One thing this article doesn't point out is how beneficial it is to have a decently large highly engaged audience beforehand.
ConvertKit is an example of this.
The founder started by selling books and then made a course on how to sell books, got a pretty big audience around that and then started to build ConvertKit. Eventually he figured out who he wanted to market ConvertKit to and his prior audience of people wanting to sell things online was a great match. Naturally a lot of people who bought his books and courses are a great fit for his email service because the whole premise of his course on selling books is around building an email list. The books ended up being a lead generator for his SAAS app.
That's not to take anything away from Nathan's work. At the end of the day he made a very successful and well deserved business but the specific circumstances around it are a bit different than what this blog post makes it out to be. It was a 10 year journey with multiple good ideas at the right time to get to that point. All of it is documented on Nathan's site. I remember reading some of his posts many years ago.
This is extremely true. I've read many blog posts about how someone started a side project and bootstrapped it to 10k mrr etc.
Invariably when you read closer it goes something like this: "So I had this widely successful blog about X and decided to make a product. I posted about it on my blog and got 1000 sign-ups overnight etc".
I think this gets overblown in the sense that followers often do no equal customers, especially when it's a subscription. obviously yes, having an audience is helpful, but it can also give you false confidence too. They'll tell you your product is amazing, sign up for an early access waitlist, and then often very few of them actually buy because what brought them there was a desire to emotionally support you, not a need for your product. It does help you get the word out though.
Yes of course I'm not implying it's a panacea. However from my experience getting product market fit is one of the hardest parts of the whole process, and having a ready made audience relevant to your topic is a very nice head start.
Absolutely. my reply was aimed more at the unseen other readers looking to use your comment to confirm their bias that regular people can't do this without a huge audience and dismiss it altogether.
It doesn't have to be your traffic tho. One of my projects initially hugely benefited from a single comment on digital oceans blog with a weird solution to a problem my Project easily solved.
It’s silly not to include this in the article. The majority of these “one man shows” are the result of years of work building an online audience, and then launching a business around that audience.
Roam is another example. Without Conor having the Twitter audience he had and the hype around Roam, specifically on Twitter, they don’t hit $2m+ in rev their first month of turning on pricing.
That's because this article was written by a company that ghost writes articles for tech companies for content marketing purposes. Paddle.com is the beneficiary of this content, and HSG is the marketing company that wrote this article. So, yeah, of course it's thinly veiled product marketing and misses quite a bit of detail while gently pushing a SaaS solution for revenue growth that happens to be tailored to the small B2B or B2C SaaS company. I guess the content writers do a good job because this sort of advertorial is quite subtle and looks genuine. Indeed the website that this is hosted on is just a means to gather email subscriptions for product promotion as well as content marketing SEO juju.
To all the people saying it’s impossible — I’ve been bootstrapping an analytics company in ecomm space. From launch to 500k ARR took 9 months with almost entirely inbound. (Aka 0 marketing cost) I didn’t have an audience prior or spent any time at all on sites like Reddit. It’s not easy to do by any means, but here’s what I believe are the requirements:
- a true generalist: technical, product, sales, design.
- deep experience in the industry you are gonna serve. Hanging out on Reddit does NOT get you this. You have to have worked in the industry prior on high level roles. It’s what’ll give you credibility to potential buyers.
- design a product and business model that’s niche and painful enough for a large AND expanding TAM.
- there’s has to be sufficient dissatisfaction with incumbents. Customers are craving for better solutions and motivated to find one.
- you can effectively source and work with contractors to fill the gaps in your skills and time.
- the product must have near zero churn. Otherwise the leaky bucket is too much to fill without an actual sales force. This is possible, my business is exactly this.
- you know how to be capital efficient and can product low cash outflow consistently.
- you are not personally in need of an actual income for at least 3 years. Preferably more.
I believe the above are a must for a single bootstrapped founder to create a high growth startup. The optionality it affords you is tremendous and you will stand above the rest.
