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My fifth year as a bootstrapped founder

499 points by mtlynch 4y ago

mtlynch 4y ago
Author here! Happy to take any feedback or answer questions about this post.
- testmasterflex 4y ago
  Great post as always Michael! Did you move away from Raspberry now or what does the EE guys do? I don’t have personal experience of outsourcing assembly yet but make sure quality control is flawless before letting that go. I would and will personally fly down to China to set that up. Will be following to see how that process goes. All the best.
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    Thanks for reading! Nope, we're still on Raspberry Pi. It's difficult to move to other hardware because it would mean managing a lot more of the OS stack ourselves, and then we'd still have thousands of users still on Raspberry Pi. I'd like to move to the Pi CM4 because we'd reduce costs and get a lot more control over the hardware, but it's a big up front cost to start over from scratch on a new board.
    - testmasterflex 4y ago
      Sounds like the smartest next step!
- blantonl 4y ago
  Are you doing any work to position your product and service to be acquired?
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    Yeah, I think taking myself out of the critical path and making the business more location-independent will make it more attractive to a buyer if I decide to sell.
- metadat 4y ago
  Thank you for publicly sharing and documenting so much information about this epic quest you're on (I'm sure it's a solid PR move, too :). I wish you all the best and respect your decision to eschew a comparatively cushy and predictable job to take up this risky and challenging endeavor filled with never ending thankless tasks. Godspeed. Edit: Sorry to hear it isn't a big boon on the marketing front. All I can say is I recall seeing TinyPilot at least once before, but now it's much more on my radar. If it could do remote power switching I'd be very keen to keep it in my server rack as the sole point of remote administration (sorry, I'm sure you get dumb feature requests and this is probably just another one.. but I couldn't resist).
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    >Thank you for publicly sharing and documenting so much information about this epic quest you're on (I'm sure it's a solid PR move, too :). Honestly, I don't see much of an impact on sales when my blog posts reach the front page of HN. I'm sure that it helps some, but nothing dramatic. In terms of ROI, there's much better payoff in writing content aimed at the smaller niche of homelab users and IT folks. I mostly write these out of vanity because I think it's fun getting feedback on the process. So, thanks for reading!
  - ganoushoreilly 4y ago
    Remote power switching is what has held me back. Even if it was an additional cost / addon I'd definitely look at picking up a dozen or so. Still I've been following for a while and hope to see some cool improvements over time. EDIT: Actually being a raspberry pi, It might not be hard to build in that feature. I might just grab one today and see.
    - mtlynch 4y ago
      Yeah, remote power switching is definitely doable. It would either be wiring directly into the motherboard's or controlling an external power switch. The challenge is making it user-friendly, supporting it, meeting compliance requirements, etc.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Have you considered retail Or other distribution channels? Do you have a SO, if so what do they think about this experiment
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    Have you considered retail Or other distribution channels? I've reached out to a couple of resellers, but they weren't interested, though I didn't pursue it very heavily. With supply shortages, I can only produce ~200 devices/month, and I can sell that volume on my own, so the resellers wouldn't help much. Maybe next year when the supply is less constrained. Do you have a SO, if so what do they think about this experiment Yep, she helped edit this post! We met when I was a year into bootstrapping, so she kind of knew what she was getting into, and she's been supportive. She worked on the business for the first year when we were quarantined for COVID and doing everything from our house.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y ago
  About page feedback: 1. If you're going to have a headshot, get yourself a professional headshot on the About page. You squinting into the sun in a selfie is nice for a Twitter profile, but you're trying to present a real company w/ a real product here, right? 2. It's clear this story is really tied into your identity right now, but nobody cares about this part on a page about TinyPilot: >> I'm a software developer and worked most of my career at Microsoft and Google, but I quit in 2018 to found a company of my own. I like the focus on your frustrations and how you solved that. The quitting part people could take negatively ("is this guy a quitter? will I receive product support if I buy this?"). Everything else looks pretty solid for a SaaS homepage.
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    Thanks for reading and for the constructive feedback! Yeah, the About page is something I haven't touched much since I first launched the site, and I agree that it feels not quite consistent with the tone of the site or where the company is at this point.
- juanse 4y ago
  Amazing post Michael! I have been following your story for years. I have also a similar project backing, but not as technical as yours. I use also Raspberries for Smart Kiosks that are set to be in restaurants and increase the demand of the most convenient dishes at a time with great photography. I see that you think now of Debian packages as an optimal way for installations in your project. What would you say it is the best way yo keep a Raspberry system "auto-updated"? PD: My skills are way lower than yours. I use mostly Ruby scripts (SystemD) to contact a backend in Rails.
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    Thanks for reading! >What would you say it is the best way yo keep a Raspberry system "auto-updated"? I think Debian packages are better than what I was doing, but if I were starting from scratch, I'd try to use Yocto[0] or NixOS[1]. Take this with a grain of salt, because this is secondhand from another founder who had good experience with Yocto, but from what she told me it's optimized for the case of pushing out updates to embedded devices. One of the pitfalls of Raspberry Pis is that the microSDs are vulnerable to filesystem corruption, which can leave the device unbootable. I believe Yocto protects against that where there are always two bootable partitions, so you failover to the other partition and can recover. [0] https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.yoctoproject.org/ [1] https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/
- deleted 4y ago
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- kevmo314 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience Michael! I found out about TinyPilot a while back ago. I made a similar device for a completely different industry and learned that TinyPilot has nearly the same architecture but a completely different use case. Unfortunately, we weren't able to turn a profit with that device either. It seems streaming video is a tough market to crack :( Our manufacturer in China is a startup as well if you are looking for a connection. He works hard and can give you a good price at smaller scales. I'll send you an email as well but in case anyone else is interested, kevmo314@gmail.com.
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    Cool, thank you!
