6 ms·

Bootstrapping a Software Product

205 points by babuskov 14y ago

imwilsonxu 14y ago
Hi garrettdimon, sine there are so many bug & issue tracking websites, why do you choose it to startup your business? Thanks!
josscrowcroft 14y ago
Fantastic slides, thanks! Will go through them again. There were a bunch of "a-ha" points in there.
PhilipA 14y ago
Thanks for the inspirational slidedeck.
raphinou 14y ago
I will possibly bootstrap a software product in the near future, but the hard part for me is to decide in which market I can find a niche. I find it hard to develop a new solution in a crowded market. I want to develop a product I am convinced of, but doubt often gets in the way, especially if the market is crowded. I also wonder how these services get their first paying customers.
- speg 14y ago
  I am going through the same thing. Everyone says enter an existing market because you already know people are willing to pay for it. But I am afraid that the existing solutions have soaked up all the customers. How am I supposed to get those customers?
  - rgbrenner 14y ago
    "existing solutions have soaked up all the customers" Please think of a case where this has happened to you as a customer. As an example: I've been leasing servers for over a decade. The industry is mature, is worth billions each year, and has plenty of competitors. I've leased servers from many companies, big and small.. one even that had 2 people working there. Sometimes I had requirements that only large companies met, and other I did not have such requirements, and considered smaller companies. Customers are constantly leaving and signing up at all of the large services (for a variety of reasons -- customer service problems, fees, inability to meet a new requirement, etc, etc, etc). I challenge you to find a provider that does NOT have some unhappy customers. You'll get your chance when they leave and are looking for a new provider.
  - adambenayoun 14y ago
    Going after a new market often require much more resources than going after an established market. You'll need to spend a lot of time branding yourself and educating your users about your services. What often works well for people is to enter a market that already exists and to understand the problem the existing solutions don't address. By focusing on these problem and solving these extremely well, you'll be able to attract a small subset of users who will want to pay for your service rather than your competitors. You'll have plenty of opportunity to steal customer from your competitors (there's no way someone can address 100% of the market). There are plenty of markets that are ripe for disprution.
  - revorad 14y ago
    To both you and raphinou and others battling with the same questions, I cannot recommend Rob Walling's work enough. His blog [0], book [1] and podcast [2] address the exact concerns any new software bootstrapper faces. He also runs the Micropreneur Academy, but I don't have any direct experience of that. He also organises Microconf, and I really recommend watching his talk from last year - http://www.microconf.com/videos-2012.html http://www.microconf.com/videos-2012.html The sheer number of products he has built, launched, acquired - both successes and failures - over the years gives all of his advice a lot of weight. [0] http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ [1] http://www.startupbook.net/ http://www.startupbook.net/ [2] http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ PS I don't have any affiliation with Rob. I'm just really grateful for all his excellent work.
    - raphinou 14y ago
      Thanks for the links! Do you know of communities of self-employed/micro-entrepreneurs? I'm not interested in a booming startup scenario, rather looking to build a sustainable business.
      - revorad 14y ago
        I've seen a few people ask this, and a few efforts towards building an online forum for bootstrappers to hang out. But they all tend to fizzle out. The community is scattered around the web on blogs, Twitter, Mixergy and here. I think that's a good thing - don't seek yet another place to shoot the breeze. Just get stuff done, and when you have a specific question, seek answers from experienced people in existing forums.
  - tarunkotia 14y ago
