13 ms·

The rise of the one-person unicorn

329 points by kiyanwang 5y ago

deworms 5y ago
This is an advertisement, it's admitted at the very end of this "article".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
aww_dang 5y ago
I like the idea of solo development. However, I don't see the value in the solutions offered. A marketplace for css components? A headline generator or optimizer? Maybe I am just too close to the technology to appreciate what people are buying.
- jFriedensreich 5y ago
  that is kind of part of the equation. these super successful one-person shows build things that sound extremely niche, trivial to sometimes even stupid. But that is the reason they can grow their companies under the radar. the key part is that they know about a real pain their audience has and that audience happens to be much much bigger than outsiders or even the founders themselves thought/think.
  - peterthehacker 5y ago
    Finding a market like that sounds really difficult to do. How does someone discover a market like this without a ton of luck?
    - jasongrishkoff 5y ago
      As someone who pulled this off, it was less about discovery and more about being part of it already. The problems are much easier to understand and address when they're actually problems you're facing yourself.
      - icer2312 5y ago
        Mine isn't anywhere near paying the bill yet, but it's at 60+ customers for $20/year. It's exactly as you described. I had a pain point which was trivial for most, but not for me. No existing solutions solved it properly so I decided to make it myself. While searching for a solution, I found that a lot of other people had the same problem. It was bad enough for them that they took time out of their day to write their complaints online. In solving my own problem, I was creating something that other people might've pay for. And they did! I quickly learned that marketing was the most important part of the process.
    - going_to_800 5y ago
      I fit very well in the article description. It's not only about finding the right niche and riding the wave, is also about execution, otherwise competitors will eat you. There's luck involved of course, but after 10 failed tries you'll get an eye for it. Just an example: there are sub-markets that don't have specialized products, they all use products built for everyone instead that specific niche, like instead of a CRM for everyone niche it down as CRM for mechanics (i'm sure there are many of them, but you get the idea).
    - ren_engineer 5y ago
      by being directly involved in other areas and seeing the problems that non-developers wouldn't know how to fix the problem with most software engineers is they only know tech. Most of these "niche" businesses are created at the intersection of tech and marketing/design/business
    - kjksf 5y ago
      You say it's luck. I say the universe is sending you lots of signals. Most people ignore those signals. The "lucky" ones are simply perceptive. To give you a concrete example. There was this app Screenhero that was acquired by Slack in 2017. There was a HN thread about it and it erupted with people saying "oh no, I'm using this and it'll go away. how awful!". The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15552042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15552042 333 points, 147 comments Just from that thread you could tell: * there's an app with obvious business model (monthly pay per user), immune to piracy (everything is mediated by their servers; no account, the app doesn't work) * the functionality was deemed valuable enough by Slack to acquire a startup that barely got off the ground * people love this app The Universe sent a clear signal. Hacker News is supposed to be a breeding ground for hackers that are interested in building software businesses. How many of the people that read the Slack HN acquisition thread fired up Visual Studio or XCode and started building a copy of Screenhero? Zero. Everyone ignored the signal. It's even worse than that. I actually made that point in 2017, in that same HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15555488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15555488 I spelled out the obvious opportunity for the tens of thousands of people who must have read that post. It was even the top voted comment. Everyone ignore the signal. BTW: "clone Screenhero" opportunity is mostly gone. Not completely but there are at least 2 startups cloning it. I'm pretty sure it took at least 2 years before they started copying Screenhero (one of the startups is actually by a guy from the original team, I think). So for at least 2 years there was a clear opportunity to build a multi-million dollar business by a very small team.
      - peterthehacker 5y ago
        But your example, Screenhero clones like Pop (https://pop.com/ https://pop.com/), are in a large, competitive market. That doesn’t fit the qualifications of a small, underserved niche like the article describes.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  It’s very often a niche the founder themselves are part of. If the founder writes content and builds a headline A/B tester, it’s often possible to make a tool, so some adwords and marketing and get a couple thousand sales at less than a $100 a month each.
- madamelic 5y ago
  > A headline generator or optimizer? Headlime used GPT-3 so you could write a prompt and it would produce copy for your landing page. It may have been niche, but it would really well and helped rather than having to brainstorm my own.
- motoboi 5y ago
  When you have the whole world as your market, even super niche products can make a lot of money.
deleted 5y ago
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leroman 5y ago
In todays market where developers are commoditized “resources” it’s only logical for the “ninjas” or “superstars” who repeatedly see their role being perceived as “working bees” who don’t want to fall into this management / worker dichotomy or choose serving a “management” queen.. to rebel and redefine the work as they see fit, a good enough business where work is done and is more aligned with the interests of the working class, so no VCs and no conforming to top to bottom hierarchies.. just work
- unixhero 5y ago
  You have precisely described me. One man army, taking projects in megacorps. I answer to no one.
  - andruby 5y ago
    I applaud your devotion! At what point do you start to answer “to your customers” though? This sometimes holds me back from rebelling. Exchanging 1 boss for a 100 customers that all have expectations.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      You pick your customers and who you want to support. Pick wisely..
    - unixhero 5y ago
      You exchange the relationship from boss to customer and business partner. You divide your customer facing work unto three categories: DELIVERY, MANAGEMENT, STEERING The relationship must be strong and you must have a working relationship, can never be caustic. Make sure that you are making the customer shine, always. Be a trusted advisor when you can. Say yes a lot, but setting expectations and saying no is also okay and important. Risk tolerance and thick skin is key. The financial reward is sky high.
- 5y ago
peterthehacker 5y ago
> In this universe, of bootstrapping to several hundred thousand per month in revenue, a founder can walk away with $5m, $10m, $20m (depending on the multiple) in around half the time it’d take to build a “unicorn”. The odds of this level of success for a solo bootstrapped founder is much smaller when you don’t raise. If you look at the stats on startup success (exits), funding has a strong positive correlation. There are good and bad reasons to raise capital and many startups do raise for bad reasons, but that doesn’t mean that funding is inherently bad or should be eliminated as an option.
- graderjs 5y ago
  Peter the Thiel? How very out of character to be pushing fund raising
- imgabe 5y ago
  What are the odds, exactly? I don’t see where they say that VC funding should be eliminated, just that this is another option that more people are pursuing.
  - peterthehacker 5y ago