    - eande 4y ago
      Michael, thank you for sharing your story and experience for TinyPlot from inception starting to scale. As a hardware engineer myself and having been in your shoes, founded 10 years ago a startup and launched the product I know what it takes and how hard it is to reach the point you got to, kudos. This blog mentions that you consider manufacturing in China and drop ship the product. In all likelihood by now you might get PCB/PCBA and/or other parts of it from China, not sure. Outsourcing the whole chain flow is another dimension. Some post here mentioned it already, but the support/expense you will need to provide that is going to be a longer list. Ongoing quality handling remotely, component shortage, part replacements you did not know about, yield, shipping issue, etc it can be real distractions. That is one of the reasons you need some build/ship volume, probably minimum over several hundred units a month to make the whole flow work efficiently. One more thought. I am not sure how you will avoid an actual office for a hardware company assuming you want to continue to grow with product improvements, debug and next generation development. My post is just to give you heads up shifting from in-house build with tight control to outsourcing might not solve all your problems. At least that was my experience and I for one definitely did that outsourcing too early.
- technotony 4y ago
  How have you thought about pricing? I would have thought a small increase in price would make a big difference to your bottom line given the difference between your revenues and profits.
- pyrrhotech 4y ago
  Congrats on your amazing success! 0 to 850k revenue with a hardware product in three years is almost unbelievably amazing. I'm totally ignorant about hardware dev. How does one even go about designing and manufacturing a hardware product like TinyPilot? Do you design in some sort of CAD software and then partner with some sort of factory?
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  Wonderful post, thanks for the courage it took to write this.
yafetn 4y ago
One of the updates I was looking forward to, and congrats on the $800k revenue! This year, I hope to transition assembly to China, where all of our parts originate. I’d have thought people were doing the opposite nowadays — bringing assembly stateside.
- mtlynch 4y ago
  I'd love to work with US vendors because that would solve a lot of problems, but I tried twice in 2022, and it went disastrously both times. I tried working with a US vendor on assembling PCBs, and the soldering was incredibly sloppy. They repaired it for free, but it was a month delay when we didn't have a lot of time to spare. I gave them another chance and the next batch they did had a defect rate of 30% whereas our Chinese vendor's rate is <1%, so I bailed on them at that point. I also tried working with US-based sheet metal vendors on making enclosures for my product, and it cost 6x as much as the Chinese competitors for drastically poorer quality.[0] [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-manufacturing-quality-makes-a-huge-difference https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-...
  - StayTrue 4y ago
    Thanks for your post and sharing your progress. I look forward to the next one. As a little bootstrapped startup, I can relate. I've also had on-shore production and sourcing issues that couldn't be resolved without unexpected costs/delays. And, culturally, Chinese vendors seem more straightforward or at least aligned with small makers. Their starting point is what they can offer rather than qualifying you as a customer.
  - dazhbog 4y ago
    I ran my startup 7 years in China doing pcba, injection molding etc. The speed is really amazing. Now trying a more hybrid model though.. Contact me if you need tips!
    - mtlynch 4y ago
      Oh, I'd love that! I'll reach out.
tashoecraft 4y ago
It's awesome to have been able to follow this journey from the beginning. Reading your blog posts, to your announcement, to your yearly posts. Keep up the great work.
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Thanks for reading and for sticking with it!
cdiamand 4y ago
I remember chatting with you about your recipe app at the IndieHackers meet up in NYC. Man, what a journey from there to here!
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Hey Cory! Good to hear from you! I miss those early meetups. That was a great group. Thanks for reading!
jimhi 4y ago
Hey Michael, been following for awhile now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21882791#21883808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21882791#21883808 Many entrepreneurs dream of being able to get to nearly 1 million in annual revenue, very surprised you only are taking 6k. Hopefully you won't spend much more on redesigning and web design? 30k is an insane amount for a startup to spend on web design. It sounds like you are happy with it but I hope you do not continue to spend that next year. It looks like Tinypilot is mostly a one time purchase. I could imagine there are software addons many of your customers go through - like taking a screenshot every x seconds and sending to aws that you could eventually for an extra cost (or even monthly subscription) Just thinking you have something nice here and it hardware will always need to be improved and redesigned so maybe you can continue to add nice products on top of this with healthy margins. I look forward to reading next year when you finally pay yourself a decent salary from this.
- deleted 4y ago
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- mtlynch 4y ago
  Thanks for reading! Yeah, we've thought about add-ons but haven't found anything yet that would be a great match. One of the most common requests is cloud access. We teased the idea in a blog post,[0] but not that many people signed up, and a lot of customers balked at the idea of $30/month when Tailscale and friends are free. [0] https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/tinypilot-cloud-waitlist https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/tinypilot-cloud-waitlist
moorg 4y ago
Five years in, no salary, and not enough earnings to pay for basic living expenses? That sheds a pretty poor light on venturing out on one's own. The author seems like a pretty bright person, and the About Me page lists an ivy league education and some prior work experience. What prospects, then, would someone from a more humble background have? Or is the point of the "bootstrapped experiment" not to earn a basic living? The media paints entrepreneuship as a high calling and "founders" are seen as stars of the show, but is the reality much bleaker?
- atentaten 4y ago
  It's true that most people can't afford to to not have enough earnings to pay for basic living expenses while pursuing the entrepreneurship path. The middle ground would be to keep a day job as you go along that path.
  - toyg 4y ago
    moonlighting is very hard, and typically means your business will not get the best of your focus and energy. It also fosters an unhealthy and antisocial attitude; people need downtime to avoid burnout.
- qup 4y ago
  > Or is the point of the "bootstrapped experiment" not to earn a basic living? With no offense to the methods of this founder, no, I don't think that's the point of his (yet?). Maybe an eventual goal, but he clearly has no need for immediate profits, he'd rather do a good job with the product.
- testmasterflex 4y ago