    The most important thing which matters to customers is the kind of support you provide to them. Just take an open source bug tracking software and provide "incredible" support to your customers and that will be a win. This has been proven time and again. And when I say "incredible" support that also means proactively solving problems/pain-points for your customers. Most corporations spend a big part of their IT budget on "Support". Think about it for a bit and you will start to get a clear picture of what really matters.
  - veesahni 14y ago
    I've gone through this dilemma as a solo founder and experimented with both (existing & new market). I ended up choosing an existing market. Some thoughts: Make sure that the market you're going into is growing and not shrinking. In a growing market, there will always be new customers. People like choice. You don't have to compete feature to feature with your competitors. Stand out somehow. Identify how you truly differentiate and make sure that everybody knows this. The good thing about an existing market is that people are already looking for what you're selling. All you have to do is be there, be different and be findable. The bad thing is that the competitors are mature and it takes a lot more effort to actually compete.
  - Mahn 14y ago
    > But I am afraid that the existing solutions have soaked up all the customers I used to think this aswell, and I was proven wrong. I think this assumption is almost always wrong. Unless you are building a facebook competitor, you will find customers, regardless how crowded the market is.
- garrettdimon 14y ago
  I hear this question a lot. Unfortunately, there's not a simple answer. In my case, it was a matter of blogging for years, building up a modest, but interested, audience, having about 2,000 Twitter followers at the time, and spending about $5,000 on advertising once we had been live for about 3 months. I also blogged extensively about the process of designing the application and some of the other steps involved. Really, though, it's not the first customers that are hard. It's maintaining and continuing to work on it and grow it during the time where growth isn't amazing and it isn't yet a full-time job.
- yesimahuman 14y ago
  I bootstrapped my company over 2012, and we now employ three full-time people and adding more. What we did to get out first few users was simple: we wanted to build cool software, and we had a few ideas. We took our favorite, built a cool landing page that spelled out the features with a demo, and then set it free on Twitter. We had 1500 early beta signups before we went into private beta. We now have over 100,000 users and we never spend money advertising. In terms of getting our first paying customers: we just charged for it. People will pay for things that they think are valuable. However, pricing and the pricing "model" have been the #1 source of missed opportunities and optimization points for us (though we have fixed a lot of that), so they are really important to think about.
kintamanimatt 14y ago
I wish there were a video presentation to go with this. There's so much information missing when only the slides are present!
- garrettdimon 14y ago
  Unfortunately, there's not a recording, but I'm doing my best to expand on the slides and add in the year's worth of lessons learned since this deck into a book. http://startingandsustaining.com http://startingandsustaining.com
  - kintamanimatt 14y ago
    Looking forward to it! I had no idea you were in this thread so please feel free to disregard my email as you've answered my question here!
rexreed 14y ago
Great slides! In one chart he shows what the level of his pre-Sifter salary was and it seems that the current app hasn't quite met that level, or am I reading it wrong? It would be great to see some actual revenue numbers here, but I can see why the OP wouldn't want to disclose that.
- garrettdimon 14y ago
  This deck is over a year old. A lot has changed. I'm not really a fan of disclosing actual revenue numbers because that opens a whole other can of worms. As such, I chose revenue and how it related to our ability to pay me a salary.
  - Simucal 14y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, have you hit your goal of earning your pre-Sifter salary yet? In the slides it looked like you were close. Also, is your partner on full time as well or still part time in your venture? I have a co-founder that I'm starting a small business with and we frequently talk about what level of reduced salary we would accept to come on full time to grow the business.