    This has been analyzed by many, but the stats you see reported often are that 9/10 startups fail while 7/10 venture-backed startups fail [0]. Perhaps the reason why a startup has no investor interest is because the market is too small, so cutting the data by TAM (if possible) might be interesting. We don’t have data for these micro-TAM startups showing whether they succeed more or less than any other startup. But the data we do have does show an advantage to raising money from VC vs. not. But to be clear, my point is that funding should be a more complicated and nuanced discussion. And if there’s a $5M+ potential return, like the author proposes, then there should be investor interest. The question is whether it’s a good idea for the company to raise. [0] https://review42.com/resources/what-percentage-of-startups-fail/ https://review42.com/resources/what-percentage-of-startups-f...
- lugged 5y ago
  Survivorship bias. One person unicorns don't generally exit in the same way, this whole article was about the problems trying to raise for small one person companies.
hiddencache 5y ago
I suspect this includes outsourcing a whole series of functions from support functions such as finance, accounting, tax and legal, to even what would be considered core functions such as UX, coding etc. Taken to an extreme, the startup could remain a handful of people while benefiting from a much larger team which is not included in the headcount.
- ncfausti 5y ago
  Sounds a lot like virtual integration. "...you basically stitch together a business with partners that are treated as if they’re inside the company." https://hbr.org/1998/03/the-power-of-virtual-integration-an-interview-with-dell-computers-michael-dell#:~:text=Virtual%20integration%20means%20you%20basically,they're%20inside%20the%20company https://hbr.org/1998/03/the-power-of-virtual-integration-an-....
- madamelic 5y ago
  In some instances, yes. In others, not really. If you cut out the bloat, planning meetings, etc., you can stand up an MVP pretty quickly while doing the coding yourself. I think most of the tricks are CSS frameworks, re-using parts of old projects, no-code MVP, outsourcing non-tech things. Many of the successful indie founders seem to be non-technical business people who give 0 cares about coding something the right way, so they just smash stuff together without a care to get it out the door.
- ryanSrich 5y ago
  You should be outsourcing as many of those as possible anyway, even if you aren’t going for the bootstrap play. There’s no strategic reason to have a finance, HR or legal team unless you have 100s of employees. That’s not to say you ignore those things, but there are so many quality SaaS services that do those at a tiny fraction of the cost of an FTE it only makes sense to use them.
- matchagaucho 5y ago
  That's really the key. A successful one-person SaaS company is effectively leveraging gig economy and contracting out many business functions.
throw0101a 5y ago
IIRC, the dating site Plenty of Fish was a one-man operation for quite a while: > In 2004, Plenty of Fish became a full-time money making business for Markus.[10] He ran the site independently until 2008, when he began hiring other employees at his new Vancouver headquarters. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POF_(dating_website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POF_(dating_website) It didn't quite hit unicorn status ($1B), as he sold it for "only" $500M.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Interesting after they were bought they kind of fell off the map. That's typical
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    Yea, they were bought by that dating conglomerate, I’m guessing the users have been rolled into one pot, instead of keeping them separate
  - ornornor 5y ago
    They also removed a couple of the posts that showed, supported by hard numbers from their analytics, that several things that match.com et al. will sell their users hard on don’t work at all and can even negatively affect your odds of being successful of the site. These posts were deleted shortly after the acquisition but they’re probably still in archive.org etc.
    - paulgb 5y ago
      Heh, the same thing happened to Ok Cupid. (Caches of) one of the posts occasionally resurface on HN, as here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501
      - ornornor 5y ago
        I might be mixing them up, it could very well have been ok Cupid that I was thinking of.
giorgioz 5y ago
I've been a solopreneur boostrapping waiterio.com for 6 years and then 2 more years with 1-3 fulltime team members with a 20k MRR after 8 years. I've chosen the bootstrap SaaS path after working 1 year in Silicon Valley. I thought all my life my dream was to build incredible stuff in Silicon Valley, then I got there and I didn't like it enough. When I was there I felt lonely and tired and sad. Despite having rare skills as Android and iOS developer 10 YEARS AGO my manager assigned me to build landing pages. This was after not passing hiring interviews for Facebook/Google but still getting in one of the big ones. I felt unappreciated and pushed to work a lot on something that wasn't even my specialty. The Silicon Valley is/was a sausage fest and it was very hard dating. When I pitched at events I felt I wasn't being considered at all. I was and I am too afraid that the fact I am Italian and/or a pragmatic and nerdy developer with no salesy wowing pitch skills would let others with little technical skills and a big mouth take all the venture funds. I left the Silicon Valley and started to work on waiterio.com while travelling the world. I lived in 10+ countries for 6 months each, I saw the world, met a lot of interesting people and found love.
- wiradikusuma 5y ago
  How do you approach your potential customers? I applaud your effort, I was in your shoes. But for your idea (SaaS for restaurants), your competitors probably hire an army of sales because restaurant owners are busy with day-to-day and relatively not high-tech.
  - giorgioz 5y ago
    Yes indeed. My (huge amount of) competitors indeed have an army of sales. If you are David and the others are Goliath just don't play the same game they are playing because you are bound to lose. Find out what you are good at and play a completely different game from them. We don't do sales. 8 years ago Waiterio was just a mobile app and got the customers from the app stores. These days we do a lot of content marketing and i18n. Are you a founder from a non English speaking country? I'll be extracting my internal tools for content marketing and i18n. Write me here if you would like to give it a try.
xwdv 5y ago
Any developer through sheer will can mold himself into a one man startup that builds a powerful product that normally requires the efforts of a massive team. Where things typically fall apart is when it comes time for maintenance and support.
- granshaw 5y ago
  I’m sorry, yes, any dev can build a product, but is it something people will pay money to buy? That is 90% of the problem. If you have to do support, count yourself lucky cause that means you actually have customers
valenterry 5y ago
If I have a SaaS (e.g. website that offers some service) then is there a good service that takes care of the technical part of user registration, payment and user support / CRM? Even if there are services like stripe and Auth0, as a solo developer it takes considerable time to connect all these together to get the basic functionality to actually sell things and integrate it into my product.
- bluedevil2k 5y ago
  > as a solo developer it takes considerable time to connect all these together Well hopefully it you’re a developer it doesn’t take that long. I just switched a SaaS to Stripe from PayPal last week and it took less than 30 minutes. These SaaS support tools/websites are increasingly easy to use, making time to market for even a solo dev pretty easy.
- kolaente 5y ago
  Stripe is incredibly good. And then there's stuff like Laravel Spark which handles all the common stuff like accounts and invoicing.
  - valenterry 5y ago
    Sounds like I have to install/maintain stuff here myself. I wish there was a solution that doesn't require me to have any additional infrastructure...
- cspags 5y ago
