4 ms·

I think one argument against bootstrapping (as someone who is trying this myself with my code review assignment and notification system "Friendly Fire") is that

I think one argument against bootstrapping (as someone who is trying this myself with my code review assignment and notification system "Friendly Fire") is that the expectations are higher now. Gone are the days of hacking something ugly together over the weekend and it going viral right away. Just look at the early screenshots of Twitter - you don't see even Alpha products too rough around the edges anymore. You spend 90% of the time doing the first half, and then 90% again for polish - because you have to. They can talk all they want about "you need to go to market before the product is even usable", but if you don't have the VC runway to keep failing and still being able to pay rent, for bootstrappers it's not an option. You get to roll that dice once. People expect few bugs, good UI and UX. There is a LOT of upfront work. I made sure that my tech choices have almost no overhead, and it's still more than a full-time job.

endisneigh 3y ago
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but it's also very easy to have something that "looks nice". It's pretty trivial these days to go get a Bootstrap Template and Tailwind Template, often times of the type of product you're trying to make anyway, and just wire together some backend stuff.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  Of course you can build something that's easy on the eyes - but you also need to build the product, the value. My point is that you need both, and you need to do it lean, without getting into the toolchain swamp that is modern UI development, because you will never be nearly done that way.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    I'm not sure I'm following you. Of course you need a product. You can solve whatever problem it is your customers are trying to solve and have something decent in terms of ui/ux is my point. The UI/UX expectations like you've mentioned have gone up, but so has the ease in meeting that expectation. It's a no-op unless you decide to do everything by hand without using the ecosystem of tooling that exists these days.
  - hobofan 3y ago
    Honest question: Have you recently done any frontend development? I think your assessment might have been valid 3-4 years ago, but nowadays if you keep to an established framework (e.g. Next.js with Tailwind), frontend development is about as simple as it was during the Rails + Bootstrap era.
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    And yes, hobofan, I have done recent UI development. I use CSS Grid as it essentially makes Bootstrap legacy - and I have used that since version 1. I use ArrowJS and ES6 directly, even lighter than anything you mentioned. You are probably just assuming I am technically incompetent, but I've been down a few rodeos in 20+ years of doing this.
yuppiepuppie 3y ago
IMHO that’s a lame excuse. Of course you can’t get by with a twitter 0.1 style MVP. But then again, twitter was built in its current context with the options they had available. We, currently, have a ton of nice things that they don’t have (thanks Bootstrap) to build very quick MVPs that look pretty darn decent.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  > We, currently, have a ton of nice things that they don’t have (thanks Bootstrap) Originally named Twitter Blueprint.
abhinai 3y ago
Not true. A certain segment of the population (early adopters) do not care about polish and these are the customers you're looking for. You really do not want to spend a long time polishing something that nobody cares about. This is the YC advice even today.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  If you have VC backing (they force their ventures to use each other's products), or launching a product as a known brand (Meta, Threads), yes. Try doing that when nobody knows who you are and you ask your potential customers to connect their GitHub account to your app. You need to at least make sure it does not look like a shoddy hacking operation.
  - abhinai 3y ago
    "If you have VC backing (they force their ventures to use each other's products), .." I never met a VC that did that. Perhaps 1 VC in 20 does that? This sounds more like an excuse.
hobofan 3y ago
> People expect few bugs, good UI and UX. People/companies expect solutions for their problems. If the solution has bad UX and is still buggy but solves their problem "well enough", they'll usually pay for it. Also empirically, you can still regularly see products both on HN and Product Hunt by "indie hackers" that end up being quite successful and were incredibly rough on initial release.
d_watt 3y ago
I think it's a sliding scale. The more unique your product is, and the more pain it solves, the more users are willing to put up with hard UI. I've seen a lot of bad ui make a lot of money, because it found a market segment that had no other options.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
I think it depends on the market your entering and the problem your solving. I've brought some very, very unpolished products to market, but they were in a completely new category. They got traction because there were few-to-no other options and they were all the same level of "poor" polish. That's the the market tolerated. Likewise, ChatGPT is arguably not a particularly polished product. Even more so when it came out. It was a slow, somewhat buggy chat experience with no bells or whistles. Overtime, they've iterated and iterated and iterated. If ChatGPT came in as "just another search engine", they'd have been laughed at from day one. The power and flexibility of LLMs would have been completely lost against the benchmark of mature, decades old search engines. ---- In my opinion, the value of the product you built is the ease of use. All of the major source control platforms have basic levels of assignment and notification. Your system must provide significant value on top of that or be a pleasure to work with.
- hnGuyReaderDude 3y ago
  When did you ship those products you mentioned? In the last 2-3 years or prior to that?
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    I’m actively shipping one now. Parts of it need to be super polished. Others, less so.
- 3pt14159 3y ago
  Right but you're basically proving his point with the ChatGPT example. There was no way that was coming out by bootstrapping. They've received tons in funding and pay-for-use was sort of a built-on based on all the hype about what it could do compared to the competition.
pawelwentpawel 3y ago
> People expect few bugs, good UI and UX. There is a LOT of upfront work. You might have a VC-funded product that has 0 bugs, perfect UI and UX and still nobody is using it. I've seen this in practice, even a decade ago. I believe that bootstrapping actually forces you to think about how useful the thing that you're building is to people. And if it's useful and in a good niche, users will work with you through a couple bugs. That said, some products are harder to build in a bootstrapped way than others. Also, having show-stopping bugs in your app is as bad today as it was 10 years ago no matter if you're bootstrapped or VC-funded. It's rare that people use something that doesn't work.
- lowercased 3y ago