    - garrettdimon 14y ago
      I have finally hit my pre-Sifter salary. We could have technically afforded it a while ago, but we only recently decided to make the adjustment. Of course, that was my salary 5 years ago, and from what I've gathered, I'm still way under what I could be making elsewhere--especially if you factor in benefits. Keith, my partner, has never been full-time. He's always been involved at about 5-10 hours per month, and that's still the case these days as well. I have a blog post that talks about the pay cut side of things a bit on my blog. http://garrettdimon.com/post/34571624540/can-you-afford-a-pay-cut http://garrettdimon.com/post/34571624540/can-you-afford-a-pa...
      - iaskwhy 14y ago
        You do you decide Keith's salary? I'm not looking for numbers, more like the logic behind it (number of hours put in?, something else?). I will have this "problem" soon. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
garrettdimon 14y ago
Author of the deck here. I'm actually in the middle of evolving these into a book. http://startingandsustaining.com http://startingandsustaining.com Happy to answer any questions anybody might have.
- mswen 14y ago
  Thanks for posting your lessons learned.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  What did you use to measure and export your revenue so you could make the chart used in the presentation?
  - garrettdimon 14y ago
    It was just a matter of running some SQL queries and putting it into iWork Numbers to generate the graphs.
- databus 14y ago
  Great deck! What business entity type (sole proprietorship, llc, ...) did you end up going with and has it changed over time?
  - garrettdimon 14y ago
    It's an LLC, but for better or worse, that's not a decision that we put a lot of time into. So it's probably not a meaningful data point.
    - databus 14y ago
      Have you personally had any problems with this setup? It sounds like for the scope of your company it would work well.
      - garrettdimon 14y ago
quizotic 14y ago
Wonderful! My favorite was the 1-month rise/fall in revenue (scary), followed by the context. So true! Questions re the pricing tier slides: (a) did you experiment with the prices & number of tiers? It would be interesting to hear your experience with that. (b) The lowest tier had the highest churn and demands ... but they were 25% of revenue ... which is too big to ignore, no?
- garrettdimon 14y ago
  There wasn't much experimenting. I've always been so heads down on the product, I've been terrible about running tests. I probably rely way too much on my gut feel with decisions like that. That said, removing the $14 plan did not hurt us at all. Since the $14 plan was half the cost of the next plan ($29), we were simply hoping that 50% of the people that would have signed up at the $14 level would go ahead and be willing to pay $29. At that point, the decision means we make the same revenue on fewer customers. My theory was that would help me stay on top of providing sub-30 minute email response times to all of our customers without going crazy. :) While I don't have exact numbers, based on our growth after the change, probably 75% of people that would have chosen the $14 plan simply signed up at the $29 level and the other 25% didn't sign up. So, the net effect was great for us.
  - quizotic 14y ago
    Gotta love a happy ending... and the courage to put 25% of revenue at risk. The sub-30 minute response time does feel good on the receiving end.
dishank 14y ago
I really like his point on the premature scalability having a big effect of a startup's failure proability. It's really a hard thing to make sure you are not growing too fast or too slow. It's much easier when you are bootstrapped, since you only scale when the profits tell you. The problem arises when dealing with startups that aren't bootstrapped and have that extra capital laying around that is supposed to be used for scaling, but there is no indication on when to start the process.
neya 14y ago
I love this presentation. So wonderful, precise and valid. I sincerely wish you best of luck for your future!
jt2190 14y ago
> Didn't get a tech partner: I'm more of a designer first > and developer second... Garett, you seem to be a "designer who programs"/"programmer who designs"... Do you think of this as an advantage, or a limitation?