If you are interested in joining me (we are hiring) - lemme know! fei(at)sourcemedium(dotcom)
The last point - 3 years of income - is a huge stumbling block for so many (myself included) but it is a trivial hurdle for many VCs. Is there a VC model that says "seed capital for many, and low continuous returns from 30% of investments"
It won't return billions but the maths seems sane (I did suggest that there is room globally for a "million startups fund")
This is why it does make sense to take preseed and seed capital. It gives you the cushion necessary to make the right decisions for the business.
Bootstrap to VC is a continuous spectrum as opposed to the black and white decision most would have you believe. There are so many more financing options available to viable businesses than before - startup studios, revenue based financing and many more (eg angel.clearbanc.com)
On your site, is there a reason why you hide the pricing and make it so that you have to get a demo to get it? Do you price every customer differently? Is there a reason for no price or cost transparency? That suggests that you're either still trying to figure out pricing, want to be able to charge arbitrary amounts, pricing is too complicated to share, or wanting to hide prices for some reason.
It’s because we don’t have a self serviced onboarding which would take a lot longer and resource to build. It’s also not to give sticker shock before they have a chance to learn what it does and whether it’s a good fit. If most of your leads are word of mouth or inbound, having too much stuff on site isn’t necessary.
It’s also just matter of not having time resource to spend on the website.
Having pricing is more important for cheap monthly products that are alot more self services.
> our team will work closely with you to integrate your data sources and setup your dashboard
Seems to have some customization involved. My industry is largely B2B where we never advertise prices for many reasons. Once we reveal our prices, all our clients would stop working with us.
I've been a solopreneur boostrapping waiterio.com for 6 years and then 2 more years with 1-3 fulltime team members with a 20k MRR after 8 years.
I've chosen the bootstrap SaaS path after working 1 year in Silicon Valley. I thought all my life my dream was to build incredible stuff in Silicon Valley, then I got there and I didn't like it enough. When I was there I felt lonely and tired and sad. Despite having rare skills as Android and iOS developer 10 YEARS AGO my manager assigned me to build landing pages.
This was after not passing hiring interviews for Facebook/Google but still getting in one of the big ones.
I felt unappreciated and pushed to work a lot on something that wasn't even my specialty. The Silicon Valley is/was a sausage fest and it was very hard dating.
When I pitched at events I felt I wasn't being considered at all. I was and I am too afraid that the fact I am Italian and/or a pragmatic and nerdy developer with no salesy wowing pitch skills would let others with little technical skills and a big mouth take all the venture funds.
I left the Silicon Valley and started to work on waiterio.com while travelling the world.
I lived in 10+ countries for 6 months each, I saw the world, met a lot of interesting people and found love.
I decided to close my startup after I woke up from a surgery which had 50% chance of survival because until couple of hours before the surgery I was typing the product strategy to my shareholders in case I die. Then I spent the next whole year winding up my startup in midst of recovery and the whole process still gives me PTSD.
So I decided to go solo, to build what I want and possibly what others need. I've been doing it for past 2 years and I'm happy.
I do, though not at the level of those mentioned in OP or parent; My products have crossed trough of sorrow and so if I stay consistent I could get to a comfortable state eventually.
But consistency is the key which is especially hard for some with OCD to build, So I try to put my maximum energy on couple of main products and the rest on fast to fail side projects.
How do you approach your potential customers? I applaud your effort, I was in your shoes. But for your idea (SaaS for restaurants), your competitors probably hire an army of sales because restaurant owners are busy with day-to-day and relatively not high-tech.
Yes indeed. My (huge amount of) competitors indeed have an army of sales.
If you are David and the others are Goliath just don't play the same game they are playing because you are bound to lose.
Find out what you are good at and play a completely different game from them.
We don't do sales. 8 years ago Waiterio was just a mobile app and got the customers from the app stores. These days we do a lot of content marketing and i18n.
Are you a founder from a non English speaking country?