  https://www.outseta.com/ https://www.outseta.com/ is the best tool I've seen that offers everything you listed.
  - valenterry 5y ago
    Wow! That's it! It just looks like they are offering there services mostly for non-developers (low-code / no-code) and I couldn't find anything about whether they have an API that I can use from my own code to check for registered users and if they paid etc. EDIT: nevermind, found it: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/3613332/outseta-rest-api-v1/7TNfr6k#intro https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/3613332/outseta-rest-...
nickjj 5y ago
One thing this article doesn't point out is how beneficial it is to have a decently large highly engaged audience beforehand. ConvertKit is an example of this. The founder started by selling books and then made a course on how to sell books, got a pretty big audience around that and then started to build ConvertKit. Eventually he figured out who he wanted to market ConvertKit to and his prior audience of people wanting to sell things online was a great match. Naturally a lot of people who bought his books and courses are a great fit for his email service because the whole premise of his course on selling books is around building an email list. The books ended up being a lead generator for his SAAS app. That's not to take anything away from Nathan's work. At the end of the day he made a very successful and well deserved business but the specific circumstances around it are a bit different than what this blog post makes it out to be. It was a 10 year journey with multiple good ideas at the right time to get to that point. All of it is documented on Nathan's site. I remember reading some of his posts many years ago.
- is0tope 5y ago
  This is extremely true. I've read many blog posts about how someone started a side project and bootstrapped it to 10k mrr etc. Invariably when you read closer it goes something like this: "So I had this widely successful blog about X and decided to make a product. I posted about it on my blog and got 1000 sign-ups overnight etc".
  - Alacart 5y ago
    I think this gets overblown in the sense that followers often do no equal customers, especially when it's a subscription. obviously yes, having an audience is helpful, but it can also give you false confidence too. They'll tell you your product is amazing, sign up for an early access waitlist, and then often very few of them actually buy because what brought them there was a desire to emotionally support you, not a need for your product. It does help you get the word out though.
    - is0tope 5y ago
      Yes of course I'm not implying it's a panacea. However from my experience getting product market fit is one of the hardest parts of the whole process, and having a ready made audience relevant to your topic is a very nice head start.
mindvirus 5y ago
This is great. One question I've had for a while - do founders typically get one time bonuses or sell their own shares during later funding rounds? I feel like with a lot of these businesses that are successful, there's probably opportunities along the way to sell and make a few million. Especially with unicorn founders I'm often in awe that they stick with it - I'm sure they had opportunities to pocket $100 million and walk away.
- TuringNYC 5y ago
  Yes, depending on the VC and how the business is going. Here is an example: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/one-year-in-bird-founder-sells-some-shares https://www.theinformation.com/articles/one-year-in-bird-fou... This might be an extreme one, but the Bird founder appears to have cashed out $44m. It makes sense for VCs to let founders cash out a bit -- just so you can be comfortable and focus on hyper-growth of the business rather than making short term decisions. I've heard the amounts are usually more like <3M (enough for a house and car or college for kids) and not like the example above. The more the founder cashes out, theoretically the less incentivized they are to grow the company.
- rmah 5y ago
  Typically, no. It is not unheard of though.
mtc010170 5y ago
One thing I’ve been wondering about, as someone who’s considering making the switch.. is the role of hiring contractors for things you yourself aren’t a specialist in (ex: for me, design). When I hear “one-person” and read posts like this, they sometimes give the impression that indie hackers do everything themselves.. which I imagine is really not the case. Does anyone have insight into that?
- JoiDegn 5y ago
  Yes that's right. Almost none of these people have built everything themselves. Design, copy writing, marketing, development, accounting are just some of the things that can be outsourced easily. Source: myself building https://subledger.app https://subledger.app
  - mellavora 5y ago
    From the landing page, subledger seems pretty useful. Good success!
    - JoiDegn 5y ago
      we are looking for additional product validation. Would you be interested to tell me a bit more about your situation and what you would consider useful in a call?
- Jack000 5y ago
  I started out designing everything from scratch, but realized it's 10 times faster to just use a commercial vue/html theme. You don't need custom design, especially if your product is not design-related. It's absolutely possible to do everything yourself. Most skills relevant to indies have a low "skill ceiling" - ie. it's easy to learn just enough to be dangerous.
gennarro 5y ago
>> This piece was editorially supported by HSG, the content firm that helps startups, investors and entrepreneurs become media companies. What does this mean? It’s sponsored content? Or just like a freelance writer?
- rexreed 5y ago
  The article was "ghost written". Meaning that if you're a founder who has no time or ability to write but want to put out content, HSG will do all / much / some of the writing for you under your name and also promote the content. HSG lists Paddle as a client.
zuhayeer 5y ago
Bootstrapped Levels.fyi up until now to $2m run rate. We’re 2 founders, but I absolutely believe this phenomenon of solo creators is the future. The pros of solo are evident: everything lives in one head / one stakeholder, singularly focused on core value by necessity (separation of concerns, do one thing really well, no sprawl), no meetings Building an audience with strong engagement is replacing the “seed” round so to speak. Don’t need anything else, just an ability to ship and iterate fast.
- riku_iki 5y ago
  > Building an audience with strong engagement is replacing the “seed” round so to speak. For funded startups this is established area: buy online ads and receive views for your product. How solo can do it efficiently without significant monetary investment into digital marketing?
  - motoxpro 5y ago
    podcasts, speaking engagements, blogs, twitter, substack, HN, Product Hunt, Instagram, small communities, early customers, newsletters. The reason digital advertising is so popular with VC backed startups is because they need capacity. If you are starting a bootstrapped startups getting a flywheeling going starting with 50 people is fine.
    - riku_iki 5y ago
      Thank you for advice. I guess I unsuccessfully tried this route, but maybe need to push harder and smarter.
deleted 5y ago
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abz10 5y ago
Lol, this is me, a 100x dev, screwed over by big co employer. Decide to go solo and slowly build a company to compete with them. Started part time 12 years ago. I think I could easily hit $1B valuation within 10 years. It is already super profitable and still growing. Eventually I’ll cost the competitors so much business that it’ll be much cheaper for them to buy me out for $Bs. If not it’ll still throw off $Ms in cash per year.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Congratulations. What are you working on?
  - abz10 5y ago
    It’s one of those secret but profitable niches.
    - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
      Oh yeah, those. Heard a lot about them. Good luck!
    - everybodyknows 5y ago
      >throw off $Ms in cash per year. >secret What sort of businesses fit within those constraints? The only ones that come to mind are illegal …