- garrettdimon 14y ago
  It's both. The upside is that I didn't need to find a designer or developer to build it, but the downside is that it's a lot of work to keep up with all of the skills that I need. Ruby, Rails, design, front-end development, MySQL, servers, etc. Fortunately, as we've grown, we've been able to contract work to friends who are experts in each of the areas, but it can be rather daunting at first. The other downside is that when designing, I always begin to think about how design decisions will trickle down the front-end to the application to the database and sometimes even to the server. As a result, it's hard to just design and implement. I'm always caught up thinking about implementation even when I'm working in Photoshop. These days, the biggest benefit is that even though I'm far from an expert in any of the areas, I can competently navigate all of the topics and maintain a pretty holistic view of both the business and the product. That makes it much easier to effectively coordinate everyone as the team grows.
mkreef 14y ago
Great deck. I always wanted to bootstrap. Never would have guessed there is a big enough market to sustain you in bug/issue tracking. Why do you now offer 14-day free trials when one of the slides is "don't do free accounts, people will use anything if it's free, etc"? I've had good luck with free SaaS beta/pre-launch and continued free trial accounts (no cc required).
- garrettdimon 14y ago
  Trials and free accounts are two very different things. Free accounts implies that they are perpetually available at no cost.
rcirka 14y ago
Good points in the slide. A question through, why have 2 web server and two database servers? Was it for performance or redundancy reasons?
- garrettdimon 14y ago
  I can't tell from your question if you're asking for a simple "performance" or "redundancy" answer or if you're asking for a deeper explanation about application architecture. So, I'll try to answer both. The short answer is redundancy. With virtual servers, problems on the host machine due to neighboring virtual servers can be frequent. This can slow down the application server and lead to performance problems. With two load-balanced application servers, this isn't as much of an issue. For the database, I'd suggest reading up on replication. In addition to the master/slave databases, we also have hourly, daily, and weekly snapshots stored offsite because a slave database isn't enough protection from some types of data loss. Application architecture is a whole beast unto itself, and my real recommendation would be to find and hire a professional to handle this kind of stuff for you.
  - rcirka 14y ago
    I was just curious. I would hope RoR would be able to handle more than 60 requests per minute. Nowadays I don't bother with manual replicated servers, cloud servers handle a lot of those problems, but I understand everyone has their reasons.
mmorrell 14y ago
Thanks a lot for this. The point about not going open-source probably just saved me 6 months-1 year of potential time spent. I knew something was bothering me about making my idea open-source at the same time I am making it. Although I'm an idealist, and like open source software, having money doing what I love was my whole goal in the first place.
- clark-kent 14y ago
  How did you save time by making your software closed source?
  - mmorrell 14y ago
    Focusing on shipping the product with all desired features instead of worrying about which features to include/exclude in each version. e.g. not wanting to include a very unique/new/proprietary feature in the open source library , that nobody else had. I was creating 2 versions for each of my projects, and had planned on continuing as such.
gjkood 14y ago
Most important slide for me: "Know your costs" (Slide 67) It is so easy to overlook the cost components that need to be factored in while running a bootstrapped operation.
martinced 14y ago
+1 but starting with $16 000 is not exactly bootstrapping. If $16 K is bootstrapping then most YC startups are bootstrapped. I think a "real" bootstrap starts with way less than that.
- gfodor 14y ago
  Pretty sure bootstrapping has less to do with the size of the strap and more to do with the fact that you're doing it yourself. $16k of your own money is a lot different than $16k of someone else's.