  > I believe that bootstrapping actually forces you to think about how useful the thing that you're building is to people You can think all you want about it, but until it's in people's hands, it doesn't matter. And when it is, per the earlier comment above, the expectations - in many many many markets - is that the UI/UX matters. IMO it matters far more than it should in early days, but that's just me. Functionality that solves real problems is ignored because ... well... could be any number of reasons. Didn't like the colors. No dark mode. Something not obvious to people. Not using their language/terms. > some products are harder to build in a bootstrapped way than others. Yes - the 'ease' of connecting to an audience of decision makers, and their expectations re: usability... it can be very different between markets and services. And again, per the earlier above comment, expectations are simply much higher than years ago. Competition is stronger in many markets, and often the competition is inertia. "Learn a new system" vs "keep emailing excel sheets around" is still a real thing in a lot of places.
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    UX/UI matters because people are used to it. You have to have an insufferable need for a product to deal with bad UI. In the olden days, users didn't know better. HTML forms were primitive, now they are server-powered applications in their own right. The users have been spoiled by slick, polished products. This used to be NOT the case. You could build something stupid out of boredom in a few days and walk into riches. Frankly, the HN comments here sound quite condescending and snooty, telling me to find a narrower niche, be a better entrepreneur, and just maybe I don't know how to write code. Not the point.
noodle 3y ago
This depends a lot on the product. Some products, companies, markets, etc simply NEED capital to get off the ground. Hardware for example is fairly pricey on average. Tech's evolution has made starting software companies and products really cheap where it used to be fairly expensive. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction a bit. Perhaps its SO easy that in some spaces, you need the money to differentiate your offering from the hundreds of others trying to do the exact same thing in order to find that success. But speaking as someone even lately who has produced new products in the last few years, the products don't need to be perfect. The PG (I think?) anecdote about PMF where your product should feel like selling water to someone who is lost in the desert and dying of thirst. You can DEFINITELY achieve that with a sub-optimal, still a little unpolished/buggy product. I have, myself, just in the last few months. You just need the right product and the right market.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
I have heard this argument a lot. Let me tell you it is categorically false. I run multiple bootstrapped software businesses which culminated in a $4 million profit last tax year. After many many years of failure. The biggest mindshift required here is you need to really think what can technology solve. Most products being developed by bootstrappers are competing in a space where the problem is already solved. For example the nth job board. Yes in that case if yours look shitty people won't use it. But that is not a problem at all if you are solving a real problem. I will give you one example, and this is me sharing one of my products for the first time: a custom mobile app for housekeepers in rich families in the UK. The mvp for this was built over a weekend using just basic ios tools. Important thing to understand in this market (custom apps for companies) is that you have to go after companies for whom the branding difference is whether they are number 1..3 or 4.. and 4.. companies die due to competition. So if you can in anyway help them stand out for a large annual contract, they will lap it up. There are many opportunites like this. Instead if you are building the next app that you are seeing online, ya you are too late. The other thing is alpha products that are rough around the edges still exist. Forget the Twitter screenshots. When you used Twitter for the first time, did it look like that screenshot? No it didn't. Because by the time it became popular enough, it had been polished a bit. So what you are doing is comparing a product which is popular now vs a screenshot of the thing before it was popular. If you actually look at the first alpha version of things of popular apps now before they were popular, you will see that they are still rough around the edges. Maybe a little bit less so as a lot of ui frameworks are available now. Also older stuff look rough around the edges even more because ui trends themselves have changed. So don't fall for this myth. Solve something hard using technology with a ready to go ui kit and get the v1 out there as soon as possible.
- 3pt14159 3y ago
  I dunno man. I sold a small company back in 2011 and it really was easier back then. Three out of four of our first leads tried to buy us because we were doing "real" machine learning. This was almost a pure API app. We didn't even have documentation we just told people we'd integrate it for them. It is harder these days. Also, the product you mentioned "custom mobile app for housekeepers in rich families in the UK" I don't know how you're marketing that, but that seems like the hard part to me. As for Twitter, people forget what it was like back when they were first starting. There were a ton of people you wanted to follow, but RSS couldn't handle the sheer numbers involved. Blogging had become so big and realistically you could only follow, say, 10 bloggers before being worn out with all the content. Twitter made it possible to get little nugget sized updates from thought leaders without having to eat the whole sandwich of some massive blogpost.
wahnfrieden 3y ago
Simply wrong info
mdekkers 3y ago
This is absolutely correct, in my view. I spent the last 4 years trying to bootstrap with a partner. I’ve kept up the day job to keep the lights on, and provide some limited support to my partner whilst they commit 100% to writing code. They are a junior developer, so there was a lot of learning, and slow going, which was fine and accounted for. Product 1 was a coding tool for a low/no code system that is really very good and provides amazing functionality, but most devs (the target audience, really) are - unsurprisingly - put off by the GUI based approach. We built a tool that allows developers to drive the platform using a DSL we developed. This was built based off the IntelliJ community edition platform. The majority of the two years time we worked on this was spent on polish, and there was no end in sight. It is functional and really fills a solid niche, but the product is not something I would consider ready for production use by other developers. Given the amount of work left to be done, the possibly imited target market even when finished, and the growing realisation that to make this profitable we’d have to go enterprise B2B (again a massive hurdle) we left it at that, and started looking at something else to build. We spent a year on product 2, think saltstack, but better, but my partner was already on their last legs, emotionally and financially, and they called it quits a few weeks before v1.0 of product 2, leaving me in a position where the product is nearly there, but we are unable to cross the finish line on account of me not being able to quit my job and work on this full time. It is beyond frustrating. In hindsight, there are many things I could have done different or better, but bootstrapping is hard for anything but the simplest products. I have two major products that are totally cool but unfinished due to the need for polish, life altering bills left over from this adventure, and I am facing a job/project market that is aggressively ageist (I’m officially an Old) and no outlook on better professional and financial prospects (boo-hoo, poor me, I know).