      - abz10 5y ago
        Cash, as in free cash flow. Maybe not the best usage of the term, but better than revenue. And secret in that people in this niche don’t advertise the opportunity as new competition would cut into profits.
- Rezwoodly 5y ago
  Ahhhh, the Internet.. I too am a 100x dev who is on the fast track for a billion dollar pay day
cushychicken 5y ago
I had to tell someone so I'll say it here: the unicorn centaur in the title image disturbs me. XD
DonHopkins 5y ago
"TGV Software" stood for "Two Guys and a Vax", before they eventually hired about 128 more people, bought a few more computers, and were acquired by Cisco in 1996. It was originally an SRI spin-off. I ran into one of the founders at a party in Santa Cruz in the mid-90's, and laughed with him about the great acronym, and asked if he and his buddy had ever gotten around to buying another Vax. He shushed me and told me never to tell anyone what TGV originally stood for! (Oops.) They must have been in negotiations with Cisco at the time. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tgv-software https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tgv-software >TGV Software, Inc. employs more than 130 people and is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. The company develops, markets and supports TCP/IP internetworking software products which enable connectivity between disparate computer systems over local area, enterprise-wide and global computing networks. TGV's principal product line is marketed under the name of MultiNet. MultiNet for Windows integrates a robust suite of TCP/IP applications including a 32-bit VxD kernel, NFS client, FTP client and server, VT100-320 and TN3270 emulations, network printing, Pronto Mail V2.0 electronic mail, Enhanced Mosaic V2.1 web browser and network diagnostics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SRI_International_spin-offs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SRI_International_spin... >TGV: Founded in 1988, this company created communications software and simulation software for VAX computers. TGV stood for "Two Guys and a Vax". The company was sold to Cisco Systems in 1996.
ausbah 5y ago
is this stuff really that new? I feel like I've been reading about solo founders who are able to bootstrap some company into the hundreds of thousands to low millions per year, for several years now on this site what seem new is all the products around it, like "micro private equity"
axegon_ 5y ago
From a personal point of view, I completely disagree here. The one-person thing is just not doable, no matter how hard you believe/try. I've attempted this countless times and my motivation and dedication never cut it, no matter how hard I push. It's an inhumane amount of work for a single person to handle. And there is one specific moment that I've been able to pin-point every single time. I end up making a ton of progress: bootstrapping a development environment, databases, frameworks, containers, yada, yada, yada, I end up building a tons of things and just as I feel extremely happy and motivated, I take a step back and suddenly I see how many small details I need to fix up, as well as how much stuff there is still to be done and how much more would pop up to fix, polish and clear up and even a small project ends up feeling like infinity and depression and frustration kicks in. In my experience having at least one other person is at least a good frustration and prevention mechanism. That said, finding someone who's on board is equally hard.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Never worry about the big picture. It's too easy to get overwhelmed. Sure, have an idea where you want to go, but don't worry about all the steps it will take to get there. Worry about the next thing. And then the next thing. And little by little you will have suddenly made a lot of progress.
  - axegon_ 5y ago
    Easier said than done it seems. I reckon I've abandoned at least 7-8 projects I took pretty far in the last decade, everything ended the same way-collecting dust in a repo or on an old drive. At this point even if something interesting comes to my mind, I shrug it off and ignore it or just share it online somewhere or tell someone. Maybe someone else has a stronger will than I do, idk. Still secretly hoping that eventually I'll meet someone as motivated as I can get so we can push each other but seems incredibly unlikely.
    - motoxpro 5y ago
      10 years / 7 or 8 projects is about 1.3 years on average. It takes a long time to build a company and a product as one person. Sounds like you have been giving up a bit prematurely. Or if you would like results in that time, make an MVP instead of trying to build a feature complete product.
MrAwesome 5y ago
Does anyone have a list of good resources / tools / communities for solo creators? I recently decided to take a solo project and run with it. The technical promise is real, and I'm excited about my vision for it. Unfortunately in this context, I've spent all 10+ years of my career in scientific computing and big tech - so despite having a few friends in the startup world, most of this is really new to me, and I don't actually know anyone who has gone the solopreneur / micro-startup route. Any and all tips, tricks, pointers, articles, and advice are welcome - I'm really excited to take this risk, but I'm feeling increasingly clueless about how to handle many of the organizational / non-technical aspects of this process.
- ac2u 5y ago
  https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/
  - MrAwesome 5y ago
    Perfect, thank you. Looks like an invitation code is needed to sign up, if any generous soul would like to send one to glenn.hope[at]protonmail.com I would be forever grateful!
4thethrillofit 5y ago
To all the people saying it’s impossible — I’ve been bootstrapping an analytics company in ecomm space. From launch to 500k ARR took 9 months with almost entirely inbound. (Aka 0 marketing cost) I didn’t have an audience prior or spent any time at all on sites like Reddit. It’s not easy to do by any means, but here’s what I believe are the requirements: - a true generalist: technical, product, sales, design. - deep experience in the industry you are gonna serve. Hanging out on Reddit does NOT get you this. You have to have worked in the industry prior on high level roles. It’s what’ll give you credibility to potential buyers. - design a product and business model that’s niche and painful enough for a large AND expanding TAM. - there’s has to be sufficient dissatisfaction with incumbents. Customers are craving for better solutions and motivated to find one. - you can effectively source and work with contractors to fill the gaps in your skills and time. - the product must have near zero churn. Otherwise the leaky bucket is too much to fill without an actual sales force. This is possible, my business is exactly this. - you know how to be capital efficient and can product low cash outflow consistently. - you are not personally in need of an actual income for at least 3 years. Preferably more. I believe the above are a must for a single bootstrapped founder to create a high growth startup. The optionality it affords you is tremendous and you will stand above the rest. If you are interested in joining me (we are hiring) - lemme know! fei(at)sourcemedium(dotcom)
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  The last point - 3 years of income - is a huge stumbling block for so many (myself included) but it is a trivial hurdle for many VCs. Is there a VC model that says "seed capital for many, and low continuous returns from 30% of investments" It won't return billions but the maths seems sane (I did suggest that there is room globally for a "million startups fund")
  - 4thethrillofit 5y ago
    This is why it does make sense to take preseed and seed capital. It gives you the cushion necessary to make the right decisions for the business. Bootstrap to VC is a continuous spectrum as opposed to the black and white decision most would have you believe. There are so many more financing options available to viable businesses than before - startup studios, revenue based financing and many more (eg angel.clearbanc.com)

