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There's No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work
- bdcravens 13y agoSpend five hours on the HackerNews front page and get a few thousand uniques from the most cynical, judgmental visitors you can imagine. In response to the idea that getting listed on TechCrunch, HN, or the like, is somehow a "launch"
- lessallan 13y agoYou'll find that unless you sell an impulse purchase (sub $35 price) targeting developers HackerNews traffic doesn't equal sales. Being that we sell accounting software for small business the traffic really doesn't affect our revenue. Overall programmers are highly critical of software applications, giving the most judgement support requests and demanding features deeming them "easy to build".
- alandarev 13y agoOn the other hand, if the strategy is not directly applicable for your business, that does not suddenly become a 'busted myth'. Though, I fully agree with you - as long as you are targetting narrow audience, getting 'general' traffic will not magically increase your sales.
- carsongross 13y agoThis is my experience with bootstrapping as well. The technical platform problems around bootstrapping have gotten much easier, due to Heroku, AWS and all the services out there (Papertrail, Exceptional, New Relic, etc.) Unfortunately relatively little work has been done on the "requires that you be a stubborn bastard" problem.
- thibaut_barrere 13y agoSimilar experience, and pretty much reflects what most bootstrappers I know said, too.
- lessallan 13y ago1) Creating any business is hard, unless you sell blue meth. 2) Creating two businesses is even harder (bootstrapping + consulting to make a living). 3) Technical hurdles are getting easier but rarely does the best product win. Marketing is hugely more important that product, although I wish that wasn't true.
- thenomad 13y agoI suspect you'll find even the meth business is tricky. Indeed, I believe there's a popular TV series about it. Serously, Breaking Bad is an excellent primer on entrepreneurship. It covers everything: distribution, marketing, negotiation, finding business partners, scaling, exit strategies...
- dasil003 13y agoThe other thing to realize is that 37signals ideals and brand directly serve their marketing. I'm not questioning their wisdom per se, but realize that it is a tremendous positive feedback loop—one that they started cultivating for at least half a decade before they released their first product. And at a time when web know-how was a lot thinner on the ground than it is today, and being any kind of professional agency that knew what CSS was actually a shockingly huge differentiator. The other product launch I can think of with such a huge audience and explosive success out of the gate was Stack Overflow that followed a similar pattern of massive precision-tuned audience to market to with an already-authenticated-and-trusted human voice announcing the product. That's not to say that their audience made their success—they obviously came out of the gate with great products as well. So if you can make a great product then you have half the equation. But the really interesting question to me (since I can build a product) is how to get the marketing right from a bootstrapping perspective.
- lessallan 13y agoGetting Basecamp linked up with any mention of Ruby on Rails helps too. Outliners (like 37Signals) work hard and do great work but they're not the standard we should compare ourselves to. Well unless you always want to fall short and feel like shit.
- mathattack 13y agoMyth: It’s easy to go from client services to products. Reality: It’s really really really hard. As you’re selling client services you’re also marketing and building a product, so you’re basically working two jobs. You’re promoting two company offerings, the product and the consultancy. In your brain you’re working through two problem spaces, juggling and assessing opportunities for two company, all without going insane or broke first. I know many consultancies of all sizes that have tried to make the hop. They look at valuations of services firms (1.5 times revenues) and compare it to SaaS firms (10-12 times revenue) and try to make the move. The Accentures have tried this, as have the 5-6 people shops. The reality is it is very hard to go beyond reusable deliverables and into technology that people independently pay for.