  If you are going to bootstrap a hardware company then this is the reality. And most companies never even get this far.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  Domain expertise matters. Solving a problem for businesses with software is what most successful tech companies are doing - but it's very difficult if you don't have some insight into the process and problems of some group of businesses. Observations as a regular human worked in the late 90's and around 2010 because there was lots of obvious stuff stuff to do when the web was taking off and mobile taking off. Outside those windows...domain expertise.
ahstilde 4y ago
Why aren't you asking for help? If this is like a public investor update, you should explicitly call out where your network could help you. "Our number one problem is finding a reliable partner in China. If you have over 5 years experience creating products like this, contact me at XYZ, I would love to hear your advice."
avinassh 4y ago
small nit: 100k+ docker pulls does not mean 100k installs, it could be running in some CI/CD pipeline. otherwise a great post!
- mtlynch 4y ago
  It's not 100k users, but those are installs, even if it's in a CI/CD pipeline.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Installing to an temporary VM that gets destroyed 2 minutes later is technically an install. But then the word becomes a bit meaningless.
deleted 4y ago
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robomartin 4y ago
Please do not take the following as criticism, just observations based on my own experience and hopefully guidance for others wishing to venture in this direction. First, to state the obvious: Hardware is hard. I have been doing hardware for forty years. I know. The cash requirements to build and sustain a hardware business can be brutally painful if you are bootstrapping. One of the problems I see when reading about solo founders in the hardware domain is that they launch into the business without having 100% of the skills necessary to deliver the product. When I built my first hardware startup I was able to complete all of the electrical engineering, firmware/software engineering, mechanical and had a pretty solid grounding in manufacturing. In looking at the profit statement for the OP's startup, I see $360K in costs that could have been avoided. That is, payroll, electrical engineering and web design. That's a ton of money. My guess is the raw materials costs ($330K) likely is high as well. Hard to say without having greater visibility into the design. I'll say this, I would not be surprised if the cost could be cut in half by going to a reputable contract manufacturer in China. That's just reality, sorry. The first quarter my product went on the market we (I) sold $650K of that product. The website didn't look particularly great, but it worked. I got better at web design over the years and improved it, eventually handing it off to someone else. At that point we were nicely profitable and I had several employees. The point is, if the product solves a problem the website almost doesn't matter. I always think of Craigs List as and example of that. It looks like the OP devices sell for, rounding it, about $400. Which means 2022's sales amount to about 2,000 units. That's great, but the profits got eaten-up by having to pay people for skills. A device like this can be assembled and delivered 100% without having to hire a single person. I recently had a case where I had to redesign a board three times due to component availability issues. It cost me nothing to do that work (in terms of cash), just a few nights and weekends of my time. That's the power of being able to do the work yourself. My take is that solo founders, particularly if bootstrapped, must restrict their venture to whatever their competencies might be. If they don't, they will have to use cash to buy that expertise, which can make the difference between a nice grow path and extended pain and agony. That said. Good job! Hardware startups can be horribly painful. I am currently helping a hardware startup that has to spend a million or two building prototypes before they can even hope to sell their product. Very different from being able to code-up a web product on a laptop in the dorm where pizza might be your greatest expense. It takes a special kind of personality to endure entrepreneurship in general, hardware entrepreneurs are on a different class altogether (which could mean we are amazing or we are absolutely demented...I think I am demented).
varispeed 4y ago
> FCC/CE compliant How did you go about that? All I know is that start ups just self-certify, based on the fact that components they use are already certified and "it's going to be okay" attitude. Some start ups do some basic in-house checks (some that have more funding can go for pre-compliance tests), but never heard of any small business actually commissioning full compliance tests. Something like this probably would require selling both kidneys and a house and made the whole business unprofitable - also considering the fact that sellers in China if they copy a product, don't need to do any compliance checks (in practice, because nobody cares).
- mtlynch 4y ago
  I work with a US-based compliance testing lab. It was $7k to do both FCC and CE testing. I'll share the name over email if you'd like. I also talked to UL, who's like the gold standard for compliance testing, but they were pretty hard to deal with and wanted something in the $20-30k range.
botswana99 4y ago
Long term technology bootstrapping founder here. Paying yourself is very important. You may need to work for free for a while but when you get your first paying customer pay yourself a little salary. And when you get a second customer, pay yourself some more. Try to get a near market salary before you hire your first employee. Corporate and your own founder/personal longevity is the path to success.
- indymike 4y ago
  There's an old rule in small business: "Pay yourself first." It means, make sure you allocate money to pay yourself before paying everything else. Once you are used to it, it makes it a lot easier to get to something that seems like market rate.
  - skeeter2020 4y ago
    This "rule" falls down pretty quick IME. It's more like Taxes > Employees > Suppliers > Yourself.
    - dceddia 4y ago
      I’ve always thought of this rule (and the similar Profit First strategy, which I personally follow) as more of a guiding principle. When taxes, salaries, and expenses come due, those need to be a priority, so before any money flows in or out, have a plan for how to set your own salary at X% while also meeting those commitments.
    - onlypositive 4y ago
      If the rule falls down it's a sign your business isn't going to work. That's the entire point of the rule. It's supposed to highlight when you're beating a dead horse.
    - indymike 4y ago
      The reason for the rule is to make sure there is ample planning to make sure you don’t fall to the bottom of the priority list. It is also to have an aversion to letting business get to a state where you have to forgo getting paid.
blobbers 4y ago
Great post! Thanks for sharing - very inspiring info on life as a founder. It seems like he picked a specific solvable 'small' problem and has built a solution. Great idea!
zhi086 4y ago
Everything is a struggle, but then everything is a victory.
enos_feedler 4y ago
thank goodness for those credit card rewards
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Haha, thanks. In my first few years, they were my main source of revenue.
71a54xd 4y ago
The fact that you didn't comment on this yourself shilling TinyPilot is another glaring indicator that running a business might not be something you're cut out for. I can't manage to get a job at Google though so obviously we all have something we're really good at. Posting here is FREE advertising, (I OWN a TinyPilot) why not include "building TinyPilot" or something "Raspi KVM" in the title? This is the lowest hanging fruit.