329 points by kiyanwang 5y ago

deworms 5y ago

This is an advertisement, it's admitted at the very end of this "article".

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

aww_dang 5y ago

I like the idea of solo development. However, I don't see the value in the solutions offered. A marketplace for css components? A headline generator or optimizer? Maybe I am just too close to the technology to appreciate what people are buying.

jFriedensreich 5y ago
that is kind of part of the equation. these super successful one-person shows build things that sound extremely niche, trivial to sometimes even stupid. But that is the reason they can grow their companies under the radar. the key part is that they know about a real pain their audience has and that audience happens to be much much bigger than outsiders or even the founders themselves thought/think.
- peterthehacker 5y ago
  Finding a market like that sounds really difficult to do. How does someone discover a market like this without a ton of luck?
  - jasongrishkoff 5y ago
    As someone who pulled this off, it was less about discovery and more about being part of it already. The problems are much easier to understand and address when they're actually problems you're facing yourself.
    - icer2312 5y ago
      Mine isn't anywhere near paying the bill yet, but it's at 60+ customers for $20/year. It's exactly as you described. I had a pain point which was trivial for most, but not for me. No existing solutions solved it properly so I decided to make it myself. While searching for a solution, I found that a lot of other people had the same problem. It was bad enough for them that they took time out of their day to write their complaints online. In solving my own problem, I was creating something that other people might've pay for. And they did! I quickly learned that marketing was the most important part of the process.
  - going_to_800 5y ago
    I fit very well in the article description. It's not only about finding the right niche and riding the wave, is also about execution, otherwise competitors will eat you. There's luck involved of course, but after 10 failed tries you'll get an eye for it. Just an example: there are sub-markets that don't have specialized products, they all use products built for everyone instead that specific niche, like instead of a CRM for everyone niche it down as CRM for mechanics (i'm sure there are many of them, but you get the idea).
  - ren_engineer 5y ago
    by being directly involved in other areas and seeing the problems that non-developers wouldn't know how to fix the problem with most software engineers is they only know tech. Most of these "niche" businesses are created at the intersection of tech and marketing/design/business
  - kjksf 5y ago
    You say it's luck. I say the universe is sending you lots of signals. Most people ignore those signals. The "lucky" ones are simply perceptive. To give you a concrete example. There was this app Screenhero that was acquired by Slack in 2017. There was a HN thread about it and it erupted with people saying "oh no, I'm using this and it'll go away. how awful!". The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15552042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15552042 333 points, 147 comments Just from that thread you could tell: * there's an app with obvious business model (monthly pay per user), immune to piracy (everything is mediated by their servers; no account, the app doesn't work) * the functionality was deemed valuable enough by Slack to acquire a startup that barely got off the ground * people love this app The Universe sent a clear signal. Hacker News is supposed to be a breeding ground for hackers that are interested in building software businesses. How many of the people that read the Slack HN acquisition thread fired up Visual Studio or XCode and started building a copy of Screenhero? Zero. Everyone ignored the signal. It's even worse than that. I actually made that point in 2017, in that same HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15555488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15555488 I spelled out the obvious opportunity for the tens of thousands of people who must have read that post. It was even the top voted comment. Everyone ignore the signal. BTW: "clone Screenhero" opportunity is mostly gone. Not completely but there are at least 2 startups cloning it. I'm pretty sure it took at least 2 years before they started copying Screenhero (one of the startups is actually by a guy from the original team, I think). So for at least 2 years there was a clear opportunity to build a multi-million dollar business by a very small team.
    - peterthehacker 5y ago
      But your example, Screenhero clones like Pop (https://pop.com/ https://pop.com/), are in a large, competitive market. That doesn’t fit the qualifications of a small, underserved niche like the article describes.
sudhirj 5y ago
It’s very often a niche the founder themselves are part of. If the founder writes content and builds a headline A/B tester, it’s often possible to make a tool, so some adwords and marketing and get a couple thousand sales at less than a $100 a month each.
madamelic 5y ago
> A headline generator or optimizer? Headlime used GPT-3 so you could write a prompt and it would produce copy for your landing page. It may have been niche, but it would really well and helped rather than having to brainstorm my own.
motoboi 5y ago
When you have the whole world as your market, even super niche products can make a lot of money.

deleted 5y ago

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leroman 5y ago

In todays market where developers are commoditized “resources” it’s only logical for the “ninjas” or “superstars” who repeatedly see their role being perceived as “working bees” who don’t want to fall into this management / worker dichotomy or choose serving a “management” queen.. to rebel and redefine the work as they see fit, a good enough business where work is done and is more aligned with the interests of the working class, so no VCs and no conforming to top to bottom hierarchies.. just work

unixhero 5y ago
You have precisely described me. One man army, taking projects in megacorps. I answer to no one.
- andruby 5y ago
  I applaud your devotion! At what point do you start to answer “to your customers” though? This sometimes holds me back from rebelling. Exchanging 1 boss for a 100 customers that all have expectations.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    You pick your customers and who you want to support. Pick wisely..
  - unixhero 5y ago
    You exchange the relationship from boss to customer and business partner. You divide your customer facing work unto three categories: DELIVERY, MANAGEMENT, STEERING The relationship must be strong and you must have a working relationship, can never be caustic. Make sure that you are making the customer shine, always. Be a trusted advisor when you can. Say yes a lot, but setting expectations and saying no is also okay and important. Risk tolerance and thick skin is key. The financial reward is sky high.
5y ago

peterthehacker 5y ago

> In this universe, of bootstrapping to several hundred thousand per month in revenue, a founder can walk away with $5m, $10m, $20m (depending on the multiple) in around half the time it’d take to build a “unicorn”. The odds of this level of success for a solo bootstrapped founder is much smaller when you don’t raise. If you look at the stats on startup success (exits), funding has a strong positive correlation. There are good and bad reasons to raise capital and many startups do raise for bad reasons, but that doesn’t mean that funding is inherently bad or should be eliminated as an option.