- thibaut_barrere 13y agoAlbeit we (2 people, a couple with children) are still small but growing on the SaaS side, I found that mixing freelancing and products works fairly well for us. I think what made it work is 1) reduced expenses by relocating to a less expensive place and leaving frugally, 2) fine control over our cash-flow and balance between freelancing and product. I recently shared this little calculator which helps do the math: https://www.wisecashhq.com/goodies/bootstrapper-calculator https://www.wisecashhq.com/goodies/bootstrapper-calculator PS: it is still hard and requires a lot of focus and organization, but works and is sustainable long-term (we started working on this in 2011). PPS: I have enough time to play with my kids and do a bit of yoga daily, to give a data point :-)
- mathattack 13y agoGlad that you can make it work. It sounds like you're very reasonable about the costs and sacrifices involved. It's not just "invest consulting money in product development", rather it's "invest and save every dollar possible." Again, it's good to see that it works for you, and that you haven't had to sacrifice your family for it. Perhaps the supporting family is one reason why you're able to pull it off. (Kids care more about your time more than money anyway)
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- alexmarcy 13y agoTo me the SAAS space is no different than starting a band, being an actor, etc. It is easy to get into at some basic level but almost impossibly hard to become the next Rolling Stones, Tom Hanks or some other crazy successful example of the field. That is by no means a reason not to do it, just that expectations need to be set about what reality actually looks like.
- diziet 13y agoRealize to have $3,000 in monthly revenue, that’s anywhere from 100 to 600 paying customers If you're charging $5-30 / month, you're not going to grow well unless you are truly a fully self serve company. Charge 10x more and have happier customers. Even apps moved towards a model where they earn most money from high spenders from in-app purchases.
- lessallan 13y agoIt's very hard to generalize pricing, we're $36/mo which is the top of our market with pricing.
- lquist 13y agoMyth: All I have to do is get TechCrunch. That’s marketing. Reality: You’ll have 2,000 unique visitors today and zero tomorrow. Spend five hours on the HackerNews front page and get a few thousand uniques from the most cynical, judgmental visitors you can imagine. Traffic from press outlets and link aggregation sites are NOT primed to buy your product and thus come and leave. We've built a bootstrapped $5M Revenue (70% pbt margin) run-rate business in ~1 year on the back of a HN post. Generated business that led to something like $500k on the first few days alone.
- lessallan 13y agoI'm sure you have, congrats, but the vast majority of people aren't selling impulse buys targeting developers.
- lquist 13y agoGood try, but not an impulse buy and doesn't target devs. Actually, very few devs would be attracted to the product.
- csallen 13y agoAny particular reason you aren't revealing your product, given that you've already posted about it on HN?
- lquist 13y agoPosted about it under a different handle. This is my "venting" handle. I didn't want to talk about the product under my real handle for competitive reasons. The amount of money that we're making is not immediately obvious to outsiders.
- lessallan 13y agoAgain congrats on your successes, I don't think hackernews should be a marketing tactic for most businesses but it could probably work for a small select few. (Github, Sublime Text, Twilio, SendGrid etc.)
- sethammons 13y agoI hate to put a negative comment, but hey, bad reviews travel 10x faster than good ones for a reason, right? Did anyone else get the chat model pop up baiting me into reading another article? Completely pulled me out of the engaged reading of the article. Poor form. I exited the window and don't believe I'll be going back to the site. </rant>
- lessallan 13y agoOh no! <puts gun to head>
- dangrossman 13y agoI loved that thing. Read both articles because of it. It even got me to check out Groove and bookmark them.
- lessallan 13y agoThanks Dan, GrooveHQ.com is sweet!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lessallan 13y agoYou win.
- hackaflocka 13y agoI suspect we'll be reading another post from this author in a year's time. About how after investing in his people, many of them walked out to other jobs.
- lessallan 13y agoI don't even know what "investing in people" means. We're a small team, our newest employee has been with us for 3 years.
- chrsm 13y agoHaving met most of the LessEverything guys, I'd definitely say they know what they are doing.
- jes 13y agoI don't know, the author sounds pretty rational to me. Do you think he's mistaken?
- 31reasons 13y agoIts pretty interesting that how people come up with the rules/"myth busting" like its a Science. Every case is different and no one can teach you or tell you how its going to be unless you try.
- CmonDev 13y ago"Spend five hours on the HackerNews front page and get a few thousand uniques from the most cynical, judgmental visitors you can imagine." That's me!