- calculated 4y ago
  Maybe the guy has a different approach to marketing. I get your point but I always try to see from the other’s person perspective.
siliconc0w 4y ago
Don't most modern systems have baked in lights out management with kvm? I think there was even an open api. So it's a pretty niche hobbyist old system market that already seems price sensitive and if want to be able to powercycle you'd need another solution anyway. Numbers are pretty grim but hardware is hard, esp bootstrapped. It seems like you're definitely playing on hard mode a bit.
beambot 4y ago
Looks like TinyPilot was started in 2020, so it's really $0 => $850k in sales in less than 3-years with a significant hardware element. That's quite an accomplishment - congratulations! Seems like the next big inflection point is getting off the single-shot hardware sales & adding an enterprise-style SaaS upsell. Software updates & cloud offerings seem like natural starting points. Needn't be anything fancy -- even if it's just an out-of-the-box wrapper around Tailscale. Add on SOC2 certification & SSO, and you'd easily be able to command enterprise pricing (e.g. extra $100-$300/yr/device).
- nikanj 4y ago
  And in 5 years we’re back to where we started from: A KVM would be occassionally useful for my job, but it comes with a $400/seat/mo mandatory subscription, with a minimum of 12 months and 20 seats
  - beambot 4y ago
    If an enterprise tier means that we get to keep a low-cost individual offering and OP gets to actually pay himself a salary, I see that as a net win...
sasakrsmanovic2 4y ago
"Don’t become anyone’s smallest client" What a great advice. Very well put - thanks!
deleted 4y ago
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schizo89 4y ago
What's the next step for a solo founder after an exit? An open source Dev?
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  Rinse and repeat I imagine for many.
plasma 4y ago
Hey Michael, congrats on your success so far, you have built a community and product people are buying which is already a great achievement. My experience as a tech founder (software) reading your blog (thanks for sharing) and your Cloud feedback at https://forum.tinypilotkvm.com/-163/tinypilot-cloud-feedback https://forum.tinypilotkvm.com/-163/tinypilot-cloud-feedback is that you need to dig deeper into requirements and your user personas, and what combination of product and software adjustments reach an enterprise / professional market that are happy to pay recurring subscription amounts to you because they receive benefits and value. Be careful you don’t set out to build and shape software entirely focused on users that don’t want to pay (because they have simpler requirements and free options) and you then don’t offer value to enterprises that needed different features because your talking to hobbyists instead of professionals with expensive problems they would pay to have solved. You’ve got hobbyists that may not pay $30/month for a subscription, but to me they aren’t your target audience for a new revenue stream, what’s it look like if you focus your efforts in customising the hardware / cloud software to support enterprise scenarios? Can you be doing Zoom calls with a few of your users in the professional space about what problem they wish TinyPilot could be solving that they could be paying for? Look at the feedback from Reeman and Larry in the above forum post, they’re asking for enterprise features that you’d be best positioned to solve and charge for (and a lot more than $30 per month), schedule calls with them and dig into their problems further, build for them, so they can order 100 devices and put them under cloud management for work, not the hobbyist that has no budget and wants different features.
rexreed 4y ago
At what point does a minimally positive income-generating concern become a hobby? I know many people who collect and sell Magic cards and make roughly the same amount net, but they wouldn't consider themselves bootstrapped founders. You can't live on $6k a year.
manv1 4y ago
Hardware is hard. Manufacturers in China have a MOQ that tends to be high, and the chance of them screwing you is high. And the process of hardware is harder. You have to handle bootstrapping, provisioning, firmware, updates, configuration, etc. You have to worry about the vendor substituting other parts in (yes, it happens more often than you'd think). Component failures. Heck, sourcing components is apparently a PITA. Before, it used to be $1 in components = $10 in end-user cost. I think that multiple is smaller now. But with all that said, hardware can make money. And it provides lock-in for you. I'd love an article about how you got the hardware side up and running: finding a manufacturer, features, design, etc.
nsarafa 4y ago
Why is hiring a sales team not mentioned here? Feels like the obvious next step and would be more impactful than focusing on increasing margins
nikisweeting 4y ago
The part about learning Debian packaging to replace Bash+Ansible rings so true to me. Sounds a bit like this flow played out yet again: https://docs.monadical.com/s/against-curl-sh#A-tale-as-old-as-time https://docs.monadical.com/s/against-curl-sh#A-tale-as-old-a...
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Hey, Nick! Good to hear from you again. Yeah, that blog post definitely resonates with me. As I've been learning about Debian packaging, there are so many times I think, "Oh, why was I reinventing what Debian does really well?" Part of it is also just getting lost in the local maxmium of Ansible. I kept feeling like, "Well, I'm not reinventing the wheel. Ansible has a pre-built module for creating users / installing dependencies / installing services, but then the Debian package manager does it so much better and faster.
  - nikisweeting 4y ago
    Howdy friend! I've loved following your progress with these posts over the years :) Ansible is definitely more ergonomic than Debian packaging still. I hope someday we get a better pipline for deb/pkg that's closer to yaml/declarative-style config that Ansible offers. Despite packaging for deb for 3 years now I still have no clue how to do it by memory, I have to check my own docs every time.
ivanech 4y ago
Congratulations on 2022 revenue, and thank you for sharing! Your blog posts are genuinely inspirational because of how honest you’ve been about your mistakes. I remember reading your first post about bootstrapping and thinking that you were spending a lot of time on weird products and making rash decisions with money. I did not think you’d last long. Very happy to be wrong. Those early years pre-TinyPilot are what make this success inspiring: they’re proof that you don’t need to immediately start out as a product or business genius to build a real company. It’s an antidote to the “oh I should learn more before starting” attitude that stops me. I really hope this doesn’t come off like a backhanded “if this idiot could do it, anyone can” comment, because that’s not how I feel. Just trying to express real admiration for your transparency, perseverance, and now success.
youssefabdelm 4y ago
> They’d never feel overworked nor underworked, and there’d be no idle time. Haha... the thought of someone being 'underworked'
marc_io 4y ago
> They won’t give you a direct link to your file You can do this with Dropbox by simply changing the 'www' in the URL to 'dl', and removing the same 'dl' parameter at the end of the link. Example: Original link https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxxxxxxxxx/file.zip?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxxxxxxxxx/file.zip?dl=0 Direct download link: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/xxxxxxxxxx/file.zip https://dl.dropbox.com/s/xxxxxxxxxx/file.zip