graderjs 5y ago
Peter the Thiel? How very out of character to be pushing fund raising
imgabe 5y ago
What are the odds, exactly? I don’t see where they say that VC funding should be eliminated, just that this is another option that more people are pursuing.
- peterthehacker 5y ago
  This has been analyzed by many, but the stats you see reported often are that 9/10 startups fail while 7/10 venture-backed startups fail [0]. Perhaps the reason why a startup has no investor interest is because the market is too small, so cutting the data by TAM (if possible) might be interesting. We don’t have data for these micro-TAM startups showing whether they succeed more or less than any other startup. But the data we do have does show an advantage to raising money from VC vs. not. But to be clear, my point is that funding should be a more complicated and nuanced discussion. And if there’s a $5M+ potential return, like the author proposes, then there should be investor interest. The question is whether it’s a good idea for the company to raise. [0] https://review42.com/resources/what-percentage-of-startups-fail/ https://review42.com/resources/what-percentage-of-startups-f...
lugged 5y ago
Survivorship bias. One person unicorns don't generally exit in the same way, this whole article was about the problems trying to raise for small one person companies.

hiddencache 5y ago

I suspect this includes outsourcing a whole series of functions from support functions such as finance, accounting, tax and legal, to even what would be considered core functions such as UX, coding etc. Taken to an extreme, the startup could remain a handful of people while benefiting from a much larger team which is not included in the headcount.

ncfausti 5y ago
Sounds a lot like virtual integration. "...you basically stitch together a business with partners that are treated as if they’re inside the company." https://hbr.org/1998/03/the-power-of-virtual-integration-an-interview-with-dell-computers-michael-dell#:~:text=Virtual%20integration%20means%20you%20basically,they're%20inside%20the%20company https://hbr.org/1998/03/the-power-of-virtual-integration-an-....
madamelic 5y ago
In some instances, yes. In others, not really. If you cut out the bloat, planning meetings, etc., you can stand up an MVP pretty quickly while doing the coding yourself. I think most of the tricks are CSS frameworks, re-using parts of old projects, no-code MVP, outsourcing non-tech things. Many of the successful indie founders seem to be non-technical business people who give 0 cares about coding something the right way, so they just smash stuff together without a care to get it out the door.
ryanSrich 5y ago
You should be outsourcing as many of those as possible anyway, even if you aren’t going for the bootstrap play. There’s no strategic reason to have a finance, HR or legal team unless you have 100s of employees. That’s not to say you ignore those things, but there are so many quality SaaS services that do those at a tiny fraction of the cost of an FTE it only makes sense to use them.
matchagaucho 5y ago
That's really the key. A successful one-person SaaS company is effectively leveraging gig economy and contracting out many business functions.

throw0101a 5y ago

IIRC, the dating site Plenty of Fish was a one-man operation for quite a while: > In 2004, Plenty of Fish became a full-time money making business for Markus.[10] He ran the site independently until 2008, when he began hiring other employees at his new Vancouver headquarters. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POF_(dating_website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POF_(dating_website) It didn't quite hit unicorn status ($1B), as he sold it for "only" $500M.

ipaddr 5y ago
Interesting after they were bought they kind of fell off the map. That's typical
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Yea, they were bought by that dating conglomerate, I’m guessing the users have been rolled into one pot, instead of keeping them separate
- ornornor 5y ago
  They also removed a couple of the posts that showed, supported by hard numbers from their analytics, that several things that match.com et al. will sell their users hard on don’t work at all and can even negatively affect your odds of being successful of the site. These posts were deleted shortly after the acquisition but they’re probably still in archive.org etc.
  - paulgb 5y ago
    Heh, the same thing happened to Ok Cupid. (Caches of) one of the posts occasionally resurface on HN, as here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501
    - ornornor 5y ago
      I might be mixing them up, it could very well have been ok Cupid that I was thinking of.

giorgioz 5y ago

I've been a solopreneur boostrapping waiterio.com for 6 years and then 2 more years with 1-3 fulltime team members with a 20k MRR after 8 years. I've chosen the bootstrap SaaS path after working 1 year in Silicon Valley. I thought all my life my dream was to build incredible stuff in Silicon Valley, then I got there and I didn't like it enough. When I was there I felt lonely and tired and sad. Despite having rare skills as Android and iOS developer 10 YEARS AGO my manager assigned me to build landing pages. This was after not passing hiring interviews for Facebook/Google but still getting in one of the big ones. I felt unappreciated and pushed to work a lot on something that wasn't even my specialty. The Silicon Valley is/was a sausage fest and it was very hard dating. When I pitched at events I felt I wasn't being considered at all. I was and I am too afraid that the fact I am Italian and/or a pragmatic and nerdy developer with no salesy wowing pitch skills would let others with little technical skills and a big mouth take all the venture funds. I left the Silicon Valley and started to work on waiterio.com while travelling the world. I lived in 10+ countries for 6 months each, I saw the world, met a lot of interesting people and found love.

wiradikusuma 5y ago
How do you approach your potential customers? I applaud your effort, I was in your shoes. But for your idea (SaaS for restaurants), your competitors probably hire an army of sales because restaurant owners are busy with day-to-day and relatively not high-tech.
- giorgioz 5y ago
  Yes indeed. My (huge amount of) competitors indeed have an army of sales. If you are David and the others are Goliath just don't play the same game they are playing because you are bound to lose. Find out what you are good at and play a completely different game from them. We don't do sales. 8 years ago Waiterio was just a mobile app and got the customers from the app stores. These days we do a lot of content marketing and i18n. Are you a founder from a non English speaking country? I'll be extracting my internal tools for content marketing and i18n. Write me here if you would like to give it a try.

xwdv 5y ago

Any developer through sheer will can mold himself into a one man startup that builds a powerful product that normally requires the efforts of a massive team. Where things typically fall apart is when it comes time for maintenance and support.

granshaw 5y ago
I’m sorry, yes, any dev can build a product, but is it something people will pay money to buy? That is 90% of the problem. If you have to do support, count yourself lucky cause that means you actually have customers

valenterry 5y ago

If I have a SaaS (e.g. website that offers some service) then is there a good service that takes care of the technical part of user registration, payment and user support / CRM? Even if there are services like stripe and Auth0, as a solo developer it takes considerable time to connect all these together to get the basic functionality to actually sell things and integrate it into my product.

bluedevil2k 5y ago
> as a solo developer it takes considerable time to connect all these together Well hopefully it you’re a developer it doesn’t take that long. I just switched a SaaS to Stripe from PayPal last week and it took less than 30 minutes. These SaaS support tools/websites are increasingly easy to use, making time to market for even a solo dev pretty easy.
kolaente 5y ago
Stripe is incredibly good. And then there's stuff like Laravel Spark which handles all the common stuff like accounts and invoicing.
- valenterry 5y ago
  Sounds like I have to install/maintain stuff here myself. I wish there was a solution that doesn't require me to have any additional infrastructure...
cspags 5y ago
https://www.outseta.com/ https://www.outseta.com/ is the best tool I've seen that offers everything you listed.
- valenterry 5y ago
  Wow! That's it! It just looks like they are offering there services mostly for non-developers (low-code / no-code) and I couldn't find anything about whether they have an API that I can use from my own code to check for registered users and if they paid etc. EDIT: nevermind, found it: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/3613332/outseta-rest-api-v1/7TNfr6k#intro https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/3613332/outseta-rest-...