endisneigh 3y ago

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but it's also very easy to have something that "looks nice". It's pretty trivial these days to go get a Bootstrap Template and Tailwind Template, often times of the type of product you're trying to make anyway, and just wire together some backend stuff.

renegade-otter 3y ago
Of course you can build something that's easy on the eyes - but you also need to build the product, the value. My point is that you need both, and you need to do it lean, without getting into the toolchain swamp that is modern UI development, because you will never be nearly done that way.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  I'm not sure I'm following you. Of course you need a product. You can solve whatever problem it is your customers are trying to solve and have something decent in terms of ui/ux is my point. The UI/UX expectations like you've mentioned have gone up, but so has the ease in meeting that expectation. It's a no-op unless you decide to do everything by hand without using the ecosystem of tooling that exists these days.
- hobofan 3y ago
  Honest question: Have you recently done any frontend development? I think your assessment might have been valid 3-4 years ago, but nowadays if you keep to an established framework (e.g. Next.js with Tailwind), frontend development is about as simple as it was during the Rails + Bootstrap era.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  And yes, hobofan, I have done recent UI development. I use CSS Grid as it essentially makes Bootstrap legacy - and I have used that since version 1. I use ArrowJS and ES6 directly, even lighter than anything you mentioned. You are probably just assuming I am technically incompetent, but I've been down a few rodeos in 20+ years of doing this.

yuppiepuppie 3y ago

IMHO that’s a lame excuse. Of course you can’t get by with a twitter 0.1 style MVP. But then again, twitter was built in its current context with the options they had available. We, currently, have a ton of nice things that they don’t have (thanks Bootstrap) to build very quick MVPs that look pretty darn decent.

meiraleal 3y ago
> We, currently, have a ton of nice things that they don’t have (thanks Bootstrap) Originally named Twitter Blueprint.