499 points by mtlynch 4y ago

mtlynch 4y ago

Author here! Happy to take any feedback or answer questions about this post.

testmasterflex 4y ago
Great post as always Michael! Did you move away from Raspberry now or what does the EE guys do? I don’t have personal experience of outsourcing assembly yet but make sure quality control is flawless before letting that go. I would and will personally fly down to China to set that up. Will be following to see how that process goes. All the best.
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Thanks for reading! Nope, we're still on Raspberry Pi. It's difficult to move to other hardware because it would mean managing a lot more of the OS stack ourselves, and then we'd still have thousands of users still on Raspberry Pi. I'd like to move to the Pi CM4 because we'd reduce costs and get a lot more control over the hardware, but it's a big up front cost to start over from scratch on a new board.
  - testmasterflex 4y ago
    Sounds like the smartest next step!
blantonl 4y ago
Are you doing any work to position your product and service to be acquired?
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Yeah, I think taking myself out of the critical path and making the business more location-independent will make it more attractive to a buyer if I decide to sell.
metadat 4y ago
Thank you for publicly sharing and documenting so much information about this epic quest you're on (I'm sure it's a solid PR move, too :). I wish you all the best and respect your decision to eschew a comparatively cushy and predictable job to take up this risky and challenging endeavor filled with never ending thankless tasks. Godspeed. Edit: Sorry to hear it isn't a big boon on the marketing front. All I can say is I recall seeing TinyPilot at least once before, but now it's much more on my radar. If it could do remote power switching I'd be very keen to keep it in my server rack as the sole point of remote administration (sorry, I'm sure you get dumb feature requests and this is probably just another one.. but I couldn't resist).
- mtlynch 4y ago
  >Thank you for publicly sharing and documenting so much information about this epic quest you're on (I'm sure it's a solid PR move, too :). Honestly, I don't see much of an impact on sales when my blog posts reach the front page of HN. I'm sure that it helps some, but nothing dramatic. In terms of ROI, there's much better payoff in writing content aimed at the smaller niche of homelab users and IT folks. I mostly write these out of vanity because I think it's fun getting feedback on the process. So, thanks for reading!
- ganoushoreilly 4y ago
  Remote power switching is what has held me back. Even if it was an additional cost / addon I'd definitely look at picking up a dozen or so. Still I've been following for a while and hope to see some cool improvements over time. EDIT: Actually being a raspberry pi, It might not be hard to build in that feature. I might just grab one today and see.
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    Yeah, remote power switching is definitely doable. It would either be wiring directly into the motherboard's or controlling an external power switch. The challenge is making it user-friendly, supporting it, meeting compliance requirements, etc.
moneywoes 4y ago
Have you considered retail Or other distribution channels? Do you have a SO, if so what do they think about this experiment
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Have you considered retail Or other distribution channels? I've reached out to a couple of resellers, but they weren't interested, though I didn't pursue it very heavily. With supply shortages, I can only produce ~200 devices/month, and I can sell that volume on my own, so the resellers wouldn't help much. Maybe next year when the supply is less constrained. Do you have a SO, if so what do they think about this experiment Yep, she helped edit this post! We met when I was a year into bootstrapping, so she kind of knew what she was getting into, and she's been supportive. She worked on the business for the first year when we were quarantined for COVID and doing everything from our house.
dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y ago
About page feedback: 1. If you're going to have a headshot, get yourself a professional headshot on the About page. You squinting into the sun in a selfie is nice for a Twitter profile, but you're trying to present a real company w/ a real product here, right? 2. It's clear this story is really tied into your identity right now, but nobody cares about this part on a page about TinyPilot: >> I'm a software developer and worked most of my career at Microsoft and Google, but I quit in 2018 to found a company of my own. I like the focus on your frustrations and how you solved that. The quitting part people could take negatively ("is this guy a quitter? will I receive product support if I buy this?"). Everything else looks pretty solid for a SaaS homepage.
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Thanks for reading and for the constructive feedback! Yeah, the About page is something I haven't touched much since I first launched the site, and I agree that it feels not quite consistent with the tone of the site or where the company is at this point.
juanse 4y ago
Amazing post Michael! I have been following your story for years. I have also a similar project backing, but not as technical as yours. I use also Raspberries for Smart Kiosks that are set to be in restaurants and increase the demand of the most convenient dishes at a time with great photography. I see that you think now of Debian packages as an optimal way for installations in your project. What would you say it is the best way yo keep a Raspberry system "auto-updated"? PD: My skills are way lower than yours. I use mostly Ruby scripts (SystemD) to contact a backend in Rails.
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Thanks for reading! >What would you say it is the best way yo keep a Raspberry system "auto-updated"? I think Debian packages are better than what I was doing, but if I were starting from scratch, I'd try to use Yocto[0] or NixOS[1]. Take this with a grain of salt, because this is secondhand from another founder who had good experience with Yocto, but from what she told me it's optimized for the case of pushing out updates to embedded devices. One of the pitfalls of Raspberry Pis is that the microSDs are vulnerable to filesystem corruption, which can leave the device unbootable. I believe Yocto protects against that where there are always two bootable partitions, so you failover to the other partition and can recover. [0] https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.yoctoproject.org/ [1] https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/
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kevmo314 4y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience Michael! I found out about TinyPilot a while back ago. I made a similar device for a completely different industry and learned that TinyPilot has nearly the same architecture but a completely different use case. Unfortunately, we weren't able to turn a profit with that device either. It seems streaming video is a tough market to crack :( Our manufacturer in China is a startup as well if you are looking for a connection. He works hard and can give you a good price at smaller scales. I'll send you an email as well but in case anyone else is interested, kevmo314@gmail.com.
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Cool, thank you!
  - eande 4y ago
    Michael, thank you for sharing your story and experience for TinyPlot from inception starting to scale. As a hardware engineer myself and having been in your shoes, founded 10 years ago a startup and launched the product I know what it takes and how hard it is to reach the point you got to, kudos. This blog mentions that you consider manufacturing in China and drop ship the product. In all likelihood by now you might get PCB/PCBA and/or other parts of it from China, not sure. Outsourcing the whole chain flow is another dimension. Some post here mentioned it already, but the support/expense you will need to provide that is going to be a longer list. Ongoing quality handling remotely, component shortage, part replacements you did not know about, yield, shipping issue, etc it can be real distractions. That is one of the reasons you need some build/ship volume, probably minimum over several hundred units a month to make the whole flow work efficiently. One more thought. I am not sure how you will avoid an actual office for a hardware company assuming you want to continue to grow with product improvements, debug and next generation development. My post is just to give you heads up shifting from in-house build with tight control to outsourcing might not solve all your problems. At least that was my experience and I for one definitely did that outsourcing too early.
technotony 4y ago
How have you thought about pricing? I would have thought a small increase in price would make a big difference to your bottom line given the difference between your revenues and profits.
pyrrhotech 4y ago
Congrats on your amazing success! 0 to 850k revenue with a hardware product in three years is almost unbelievably amazing. I'm totally ignorant about hardware dev. How does one even go about designing and manufacturing a hardware product like TinyPilot? Do you design in some sort of CAD software and then partner with some sort of factory?
hummus_bae 4y ago
Wonderful post, thanks for the courage it took to write this.