nickjj 5y ago

One thing this article doesn't point out is how beneficial it is to have a decently large highly engaged audience beforehand. ConvertKit is an example of this. The founder started by selling books and then made a course on how to sell books, got a pretty big audience around that and then started to build ConvertKit. Eventually he figured out who he wanted to market ConvertKit to and his prior audience of people wanting to sell things online was a great match. Naturally a lot of people who bought his books and courses are a great fit for his email service because the whole premise of his course on selling books is around building an email list. The books ended up being a lead generator for his SAAS app. That's not to take anything away from Nathan's work. At the end of the day he made a very successful and well deserved business but the specific circumstances around it are a bit different than what this blog post makes it out to be. It was a 10 year journey with multiple good ideas at the right time to get to that point. All of it is documented on Nathan's site. I remember reading some of his posts many years ago.

is0tope 5y ago
This is extremely true. I've read many blog posts about how someone started a side project and bootstrapped it to 10k mrr etc. Invariably when you read closer it goes something like this: "So I had this widely successful blog about X and decided to make a product. I posted about it on my blog and got 1000 sign-ups overnight etc".
- Alacart 5y ago
  I think this gets overblown in the sense that followers often do no equal customers, especially when it's a subscription. obviously yes, having an audience is helpful, but it can also give you false confidence too. They'll tell you your product is amazing, sign up for an early access waitlist, and then often very few of them actually buy because what brought them there was a desire to emotionally support you, not a need for your product. It does help you get the word out though.
  - is0tope 5y ago
    Yes of course I'm not implying it's a panacea. However from my experience getting product market fit is one of the hardest parts of the whole process, and having a ready made audience relevant to your topic is a very nice head start.

mindvirus 5y ago

This is great. One question I've had for a while - do founders typically get one time bonuses or sell their own shares during later funding rounds? I feel like with a lot of these businesses that are successful, there's probably opportunities along the way to sell and make a few million. Especially with unicorn founders I'm often in awe that they stick with it - I'm sure they had opportunities to pocket $100 million and walk away.

TuringNYC 5y ago
Yes, depending on the VC and how the business is going. Here is an example: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/one-year-in-bird-founder-sells-some-shares https://www.theinformation.com/articles/one-year-in-bird-fou... This might be an extreme one, but the Bird founder appears to have cashed out $44m. It makes sense for VCs to let founders cash out a bit -- just so you can be comfortable and focus on hyper-growth of the business rather than making short term decisions. I've heard the amounts are usually more like <3M (enough for a house and car or college for kids) and not like the example above. The more the founder cashes out, theoretically the less incentivized they are to grow the company.
rmah 5y ago
Typically, no. It is not unheard of though.

mtc010170 5y ago

One thing I’ve been wondering about, as someone who’s considering making the switch.. is the role of hiring contractors for things you yourself aren’t a specialist in (ex: for me, design). When I hear “one-person” and read posts like this, they sometimes give the impression that indie hackers do everything themselves.. which I imagine is really not the case. Does anyone have insight into that?

JoiDegn 5y ago
Yes that's right. Almost none of these people have built everything themselves. Design, copy writing, marketing, development, accounting are just some of the things that can be outsourced easily. Source: myself building https://subledger.app https://subledger.app
- mellavora 5y ago
  From the landing page, subledger seems pretty useful. Good success!
  - JoiDegn 5y ago
    we are looking for additional product validation. Would you be interested to tell me a bit more about your situation and what you would consider useful in a call?
Jack000 5y ago
I started out designing everything from scratch, but realized it's 10 times faster to just use a commercial vue/html theme. You don't need custom design, especially if your product is not design-related. It's absolutely possible to do everything yourself. Most skills relevant to indies have a low "skill ceiling" - ie. it's easy to learn just enough to be dangerous.

gennarro 5y ago

>> This piece was editorially supported by HSG, the content firm that helps startups, investors and entrepreneurs become media companies. What does this mean? It’s sponsored content? Or just like a freelance writer?

rexreed 5y ago
The article was "ghost written". Meaning that if you're a founder who has no time or ability to write but want to put out content, HSG will do all / much / some of the writing for you under your name and also promote the content. HSG lists Paddle as a client.

zuhayeer 5y ago

Bootstrapped Levels.fyi up until now to $2m run rate. We’re 2 founders, but I absolutely believe this phenomenon of solo creators is the future. The pros of solo are evident: everything lives in one head / one stakeholder, singularly focused on core value by necessity (separation of concerns, do one thing really well, no sprawl), no meetings Building an audience with strong engagement is replacing the “seed” round so to speak. Don’t need anything else, just an ability to ship and iterate fast.

riku_iki 5y ago
> Building an audience with strong engagement is replacing the “seed” round so to speak. For funded startups this is established area: buy online ads and receive views for your product. How solo can do it efficiently without significant monetary investment into digital marketing?
- motoxpro 5y ago
  podcasts, speaking engagements, blogs, twitter, substack, HN, Product Hunt, Instagram, small communities, early customers, newsletters. The reason digital advertising is so popular with VC backed startups is because they need capacity. If you are starting a bootstrapped startups getting a flywheeling going starting with 50 people is fine.
  - riku_iki 5y ago
    Thank you for advice. I guess I unsuccessfully tried this route, but maybe need to push harder and smarter.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

abz10 5y ago

Lol, this is me, a 100x dev, screwed over by big co employer. Decide to go solo and slowly build a company to compete with them. Started part time 12 years ago. I think I could easily hit $1B valuation within 10 years. It is already super profitable and still growing. Eventually I’ll cost the competitors so much business that it’ll be much cheaper for them to buy me out for $Bs. If not it’ll still throw off $Ms in cash per year.