I'll be extracting my internal tools for content marketing and i18n. Write me here if you would like to give it a try.
You don't want to necessarily play the same game as your competitors, but you should probably consider at least building up an understanding of what it is they're doing, why, and whether there are lighter versions of it that you can achieve. The 80/20 rule can go a long way, and a B2B company that "doesn't do sales" is probably leaving a lot of easy money on the table, depending what exactly that means (do you just not do high-touch individual pitching? Or no advertising at all? [Sounds like you do some of that at least, which is a kind of sales] Do you try to use existing customers to get referrals to new ones? If a potential customer does want to talk to someone do you support that? Etc).
The best CEOs I've known are basically sales people, and they all tell me that it's a skill you really can learn, even with a language barrier - I know several Indian tech folks who sell like crazy in the US even as I can barely understand their accents, so it's not an insurmountable barrier, though I do understand that's a bit of a special case since the Indian culture is very keen on teaching negotiation and sales as a life skill and a lot of the dealings end up being with other Indian entrepreneurs.
WHAT WE DO
By not doing sales I mean that customers can register and use our product and pay for it without being forced to speak to a human being.
We have few transactional flow emails but we do not try to establish a one-to-one relationship with every customer.
We offer chat support and email support but that's it.
I do contact restaurants on Whatsapp asking them to be alpha users in new products to get feedback. My intention though is more to get feedback rather than make a sale.
I do have an understanding of the strategy of many competitors. Sales are not my forte and I prefer to pursue other strategies where I can outdo my competitors. I've a background in software engineering but I did acquire a lot of marketing skills to have the startup succeed. I do not wish to get in high-touch sales. I'm not good at it and also I don't think it's a good strategy with restaurants which are SMB (small and medium business).
The SaaS plans for restaurants range in the 15-100$ and I think is a classic example where nets will catch more customers than spears.
Where are the forums for people with this mindset? It used to be you could talk small-scale entrepreneurship on webdev forums of old, but now there s too much talk of raising money/marketing to death/bulshit your way up/game the system
Great story, thanks for sharing it. I have a friend who has been an entrepreneur his whole life, many different kinds of businesses. He wanted to partner with me eight years ago to write something similar to your Waiterio product, but I have always been hesitant to give up just working for pay. Your story, and this article is inspiring, but probably not enough for me. It is difficult in life to give up successful paths for the unknown.
I often say that high dev salaries are both a blessing and a curse for entrepreneur-minded devs. The opportunity cost and bar for success can be insanely high
A big part is probably not being in Silicon Valley or any other high cost of living location. T&C has governing law in England & Wales so remove company paid healthcare insurance as a big factor.
They are low key racist though (compared to the US). They are kinda racist to other Europeans. Eg Polish people and Southern Europeans would be looked down.
1. I lived in Sweden, and kinda experienced this. I was treated much better when I told people I live in the US/NYC. Also my colleagues there had hard time making friends.
2. Norway is staunchly anti-immigrant for a reason. It has resources and they like to keep it that way. They wont even give visas to foreign grand-parents unless one of the grandparents has died. This happened to my dad's friend. His daughter married to a Norwegian, he couldn't stay more than few weeks at a time with his grandchildren (treated like a tourist). Finally when he died from cancer, wis wife (the grandmother), finally could. This is especially cruel from a country that has trilions of oil money. (The US sytem, while flawed, is very family friendly).
3. Danemark had enough, and it is turning to the right and started doing all kinds of ant-immigration laws.
Now, the OP, said came to north europe as they are plenty of women. I am warning the OP as he will face some kind of low key discrimination as those countries traditionally have been mono-enthnic nation states, and as a foreigner you will always be treated like an 'other'.
Just giving it the reality on the ground. I know the US gets a lot of flack about racist this, or that, but the reality the US is the least racist country among western countries. Europe is on another level. They discriminate routinely against other europeans.