yafetn 4y ago

One of the updates I was looking forward to, and congrats on the $800k revenue! This year, I hope to transition assembly to China, where all of our parts originate. I’d have thought people were doing the opposite nowadays — bringing assembly stateside.

mtlynch 4y ago
I'd love to work with US vendors because that would solve a lot of problems, but I tried twice in 2022, and it went disastrously both times. I tried working with a US vendor on assembling PCBs, and the soldering was incredibly sloppy. They repaired it for free, but it was a month delay when we didn't have a lot of time to spare. I gave them another chance and the next batch they did had a defect rate of 30% whereas our Chinese vendor's rate is <1%, so I bailed on them at that point. I also tried working with US-based sheet metal vendors on making enclosures for my product, and it cost 6x as much as the Chinese competitors for drastically poorer quality.[0] [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-manufacturing-quality-makes-a-huge-difference https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-...
- StayTrue 4y ago
  Thanks for your post and sharing your progress. I look forward to the next one. As a little bootstrapped startup, I can relate. I've also had on-shore production and sourcing issues that couldn't be resolved without unexpected costs/delays. And, culturally, Chinese vendors seem more straightforward or at least aligned with small makers. Their starting point is what they can offer rather than qualifying you as a customer.
- dazhbog 4y ago
  I ran my startup 7 years in China doing pcba, injection molding etc. The speed is really amazing. Now trying a more hybrid model though.. Contact me if you need tips!
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    Oh, I'd love that! I'll reach out.

tashoecraft 4y ago

It's awesome to have been able to follow this journey from the beginning. Reading your blog posts, to your announcement, to your yearly posts. Keep up the great work.

mtlynch 4y ago
Thanks for reading and for sticking with it!

cdiamand 4y ago

I remember chatting with you about your recipe app at the IndieHackers meet up in NYC. Man, what a journey from there to here!

mtlynch 4y ago
Hey Cory! Good to hear from you! I miss those early meetups. That was a great group. Thanks for reading!

jimhi 4y ago

Hey Michael, been following for awhile now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21882791#21883808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21882791#21883808 Many entrepreneurs dream of being able to get to nearly 1 million in annual revenue, very surprised you only are taking 6k. Hopefully you won't spend much more on redesigning and web design? 30k is an insane amount for a startup to spend on web design. It sounds like you are happy with it but I hope you do not continue to spend that next year. It looks like Tinypilot is mostly a one time purchase. I could imagine there are software addons many of your customers go through - like taking a screenshot every x seconds and sending to aws that you could eventually for an extra cost (or even monthly subscription) Just thinking you have something nice here and it hardware will always need to be improved and redesigned so maybe you can continue to add nice products on top of this with healthy margins. I look forward to reading next year when you finally pay yourself a decent salary from this.

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mtlynch 4y ago
Thanks for reading! Yeah, we've thought about add-ons but haven't found anything yet that would be a great match. One of the most common requests is cloud access. We teased the idea in a blog post,[0] but not that many people signed up, and a lot of customers balked at the idea of $30/month when Tailscale and friends are free. [0] https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/tinypilot-cloud-waitlist https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/tinypilot-cloud-waitlist

moorg 4y ago

Five years in, no salary, and not enough earnings to pay for basic living expenses? That sheds a pretty poor light on venturing out on one's own. The author seems like a pretty bright person, and the About Me page lists an ivy league education and some prior work experience. What prospects, then, would someone from a more humble background have? Or is the point of the "bootstrapped experiment" not to earn a basic living? The media paints entrepreneuship as a high calling and "founders" are seen as stars of the show, but is the reality much bleaker?

atentaten 4y ago
It's true that most people can't afford to to not have enough earnings to pay for basic living expenses while pursuing the entrepreneurship path. The middle ground would be to keep a day job as you go along that path.
- toyg 4y ago
  moonlighting is very hard, and typically means your business will not get the best of your focus and energy. It also fosters an unhealthy and antisocial attitude; people need downtime to avoid burnout.
qup 4y ago
> Or is the point of the "bootstrapped experiment" not to earn a basic living? With no offense to the methods of this founder, no, I don't think that's the point of his (yet?). Maybe an eventual goal, but he clearly has no need for immediate profits, he'd rather do a good job with the product.
testmasterflex 4y ago
If you are going to bootstrap a hardware company then this is the reality. And most companies never even get this far.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
Domain expertise matters. Solving a problem for businesses with software is what most successful tech companies are doing - but it's very difficult if you don't have some insight into the process and problems of some group of businesses. Observations as a regular human worked in the late 90's and around 2010 because there was lots of obvious stuff stuff to do when the web was taking off and mobile taking off. Outside those windows...domain expertise.

ahstilde 4y ago

Why aren't you asking for help? If this is like a public investor update, you should explicitly call out where your network could help you. "Our number one problem is finding a reliable partner in China. If you have over 5 years experience creating products like this, contact me at XYZ, I would love to hear your advice."

avinassh 4y ago

small nit: 100k+ docker pulls does not mean 100k installs, it could be running in some CI/CD pipeline. otherwise a great post!

mtlynch 4y ago
It's not 100k users, but those are installs, even if it's in a CI/CD pipeline.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Installing to an temporary VM that gets destroyed 2 minutes later is technically an install. But then the word becomes a bit meaningless.