205 points by babuskov 14y ago

Hi garrettdimon, sine there are so many bug & issue tracking websites, why do you choose it to startup your business? Thanks!

josscrowcroft 14y ago

Fantastic slides, thanks! Will go through them again. There were a bunch of "a-ha" points in there.

PhilipA 14y ago

Thanks for the inspirational slidedeck.

raphinou 14y ago

I will possibly bootstrap a software product in the near future, but the hard part for me is to decide in which market I can find a niche. I find it hard to develop a new solution in a crowded market. I want to develop a product I am convinced of, but doubt often gets in the way, especially if the market is crowded. I also wonder how these services get their first paying customers.

speg 14y ago
I am going through the same thing. Everyone says enter an existing market because you already know people are willing to pay for it. But I am afraid that the existing solutions have soaked up all the customers. How am I supposed to get those customers?
- rgbrenner 14y ago
  "existing solutions have soaked up all the customers" Please think of a case where this has happened to you as a customer. As an example: I've been leasing servers for over a decade. The industry is mature, is worth billions each year, and has plenty of competitors. I've leased servers from many companies, big and small.. one even that had 2 people working there. Sometimes I had requirements that only large companies met, and other I did not have such requirements, and considered smaller companies. Customers are constantly leaving and signing up at all of the large services (for a variety of reasons -- customer service problems, fees, inability to meet a new requirement, etc, etc, etc). I challenge you to find a provider that does NOT have some unhappy customers. You'll get your chance when they leave and are looking for a new provider.
- adambenayoun 14y ago
  Going after a new market often require much more resources than going after an established market. You'll need to spend a lot of time branding yourself and educating your users about your services. What often works well for people is to enter a market that already exists and to understand the problem the existing solutions don't address. By focusing on these problem and solving these extremely well, you'll be able to attract a small subset of users who will want to pay for your service rather than your competitors. You'll have plenty of opportunity to steal customer from your competitors (there's no way someone can address 100% of the market). There are plenty of markets that are ripe for disprution.
- revorad 14y ago
  To both you and raphinou and others battling with the same questions, I cannot recommend Rob Walling's work enough. His blog [0], book [1] and podcast [2] address the exact concerns any new software bootstrapper faces. He also runs the Micropreneur Academy, but I don't have any direct experience of that. He also organises Microconf, and I really recommend watching his talk from last year - http://www.microconf.com/videos-2012.html http://www.microconf.com/videos-2012.html The sheer number of products he has built, launched, acquired - both successes and failures - over the years gives all of his advice a lot of weight. [0] http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ [1] http://www.startupbook.net/ http://www.startupbook.net/ [2] http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ PS I don't have any affiliation with Rob. I'm just really grateful for all his excellent work.
  - raphinou 14y ago
    Thanks for the links! Do you know of communities of self-employed/micro-entrepreneurs? I'm not interested in a booming startup scenario, rather looking to build a sustainable business.
    - revorad 14y ago
      I've seen a few people ask this, and a few efforts towards building an online forum for bootstrappers to hang out. But they all tend to fizzle out. The community is scattered around the web on blogs, Twitter, Mixergy and here. I think that's a good thing - don't seek yet another place to shoot the breeze. Just get stuff done, and when you have a specific question, seek answers from experienced people in existing forums.
- tarunkotia 14y ago
  The most important thing which matters to customers is the kind of support you provide to them. Just take an open source bug tracking software and provide "incredible" support to your customers and that will be a win. This has been proven time and again. And when I say "incredible" support that also means proactively solving problems/pain-points for your customers. Most corporations spend a big part of their IT budget on "Support". Think about it for a bit and you will start to get a clear picture of what really matters.
- veesahni 14y ago
  I've gone through this dilemma as a solo founder and experimented with both (existing & new market). I ended up choosing an existing market. Some thoughts: Make sure that the market you're going into is growing and not shrinking. In a growing market, there will always be new customers. People like choice. You don't have to compete feature to feature with your competitors. Stand out somehow. Identify how you truly differentiate and make sure that everybody knows this. The good thing about an existing market is that people are already looking for what you're selling. All you have to do is be there, be different and be findable. The bad thing is that the competitors are mature and it takes a lot more effort to actually compete.
- Mahn 14y ago
  > But I am afraid that the existing solutions have soaked up all the customers I used to think this aswell, and I was proven wrong. I think this assumption is almost always wrong. Unless you are building a facebook competitor, you will find customers, regardless how crowded the market is.
garrettdimon 14y ago
I hear this question a lot. Unfortunately, there's not a simple answer. In my case, it was a matter of blogging for years, building up a modest, but interested, audience, having about 2,000 Twitter followers at the time, and spending about $5,000 on advertising once we had been live for about 3 months. I also blogged extensively about the process of designing the application and some of the other steps involved. Really, though, it's not the first customers that are hard. It's maintaining and continuing to work on it and grow it during the time where growth isn't amazing and it isn't yet a full-time job.
yesimahuman 14y ago
I bootstrapped my company over 2012, and we now employ three full-time people and adding more. What we did to get out first few users was simple: we wanted to build cool software, and we had a few ideas. We took our favorite, built a cool landing page that spelled out the features with a demo, and then set it free on Twitter. We had 1500 early beta signups before we went into private beta. We now have over 100,000 users and we never spend money advertising. In terms of getting our first paying customers: we just charged for it. People will pay for things that they think are valuable. However, pricing and the pricing "model" have been the #1 source of missed opportunities and optimization points for us (though we have fixed a lot of that), so they are really important to think about.

kintamanimatt 14y ago

I wish there were a video presentation to go with this. There's so much information missing when only the slides are present!

garrettdimon 14y ago
Unfortunately, there's not a recording, but I'm doing my best to expand on the slides and add in the year's worth of lessons learned since this deck into a book. http://startingandsustaining.com http://startingandsustaining.com
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  Looking forward to it! I had no idea you were in this thread so please feel free to disregard my email as you've answered my question here!

