I've been bootstrapping https://www.castingcall.club for about 2 years now. Although I don't have a team (just me) and I've not in the 7-figure range (still in 6), a lot of the lessons from Kinsta holds true.
I wanted to point out one bullet though: Automation
My product is a SaaS product. I've automated every single thing possible from self-creating wikis to recommendations. I stepped away to visit Japan for 3 weeks earlier this year and came back to a site that increased in value.
I've thought about raising money for it so many times but I always come back to this. Answer to someone else, or keep growing it on my own terms.
Using the 80/20 Rule with Automation has been pretty good for what I do (https://opszero.com). Most of the time we can automate with Zapier and not have to write any code until much, much later. One of the lessons we learned bootstrapping is that running and writing code has major maintenance costs and reducing the code footprint when testing out an idea is pretty important.
Agreed with the automation — I’m a fellow bootstrapper[0] in the SaaS space, and wouldn’t be without it. If there is anything that can be automated, even if slightly prematurely before the need to scale arises, I do so.
In terms of infrastructure, this meant using Ansible for quickly deploying new servers where needed and adding them to the right load balancer. Currently all I need to do is spin up a new instance with the right tag & run the relevant Ansible script - this will grab a copy of the site from git, sort out dependencies and any other apps needed (supervisord and so on), and add it to the nginx loadbalancer config as a new upstream server.
Same applies for things like billing. Yes I could have started off doing billing manually, sending out invoices etc, but these take time and realistically need to be automated to avoid any errors.
These things definitely meant I didn’t get my MVP out in weeks, but meant I could still do this as a solo-bootstrapper and look after a young family and such.
Also have a young family. Having a semi-passive source of income is a massive sigh of relief on family life. Been married for 10 years and my wife has never been happier.
+1 on slight premature automation. In my case, there are 70k signed up users, so doing anything manually at this point is out of control.
> In terms of infrastructure, this meant using Ansible for quickly deploying new servers where needed and adding them to the right load balancer. Currently all I need to do is spin up a new instance with the right tag & run the relevant Ansible script
To me, this still sounds awfully manual. You still need to always have an eye on load/health and proactively provision instances or risk not having the necessary capacity. Why go that route and not a template with auto-scaling and an init script or image to pull the dependencies?
Valid point, and something I considered initially. However we've a security startup – the likelihood hood of us getting a huge wave of visitors, the hug of death, is highly unlikely. Our landing page is static & anything remotely intensive requires an account. We are more likely to be hit by a DDoS, which I would hate to consume by upscaling servers and burning any potential profits we have.
Additionally, I have multiple alerts setup for any signs of downtime, so that any deployment can be invoked as soon as possible.
However, I completely understand your perspective, and if this was a different type of startup or industry, I would probably implement it the way you mentioned.
I think you’re fine, personally — a workload has to have very well defined characteristics to be automatically scalable. Just paying when health checks fail and figuring out how to fix it when there’s a problem is a much better strategy than implementing “scaling automation” that might go awry.
I wanted to point out one bullet though: Automation
My product is a SaaS product. I've automated every single thing possible from self-creating wikis to recommendations. I stepped away to visit Japan for 3 weeks earlier this year and came back to a site that increased in value.
I've thought about raising money for it so many times but I always come back to this. Answer to someone else, or keep growing it on my own terms.