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robomartin 4y ago

Please do not take the following as criticism, just observations based on my own experience and hopefully guidance for others wishing to venture in this direction. First, to state the obvious: Hardware is hard. I have been doing hardware for forty years. I know. The cash requirements to build and sustain a hardware business can be brutally painful if you are bootstrapping. One of the problems I see when reading about solo founders in the hardware domain is that they launch into the business without having 100% of the skills necessary to deliver the product. When I built my first hardware startup I was able to complete all of the electrical engineering, firmware/software engineering, mechanical and had a pretty solid grounding in manufacturing. In looking at the profit statement for the OP's startup, I see $360K in costs that could have been avoided. That is, payroll, electrical engineering and web design. That's a ton of money. My guess is the raw materials costs ($330K) likely is high as well. Hard to say without having greater visibility into the design. I'll say this, I would not be surprised if the cost could be cut in half by going to a reputable contract manufacturer in China. That's just reality, sorry. The first quarter my product went on the market we (I) sold $650K of that product. The website didn't look particularly great, but it worked. I got better at web design over the years and improved it, eventually handing it off to someone else. At that point we were nicely profitable and I had several employees. The point is, if the product solves a problem the website almost doesn't matter. I always think of Craigs List as and example of that. It looks like the OP devices sell for, rounding it, about $400. Which means 2022's sales amount to about 2,000 units. That's great, but the profits got eaten-up by having to pay people for skills. A device like this can be assembled and delivered 100% without having to hire a single person. I recently had a case where I had to redesign a board three times due to component availability issues. It cost me nothing to do that work (in terms of cash), just a few nights and weekends of my time. That's the power of being able to do the work yourself. My take is that solo founders, particularly if bootstrapped, must restrict their venture to whatever their competencies might be. If they don't, they will have to use cash to buy that expertise, which can make the difference between a nice grow path and extended pain and agony. That said. Good job! Hardware startups can be horribly painful. I am currently helping a hardware startup that has to spend a million or two building prototypes before they can even hope to sell their product. Very different from being able to code-up a web product on a laptop in the dorm where pizza might be your greatest expense. It takes a special kind of personality to endure entrepreneurship in general, hardware entrepreneurs are on a different class altogether (which could mean we are amazing or we are absolutely demented...I think I am demented).

varispeed 4y ago

> FCC/CE compliant How did you go about that? All I know is that start ups just self-certify, based on the fact that components they use are already certified and "it's going to be okay" attitude. Some start ups do some basic in-house checks (some that have more funding can go for pre-compliance tests), but never heard of any small business actually commissioning full compliance tests. Something like this probably would require selling both kidneys and a house and made the whole business unprofitable - also considering the fact that sellers in China if they copy a product, don't need to do any compliance checks (in practice, because nobody cares).

mtlynch 4y ago
I work with a US-based compliance testing lab. It was $7k to do both FCC and CE testing. I'll share the name over email if you'd like. I also talked to UL, who's like the gold standard for compliance testing, but they were pretty hard to deal with and wanted something in the $20-30k range.

botswana99 4y ago

Long term technology bootstrapping founder here. Paying yourself is very important. You may need to work for free for a while but when you get your first paying customer pay yourself a little salary. And when you get a second customer, pay yourself some more. Try to get a near market salary before you hire your first employee. Corporate and your own founder/personal longevity is the path to success.

indymike 4y ago
There's an old rule in small business: "Pay yourself first." It means, make sure you allocate money to pay yourself before paying everything else. Once you are used to it, it makes it a lot easier to get to something that seems like market rate.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  This "rule" falls down pretty quick IME. It's more like Taxes > Employees > Suppliers > Yourself.
  - dceddia 4y ago
    I’ve always thought of this rule (and the similar Profit First strategy, which I personally follow) as more of a guiding principle. When taxes, salaries, and expenses come due, those need to be a priority, so before any money flows in or out, have a plan for how to set your own salary at X% while also meeting those commitments.
  - onlypositive 4y ago
    If the rule falls down it's a sign your business isn't going to work. That's the entire point of the rule. It's supposed to highlight when you're beating a dead horse.
  - indymike 4y ago
    The reason for the rule is to make sure there is ample planning to make sure you don’t fall to the bottom of the priority list. It is also to have an aversion to letting business get to a state where you have to forgo getting paid.

blobbers 4y ago

Great post! Thanks for sharing - very inspiring info on life as a founder. It seems like he picked a specific solvable 'small' problem and has built a solution. Great idea!

zhi086 4y ago

Everything is a struggle, but then everything is a victory.

enos_feedler 4y ago

thank goodness for those credit card rewards

mtlynch 4y ago
Haha, thanks. In my first few years, they were my main source of revenue.