rexreed 14y ago

Great slides! In one chart he shows what the level of his pre-Sifter salary was and it seems that the current app hasn't quite met that level, or am I reading it wrong? It would be great to see some actual revenue numbers here, but I can see why the OP wouldn't want to disclose that.

garrettdimon 14y ago
This deck is over a year old. A lot has changed. I'm not really a fan of disclosing actual revenue numbers because that opens a whole other can of worms. As such, I chose revenue and how it related to our ability to pay me a salary.
- Simucal 14y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, have you hit your goal of earning your pre-Sifter salary yet? In the slides it looked like you were close. Also, is your partner on full time as well or still part time in your venture? I have a co-founder that I'm starting a small business with and we frequently talk about what level of reduced salary we would accept to come on full time to grow the business.
  - garrettdimon 14y ago
    I have finally hit my pre-Sifter salary. We could have technically afforded it a while ago, but we only recently decided to make the adjustment. Of course, that was my salary 5 years ago, and from what I've gathered, I'm still way under what I could be making elsewhere--especially if you factor in benefits. Keith, my partner, has never been full-time. He's always been involved at about 5-10 hours per month, and that's still the case these days as well. I have a blog post that talks about the pay cut side of things a bit on my blog. http://garrettdimon.com/post/34571624540/can-you-afford-a-pay-cut http://garrettdimon.com/post/34571624540/can-you-afford-a-pa...
    - iaskwhy 14y ago
      You do you decide Keith's salary? I'm not looking for numbers, more like the logic behind it (number of hours put in?, something else?). I will have this "problem" soon. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!

garrettdimon 14y ago

Author of the deck here. I'm actually in the middle of evolving these into a book. http://startingandsustaining.com http://startingandsustaining.com Happy to answer any questions anybody might have.

mswen 14y ago
Thanks for posting your lessons learned.
kmfrk 14y ago
What did you use to measure and export your revenue so you could make the chart used in the presentation?
- garrettdimon 14y ago
  It was just a matter of running some SQL queries and putting it into iWork Numbers to generate the graphs.
databus 14y ago
Great deck! What business entity type (sole proprietorship, llc, ...) did you end up going with and has it changed over time?
- garrettdimon 14y ago
  It's an LLC, but for better or worse, that's not a decision that we put a lot of time into. So it's probably not a meaningful data point.
  - databus 14y ago
    Have you personally had any problems with this setup? It sounds like for the scope of your company it would work well.
    - garrettdimon 14y ago

quizotic 14y ago

Wonderful! My favorite was the 1-month rise/fall in revenue (scary), followed by the context. So true! Questions re the pricing tier slides: (a) did you experiment with the prices & number of tiers? It would be interesting to hear your experience with that. (b) The lowest tier had the highest churn and demands ... but they were 25% of revenue ... which is too big to ignore, no?

garrettdimon 14y ago
There wasn't much experimenting. I've always been so heads down on the product, I've been terrible about running tests. I probably rely way too much on my gut feel with decisions like that. That said, removing the $14 plan did not hurt us at all. Since the $14 plan was half the cost of the next plan ($29), we were simply hoping that 50% of the people that would have signed up at the $14 level would go ahead and be willing to pay $29. At that point, the decision means we make the same revenue on fewer customers. My theory was that would help me stay on top of providing sub-30 minute email response times to all of our customers without going crazy. :) While I don't have exact numbers, based on our growth after the change, probably 75% of people that would have chosen the $14 plan simply signed up at the $29 level and the other 25% didn't sign up. So, the net effect was great for us.
- quizotic 14y ago
  Gotta love a happy ending... and the courage to put 25% of revenue at risk. The sub-30 minute response time does feel good on the receiving end.