abhinai 3y ago

Not true. A certain segment of the population (early adopters) do not care about polish and these are the customers you're looking for. You really do not want to spend a long time polishing something that nobody cares about. This is the YC advice even today.

renegade-otter 3y ago
If you have VC backing (they force their ventures to use each other's products), or launching a product as a known brand (Meta, Threads), yes. Try doing that when nobody knows who you are and you ask your potential customers to connect their GitHub account to your app. You need to at least make sure it does not look like a shoddy hacking operation.
- abhinai 3y ago
  "If you have VC backing (they force their ventures to use each other's products), .." I never met a VC that did that. Perhaps 1 VC in 20 does that? This sounds more like an excuse.

hobofan 3y ago

> People expect few bugs, good UI and UX. People/companies expect solutions for their problems. If the solution has bad UX and is still buggy but solves their problem "well enough", they'll usually pay for it. Also empirically, you can still regularly see products both on HN and Product Hunt by "indie hackers" that end up being quite successful and were incredibly rough on initial release.

d_watt 3y ago

I think it's a sliding scale. The more unique your product is, and the more pain it solves, the more users are willing to put up with hard UI. I've seen a lot of bad ui make a lot of money, because it found a market segment that had no other options.

SkyPuncher 3y ago

I think it depends on the market your entering and the problem your solving. I've brought some very, very unpolished products to market, but they were in a completely new category. They got traction because there were few-to-no other options and they were all the same level of "poor" polish. That's the the market tolerated. Likewise, ChatGPT is arguably not a particularly polished product. Even more so when it came out. It was a slow, somewhat buggy chat experience with no bells or whistles. Overtime, they've iterated and iterated and iterated. If ChatGPT came in as "just another search engine", they'd have been laughed at from day one. The power and flexibility of LLMs would have been completely lost against the benchmark of mature, decades old search engines. ---- In my opinion, the value of the product you built is the ease of use. All of the major source control platforms have basic levels of assignment and notification. Your system must provide significant value on top of that or be a pleasure to work with.

hnGuyReaderDude 3y ago
When did you ship those products you mentioned? In the last 2-3 years or prior to that?
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  I’m actively shipping one now. Parts of it need to be super polished. Others, less so.
3pt14159 3y ago
Right but you're basically proving his point with the ChatGPT example. There was no way that was coming out by bootstrapping. They've received tons in funding and pay-for-use was sort of a built-on based on all the hype about what it could do compared to the competition.

pawelwentpawel 3y ago

> People expect few bugs, good UI and UX. There is a LOT of upfront work. You might have a VC-funded product that has 0 bugs, perfect UI and UX and still nobody is using it. I've seen this in practice, even a decade ago. I believe that bootstrapping actually forces you to think about how useful the thing that you're building is to people. And if it's useful and in a good niche, users will work with you through a couple bugs. That said, some products are harder to build in a bootstrapped way than others. Also, having show-stopping bugs in your app is as bad today as it was 10 years ago no matter if you're bootstrapped or VC-funded. It's rare that people use something that doesn't work.

lowercased 3y ago
> I believe that bootstrapping actually forces you to think about how useful the thing that you're building is to people You can think all you want about it, but until it's in people's hands, it doesn't matter. And when it is, per the earlier comment above, the expectations - in many many many markets - is that the UI/UX matters. IMO it matters far more than it should in early days, but that's just me. Functionality that solves real problems is ignored because ... well... could be any number of reasons. Didn't like the colors. No dark mode. Something not obvious to people. Not using their language/terms. > some products are harder to build in a bootstrapped way than others. Yes - the 'ease' of connecting to an audience of decision makers, and their expectations re: usability... it can be very different between markets and services. And again, per the earlier above comment, expectations are simply much higher than years ago. Competition is stronger in many markets, and often the competition is inertia. "Learn a new system" vs "keep emailing excel sheets around" is still a real thing in a lot of places.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  UX/UI matters because people are used to it. You have to have an insufferable need for a product to deal with bad UI. In the olden days, users didn't know better. HTML forms were primitive, now they are server-powered applications in their own right. The users have been spoiled by slick, polished products. This used to be NOT the case. You could build something stupid out of boredom in a few days and walk into riches. Frankly, the HN comments here sound quite condescending and snooty, telling me to find a narrower niche, be a better entrepreneur, and just maybe I don't know how to write code. Not the point.