The main complain in the UK during brexit was about Romanians and Polish plumbers taking the jobs away....
well, I am from Turkey and I have been living in Denmark for 5 years.
I really understand what you are saying. I think that Racism is everywhere and it is not specific to Northern Europe. During my 7 years in Europe, I have developed some sort of immunity for low key discrimination and I have been lucky enough to build my social circle. So, I don't care right now much.
P.S: I'm white, good-looking and have European look. I think these are also important.
Where specifically in Northern Europe do you suggest? What is the visa situation and cost of living? I'm assuming any mobility will be difficult in COVID era.
"TGV Software" stood for "Two Guys and a Vax", before they eventually hired about 128 more people, bought a few more computers, and were acquired by Cisco in 1996. It was originally an SRI spin-off.
I ran into one of the founders at a party in Santa Cruz in the mid-90's, and laughed with him about the great acronym, and asked if he and his buddy had ever gotten around to buying another Vax. He shushed me and told me never to tell anyone what TGV originally stood for! (Oops.) They must have been in negotiations with Cisco at the time.
>TGV Software, Inc. employs more than 130 people and is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. The company develops, markets and supports TCP/IP internetworking software products which enable connectivity between disparate computer systems over local area, enterprise-wide and global computing networks. TGV's principal product line is marketed under the name of MultiNet. MultiNet for Windows integrates a robust suite of TCP/IP applications including a 32-bit VxD kernel, NFS client, FTP client and server, VT100-320 and TN3270 emulations, network printing, Pronto Mail V2.0 electronic mail, Enhanced Mosaic V2.1 web browser and network diagnostics.
>TGV: Founded in 1988, this company created communications software and simulation software for VAX computers. TGV stood for "Two Guys and a Vax". The company was sold to Cisco Systems in 1996.
IIRC, the dating site Plenty of Fish was a one-man operation for quite a while:
> In 2004, Plenty of Fish became a full-time money making business for Markus.[10] He ran the site independently until 2008, when he began hiring other employees at his new Vancouver headquarters.
They also removed a couple of the posts that showed, supported by hard numbers from their analytics, that several things that match.com et al. will sell their users hard on don’t work at all and can even negatively affect your odds of being successful of the site.
These posts were deleted shortly after the acquisition but they’re probably still in archive.org etc.
Markus was shrewd enough to see how the business was changing in terms of the cost of providing a free service and jumped ship accordingly. At least that's how I read it.
From a personal point of view, I completely disagree here. The one-person thing is just not doable, no matter how hard you believe/try. I've attempted this countless times and my motivation and dedication never cut it, no matter how hard I push. It's an inhumane amount of work for a single person to handle. And there is one specific moment that I've been able to pin-point every single time. I end up making a ton of progress: bootstrapping a development environment, databases, frameworks, containers, yada, yada, yada, I end up building a tons of things and just as I feel extremely happy and motivated, I take a step back and suddenly I see how many small details I need to fix up, as well as how much stuff there is still to be done and how much more would pop up to fix, polish and clear up and even a small project ends up feeling like infinity and depression and frustration kicks in. In my experience having at least one other person is at least a good frustration and prevention mechanism. That said, finding someone who's on board is equally hard.
> I end up making a ton of progress: bootstrapping a development environment, databases, frameworks, containers, yada, yada, yada
The „modern“ way of development is overcomplicated and not suitable if you are an solo founder, too much time is lost on infrastructure, setup etc. The modern complicated js stack where you need to maybe configure everything for 1-2 days and need to constantly fight webpack is not how you should built an web application as a solo founder.
You should be able to be „live“ in a few minutes. For every language there is a stack enabling this, they are not the most fany ones but get their work done. Take for example laravel with spark (https://spark.laravel.com/), for 99$ you get a login-system with teams and subscription management all-in-one within minutes. And don‘t build a ci pipeline, complex kubernetes cluster or learning a dozen of aws servers. A simple VPS or root server and Laravel Forge (https://forge.laravel.com/) or Ploi (https://ploi.io/) and you are live.