dishank 14y ago

I really like his point on the premature scalability having a big effect of a startup's failure proability. It's really a hard thing to make sure you are not growing too fast or too slow. It's much easier when you are bootstrapped, since you only scale when the profits tell you. The problem arises when dealing with startups that aren't bootstrapped and have that extra capital laying around that is supposed to be used for scaling, but there is no indication on when to start the process.

neya 14y ago

I love this presentation. So wonderful, precise and valid. I sincerely wish you best of luck for your future!

jt2190 14y ago

> Didn't get a tech partner: I'm more of a designer first > and developer second... Garett, you seem to be a "designer who programs"/"programmer who designs"... Do you think of this as an advantage, or a limitation?

garrettdimon 14y ago
It's both. The upside is that I didn't need to find a designer or developer to build it, but the downside is that it's a lot of work to keep up with all of the skills that I need. Ruby, Rails, design, front-end development, MySQL, servers, etc. Fortunately, as we've grown, we've been able to contract work to friends who are experts in each of the areas, but it can be rather daunting at first. The other downside is that when designing, I always begin to think about how design decisions will trickle down the front-end to the application to the database and sometimes even to the server. As a result, it's hard to just design and implement. I'm always caught up thinking about implementation even when I'm working in Photoshop. These days, the biggest benefit is that even though I'm far from an expert in any of the areas, I can competently navigate all of the topics and maintain a pretty holistic view of both the business and the product. That makes it much easier to effectively coordinate everyone as the team grows.

mkreef 14y ago

Great deck. I always wanted to bootstrap. Never would have guessed there is a big enough market to sustain you in bug/issue tracking. Why do you now offer 14-day free trials when one of the slides is "don't do free accounts, people will use anything if it's free, etc"? I've had good luck with free SaaS beta/pre-launch and continued free trial accounts (no cc required).

garrettdimon 14y ago
Trials and free accounts are two very different things. Free accounts implies that they are perpetually available at no cost.

rcirka 14y ago

Good points in the slide. A question through, why have 2 web server and two database servers? Was it for performance or redundancy reasons?

garrettdimon 14y ago
I can't tell from your question if you're asking for a simple "performance" or "redundancy" answer or if you're asking for a deeper explanation about application architecture. So, I'll try to answer both. The short answer is redundancy. With virtual servers, problems on the host machine due to neighboring virtual servers can be frequent. This can slow down the application server and lead to performance problems. With two load-balanced application servers, this isn't as much of an issue. For the database, I'd suggest reading up on replication. In addition to the master/slave databases, we also have hourly, daily, and weekly snapshots stored offsite because a slave database isn't enough protection from some types of data loss. Application architecture is a whole beast unto itself, and my real recommendation would be to find and hire a professional to handle this kind of stuff for you.
- rcirka 14y ago
  I was just curious. I would hope RoR would be able to handle more than 60 requests per minute. Nowadays I don't bother with manual replicated servers, cloud servers handle a lot of those problems, but I understand everyone has their reasons.

mmorrell 14y ago

Thanks a lot for this. The point about not going open-source probably just saved me 6 months-1 year of potential time spent. I knew something was bothering me about making my idea open-source at the same time I am making it. Although I'm an idealist, and like open source software, having money doing what I love was my whole goal in the first place.

clark-kent 14y ago
How did you save time by making your software closed source?
- mmorrell 14y ago
  Focusing on shipping the product with all desired features instead of worrying about which features to include/exclude in each version. e.g. not wanting to include a very unique/new/proprietary feature in the open source library , that nobody else had. I was creating 2 versions for each of my projects, and had planned on continuing as such.

gjkood 14y ago

Most important slide for me: "Know your costs" (Slide 67) It is so easy to overlook the cost components that need to be factored in while running a bootstrapped operation.

martinced 14y ago

+1 but starting with $16 000 is not exactly bootstrapping. If $16 K is bootstrapping then most YC startups are bootstrapped. I think a "real" bootstrap starts with way less than that.

gfodor 14y ago
Pretty sure bootstrapping has less to do with the size of the strap and more to do with the fact that you're doing it yourself. $16k of your own money is a lot different than $16k of someone else's.