lonely being a digital nomad?
- giorgioz 5y agoI always met a ton of people. This is easier if you go to cities with big digital nomad/expat/erasmus communities. I used to research the social life of a city in advance by checking Facebook groups like "Digital Nomads Chiang Mai" or "Lisbon Expats" and meetups on meetup.com If you want generic ideas for cities you can see http://nomadlist.com/ http://nomadlist.com/ but you still need to research it. Depending on your continent the easiest places to start digital nomading are like Lisbon/Barcelona/Budapest/Chaing Mai/Bali/Medellin. There is a ton more and you will discover them after talking with digital nomads about their previous trips.