renewiltord 5y ago
Congratulations. What are you working on?
- abz10 5y ago
  It’s one of those secret but profitable niches.
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    Oh yeah, those. Heard a lot about them. Good luck!
  - everybodyknows 5y ago
    >throw off $Ms in cash per year. >secret What sort of businesses fit within those constraints? The only ones that come to mind are illegal …
    - abz10 5y ago
      Cash, as in free cash flow. Maybe not the best usage of the term, but better than revenue. And secret in that people in this niche don’t advertise the opportunity as new competition would cut into profits.
Rezwoodly 5y ago
Ahhhh, the Internet.. I too am a 100x dev who is on the fast track for a billion dollar pay day

cushychicken 5y ago

I had to tell someone so I'll say it here: the unicorn centaur in the title image disturbs me. XD

DonHopkins 5y ago

"TGV Software" stood for "Two Guys and a Vax", before they eventually hired about 128 more people, bought a few more computers, and were acquired by Cisco in 1996. It was originally an SRI spin-off. I ran into one of the founders at a party in Santa Cruz in the mid-90's, and laughed with him about the great acronym, and asked if he and his buddy had ever gotten around to buying another Vax. He shushed me and told me never to tell anyone what TGV originally stood for! (Oops.) They must have been in negotiations with Cisco at the time. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tgv-software https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tgv-software >TGV Software, Inc. employs more than 130 people and is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. The company develops, markets and supports TCP/IP internetworking software products which enable connectivity between disparate computer systems over local area, enterprise-wide and global computing networks. TGV's principal product line is marketed under the name of MultiNet. MultiNet for Windows integrates a robust suite of TCP/IP applications including a 32-bit VxD kernel, NFS client, FTP client and server, VT100-320 and TN3270 emulations, network printing, Pronto Mail V2.0 electronic mail, Enhanced Mosaic V2.1 web browser and network diagnostics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SRI_International_spin-offs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SRI_International_spin... >TGV: Founded in 1988, this company created communications software and simulation software for VAX computers. TGV stood for "Two Guys and a Vax". The company was sold to Cisco Systems in 1996.

ausbah 5y ago

is this stuff really that new? I feel like I've been reading about solo founders who are able to bootstrap some company into the hundreds of thousands to low millions per year, for several years now on this site what seem new is all the products around it, like "micro private equity"

axegon_ 5y ago

From a personal point of view, I completely disagree here. The one-person thing is just not doable, no matter how hard you believe/try. I've attempted this countless times and my motivation and dedication never cut it, no matter how hard I push. It's an inhumane amount of work for a single person to handle. And there is one specific moment that I've been able to pin-point every single time. I end up making a ton of progress: bootstrapping a development environment, databases, frameworks, containers, yada, yada, yada, I end up building a tons of things and just as I feel extremely happy and motivated, I take a step back and suddenly I see how many small details I need to fix up, as well as how much stuff there is still to be done and how much more would pop up to fix, polish and clear up and even a small project ends up feeling like infinity and depression and frustration kicks in. In my experience having at least one other person is at least a good frustration and prevention mechanism. That said, finding someone who's on board is equally hard.

throwawayboise 5y ago
Never worry about the big picture. It's too easy to get overwhelmed. Sure, have an idea where you want to go, but don't worry about all the steps it will take to get there. Worry about the next thing. And then the next thing. And little by little you will have suddenly made a lot of progress.
- axegon_ 5y ago
  Easier said than done it seems. I reckon I've abandoned at least 7-8 projects I took pretty far in the last decade, everything ended the same way-collecting dust in a repo or on an old drive. At this point even if something interesting comes to my mind, I shrug it off and ignore it or just share it online somewhere or tell someone. Maybe someone else has a stronger will than I do, idk. Still secretly hoping that eventually I'll meet someone as motivated as I can get so we can push each other but seems incredibly unlikely.
  - motoxpro 5y ago
    10 years / 7 or 8 projects is about 1.3 years on average. It takes a long time to build a company and a product as one person. Sounds like you have been giving up a bit prematurely. Or if you would like results in that time, make an MVP instead of trying to build a feature complete product.

MrAwesome 5y ago

Does anyone have a list of good resources / tools / communities for solo creators? I recently decided to take a solo project and run with it. The technical promise is real, and I'm excited about my vision for it. Unfortunately in this context, I've spent all 10+ years of my career in scientific computing and big tech - so despite having a few friends in the startup world, most of this is really new to me, and I don't actually know anyone who has gone the solopreneur / micro-startup route. Any and all tips, tricks, pointers, articles, and advice are welcome - I'm really excited to take this risk, but I'm feeling increasingly clueless about how to handle many of the organizational / non-technical aspects of this process.

ac2u 5y ago
https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/
- MrAwesome 5y ago
  Perfect, thank you. Looks like an invitation code is needed to sign up, if any generous soul would like to send one to glenn.hope[at]protonmail.com I would be forever grateful!

4thethrillofit 5y ago

To all the people saying it’s impossible — I’ve been bootstrapping an analytics company in ecomm space. From launch to 500k ARR took 9 months with almost entirely inbound. (Aka 0 marketing cost) I didn’t have an audience prior or spent any time at all on sites like Reddit. It’s not easy to do by any means, but here’s what I believe are the requirements: - a true generalist: technical, product, sales, design. - deep experience in the industry you are gonna serve. Hanging out on Reddit does NOT get you this. You have to have worked in the industry prior on high level roles. It’s what’ll give you credibility to potential buyers. - design a product and business model that’s niche and painful enough for a large AND expanding TAM. - there’s has to be sufficient dissatisfaction with incumbents. Customers are craving for better solutions and motivated to find one. - you can effectively source and work with contractors to fill the gaps in your skills and time. - the product must have near zero churn. Otherwise the leaky bucket is too much to fill without an actual sales force. This is possible, my business is exactly this. - you know how to be capital efficient and can product low cash outflow consistently. - you are not personally in need of an actual income for at least 3 years. Preferably more. I believe the above are a must for a single bootstrapped founder to create a high growth startup. The optionality it affords you is tremendous and you will stand above the rest. If you are interested in joining me (we are hiring) - lemme know! fei(at)sourcemedium(dotcom)

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
The last point - 3 years of income - is a huge stumbling block for so many (myself included) but it is a trivial hurdle for many VCs. Is there a VC model that says "seed capital for many, and low continuous returns from 30% of investments" It won't return billions but the maths seems sane (I did suggest that there is room globally for a "million startups fund")
- 4thethrillofit 5y ago
  This is why it does make sense to take preseed and seed capital. It gives you the cushion necessary to make the right decisions for the business. Bootstrap to VC is a continuous spectrum as opposed to the black and white decision most would have you believe. There are so many more financing options available to viable businesses than before - startup studios, revenue based financing and many more (eg angel.clearbanc.com)