71a54xd 4y ago

The fact that you didn't comment on this yourself shilling TinyPilot is another glaring indicator that running a business might not be something you're cut out for. I can't manage to get a job at Google though so obviously we all have something we're really good at. Posting here is FREE advertising, (I OWN a TinyPilot) why not include "building TinyPilot" or something "Raspi KVM" in the title? This is the lowest hanging fruit.

calculated 4y ago
Maybe the guy has a different approach to marketing. I get your point but I always try to see from the other’s person perspective.

siliconc0w 4y ago

Don't most modern systems have baked in lights out management with kvm? I think there was even an open api. So it's a pretty niche hobbyist old system market that already seems price sensitive and if want to be able to powercycle you'd need another solution anyway. Numbers are pretty grim but hardware is hard, esp bootstrapped. It seems like you're definitely playing on hard mode a bit.

beambot 4y ago

Looks like TinyPilot was started in 2020, so it's really $0 => $850k in sales in less than 3-years with a significant hardware element. That's quite an accomplishment - congratulations! Seems like the next big inflection point is getting off the single-shot hardware sales & adding an enterprise-style SaaS upsell. Software updates & cloud offerings seem like natural starting points. Needn't be anything fancy -- even if it's just an out-of-the-box wrapper around Tailscale. Add on SOC2 certification & SSO, and you'd easily be able to command enterprise pricing (e.g. extra $100-$300/yr/device).

nikanj 4y ago
And in 5 years we’re back to where we started from: A KVM would be occassionally useful for my job, but it comes with a $400/seat/mo mandatory subscription, with a minimum of 12 months and 20 seats
- beambot 4y ago
  If an enterprise tier means that we get to keep a low-cost individual offering and OP gets to actually pay himself a salary, I see that as a net win...

sasakrsmanovic2 4y ago

"Don’t become anyone’s smallest client" What a great advice. Very well put - thanks!

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schizo89 4y ago

What's the next step for a solo founder after an exit? An open source Dev?

dinkleberg 4y ago
Rinse and repeat I imagine for many.

plasma 4y ago

Hey Michael, congrats on your success so far, you have built a community and product people are buying which is already a great achievement. My experience as a tech founder (software) reading your blog (thanks for sharing) and your Cloud feedback at https://forum.tinypilotkvm.com/-163/tinypilot-cloud-feedback https://forum.tinypilotkvm.com/-163/tinypilot-cloud-feedback is that you need to dig deeper into requirements and your user personas, and what combination of product and software adjustments reach an enterprise / professional market that are happy to pay recurring subscription amounts to you because they receive benefits and value. Be careful you don’t set out to build and shape software entirely focused on users that don’t want to pay (because they have simpler requirements and free options) and you then don’t offer value to enterprises that needed different features because your talking to hobbyists instead of professionals with expensive problems they would pay to have solved. You’ve got hobbyists that may not pay $30/month for a subscription, but to me they aren’t your target audience for a new revenue stream, what’s it look like if you focus your efforts in customising the hardware / cloud software to support enterprise scenarios? Can you be doing Zoom calls with a few of your users in the professional space about what problem they wish TinyPilot could be solving that they could be paying for? Look at the feedback from Reeman and Larry in the above forum post, they’re asking for enterprise features that you’d be best positioned to solve and charge for (and a lot more than $30 per month), schedule calls with them and dig into their problems further, build for them, so they can order 100 devices and put them under cloud management for work, not the hobbyist that has no budget and wants different features.

rexreed 4y ago

At what point does a minimally positive income-generating concern become a hobby? I know many people who collect and sell Magic cards and make roughly the same amount net, but they wouldn't consider themselves bootstrapped founders. You can't live on $6k a year.

manv1 4y ago

Hardware is hard. Manufacturers in China have a MOQ that tends to be high, and the chance of them screwing you is high. And the process of hardware is harder. You have to handle bootstrapping, provisioning, firmware, updates, configuration, etc. You have to worry about the vendor substituting other parts in (yes, it happens more often than you'd think). Component failures. Heck, sourcing components is apparently a PITA. Before, it used to be $1 in components = $10 in end-user cost. I think that multiple is smaller now. But with all that said, hardware can make money. And it provides lock-in for you. I'd love an article about how you got the hardware side up and running: finding a manufacturer, features, design, etc.

nsarafa 4y ago

Why is hiring a sales team not mentioned here? Feels like the obvious next step and would be more impactful than focusing on increasing margins

nikisweeting 4y ago

The part about learning Debian packaging to replace Bash+Ansible rings so true to me. Sounds a bit like this flow played out yet again: https://docs.monadical.com/s/against-curl-sh#A-tale-as-old-as-time https://docs.monadical.com/s/against-curl-sh#A-tale-as-old-a...

mtlynch 4y ago
Hey, Nick! Good to hear from you again. Yeah, that blog post definitely resonates with me. As I've been learning about Debian packaging, there are so many times I think, "Oh, why was I reinventing what Debian does really well?" Part of it is also just getting lost in the local maxmium of Ansible. I kept feeling like, "Well, I'm not reinventing the wheel. Ansible has a pre-built module for creating users / installing dependencies / installing services, but then the Debian package manager does it so much better and faster.
- nikisweeting 4y ago
  Howdy friend! I've loved following your progress with these posts over the years :) Ansible is definitely more ergonomic than Debian packaging still. I hope someday we get a better pipline for deb/pkg that's closer to yaml/declarative-style config that Ansible offers. Despite packaging for deb for 3 years now I still have no clue how to do it by memory, I have to check my own docs every time.

ivanech 4y ago

Congratulations on 2022 revenue, and thank you for sharing! Your blog posts are genuinely inspirational because of how honest you’ve been about your mistakes. I remember reading your first post about bootstrapping and thinking that you were spending a lot of time on weird products and making rash decisions with money. I did not think you’d last long. Very happy to be wrong. Those early years pre-TinyPilot are what make this success inspiring: they’re proof that you don’t need to immediately start out as a product or business genius to build a real company. It’s an antidote to the “oh I should learn more before starting” attitude that stops me. I really hope this doesn’t come off like a backhanded “if this idiot could do it, anyone can” comment, because that’s not how I feel. Just trying to express real admiration for your transparency, perseverance, and now success.

youssefabdelm 4y ago

> They’d never feel overworked nor underworked, and there’d be no idle time. Haha... the thought of someone being 'underworked'

marc_io 4y ago

> They won’t give you a direct link to your file You can do this with Dropbox by simply changing the 'www' in the URL to 'dl', and removing the same 'dl' parameter at the end of the link. Example: Original link https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxxxxxxxxx/file.zip?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxxxxxxxxx/file.zip?dl=0 Direct download link: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/xxxxxxxxxx/file.zip https://dl.dropbox.com/s/xxxxxxxxxx/file.zip