noodle 3y ago

This depends a lot on the product. Some products, companies, markets, etc simply NEED capital to get off the ground. Hardware for example is fairly pricey on average. Tech's evolution has made starting software companies and products really cheap where it used to be fairly expensive. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction a bit. Perhaps its SO easy that in some spaces, you need the money to differentiate your offering from the hundreds of others trying to do the exact same thing in order to find that success. But speaking as someone even lately who has produced new products in the last few years, the products don't need to be perfect. The PG (I think?) anecdote about PMF where your product should feel like selling water to someone who is lost in the desert and dying of thirst. You can DEFINITELY achieve that with a sub-optimal, still a little unpolished/buggy product. I have, myself, just in the last few months. You just need the right product and the right market.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

I have heard this argument a lot. Let me tell you it is categorically false. I run multiple bootstrapped software businesses which culminated in a $4 million profit last tax year. After many many years of failure. The biggest mindshift required here is you need to really think what can technology solve. Most products being developed by bootstrappers are competing in a space where the problem is already solved. For example the nth job board. Yes in that case if yours look shitty people won't use it. But that is not a problem at all if you are solving a real problem. I will give you one example, and this is me sharing one of my products for the first time: a custom mobile app for housekeepers in rich families in the UK. The mvp for this was built over a weekend using just basic ios tools. Important thing to understand in this market (custom apps for companies) is that you have to go after companies for whom the branding difference is whether they are number 1..3 or 4.. and 4.. companies die due to competition. So if you can in anyway help them stand out for a large annual contract, they will lap it up. There are many opportunites like this. Instead if you are building the next app that you are seeing online, ya you are too late. The other thing is alpha products that are rough around the edges still exist. Forget the Twitter screenshots. When you used Twitter for the first time, did it look like that screenshot? No it didn't. Because by the time it became popular enough, it had been polished a bit. So what you are doing is comparing a product which is popular now vs a screenshot of the thing before it was popular. If you actually look at the first alpha version of things of popular apps now before they were popular, you will see that they are still rough around the edges. Maybe a little bit less so as a lot of ui frameworks are available now. Also older stuff look rough around the edges even more because ui trends themselves have changed. So don't fall for this myth. Solve something hard using technology with a ready to go ui kit and get the v1 out there as soon as possible.

3pt14159 3y ago
I dunno man. I sold a small company back in 2011 and it really was easier back then. Three out of four of our first leads tried to buy us because we were doing "real" machine learning. This was almost a pure API app. We didn't even have documentation we just told people we'd integrate it for them. It is harder these days. Also, the product you mentioned "custom mobile app for housekeepers in rich families in the UK" I don't know how you're marketing that, but that seems like the hard part to me. As for Twitter, people forget what it was like back when they were first starting. There were a ton of people you wanted to follow, but RSS couldn't handle the sheer numbers involved. Blogging had become so big and realistically you could only follow, say, 10 bloggers before being worn out with all the content. Twitter made it possible to get little nugget sized updates from thought leaders without having to eat the whole sandwich of some massive blogpost.

wahnfrieden 3y ago

Simply wrong info

mdekkers 3y ago

This is absolutely correct, in my view. I spent the last 4 years trying to bootstrap with a partner. I’ve kept up the day job to keep the lights on, and provide some limited support to my partner whilst they commit 100% to writing code. They are a junior developer, so there was a lot of learning, and slow going, which was fine and accounted for. Product 1 was a coding tool for a low/no code system that is really very good and provides amazing functionality, but most devs (the target audience, really) are - unsurprisingly - put off by the GUI based approach. We built a tool that allows developers to drive the platform using a DSL we developed. This was built based off the IntelliJ community edition platform. The majority of the two years time we worked on this was spent on polish, and there was no end in sight. It is functional and really fills a solid niche, but the product is not something I would consider ready for production use by other developers. Given the amount of work left to be done, the possibly imited target market even when finished, and the growing realisation that to make this profitable we’d have to go enterprise B2B (again a massive hurdle) we left it at that, and started looking at something else to build. We spent a year on product 2, think saltstack, but better, but my partner was already on their last legs, emotionally and financially, and they called it quits a few weeks before v1.0 of product 2, leaving me in a position where the product is nearly there, but we are unable to cross the finish line on account of me not being able to quit my job and work on this full time. It is beyond frustrating. In hindsight, there are many things I could have done different or better, but bootstrapping is hard for anything but the simplest products. I have two major products that are totally cool but unfinished due to the need for polish, life altering bills left over from this adventure, and I am facing a job/project market that is aggressively ageist (I’m officially an Old) and no outlook on better professional and financial prospects (boo-hoo, poor me, I know).