As a solo founder you need to find a way to cut down on non-programming and non-marketing tasks. This means maybe not working with the hottest tech stack of the day but simply using a workhorse solution which lets you get shit done quickly.
The biggest problem is you are missing an ecosystem. If someone wants to use it they need to do everything your way. But when using a boilerplate like from laravel, django, ror etc. there is a huuuge ecosystem which can be used too. So many functionality which does not need to be reimplemented.
So in my opinion all these one-off boilerplates not build on a well-known framework are too much hustle.
Never worry about the big picture. It's too easy to get overwhelmed. Sure, have an idea where you want to go, but don't worry about all the steps it will take to get there. Worry about the next thing. And then the next thing. And little by little you will have suddenly made a lot of progress.
Easier said than done it seems. I reckon I've abandoned at least 7-8 projects I took pretty far in the last decade, everything ended the same way-collecting dust in a repo or on an old drive. At this point even if something interesting comes to my mind, I shrug it off and ignore it or just share it online somewhere or tell someone. Maybe someone else has a stronger will than I do, idk. Still secretly hoping that eventually I'll meet someone as motivated as I can get so we can push each other but seems incredibly unlikely.
10 years / 7 or 8 projects is about 1.3 years on average. It takes a long time to build a company and a product as one person. Sounds like you have been giving up a bit prematurely. Or if you would like results in that time, make an MVP instead of trying to build a feature complete product.
I disagree. That's a skill, one you have to learn by yourself. Getting something production ready rarely is fun but doable. Motivation is complicated but for me it's for example bills I have to pay and the experience that we'll done projects do pay out sometimes.
> In this universe, of bootstrapping to several hundred thousand per month in revenue, a founder can walk away with $5m, $10m, $20m (depending on the multiple) in around half the time it’d take to build a “unicorn”.
The odds of this level of success for a solo bootstrapped founder is much smaller when you don’t raise. If you look at the stats on startup success (exits), funding has a strong positive correlation.
There are good and bad reasons to raise capital and many startups do raise for bad reasons, but that doesn’t mean that funding is inherently bad or should be eliminated as an option.
The common rational used as a counterpoint (including during my time at YC) was “if taking on $xx million in exchange for 20% of the company increases the value of your equity by more than 20%, it’s a win-win.
The one (major) caveat is that taking on significant funding also means you need to repay all of the amount raised when you sell your company (legally referred to as a 1x liquidation preference).
My main worry for modern day SaaS founders raising giant seed rounds (often $5-10mm) is that after taking that money, you’ve now raised the minimum price you would need to sell the company for you or your employees to financially gain from a sales.
After raising $10mm, if you go and sell for $12mm a year later, the first $10mm goes straight back to your investors, and the left over $2mm goes to whoever owns the shares of the company.
When a startup that raised a $10mm seed goes on to raise a $25mm Series A, the company can no longer sell for less than $35mm (1x liquidation preference to investors).
In other words, we’re seeing a shift of mindset to one of “go big or go home, there’s no middle ground”.
The one exception is sometimes VCs allow founders to take money off the table during large rounds (but of course that often doesn’t trickle down to employees with stock options, etc).
And then there are founders who accept 2x or 3x liquidation preference terms, which double or triple to problem described above.
This is just one of many reasons I favor bootstrapping and reinvesting profits for long-term organic growth rather than short-term VC-fueled hypergrowth.
The nice thing about solo bootstrapped is that it is extremely quick & easy to cut losses.
Most 'indie hacker' founders have 5 - 10+ failed businesses that didn't grow fast enough or just weren't quite right.
The indie hacker scene is pretty different from your typical VC startup where a business is 3 - 5 years minimum, most indie hackers are running on time frames of 1 - 3 months to gain traction.
-Thank- you. I scrolled through all the replies until I saw this one, because it seemed like such an obvious reason for why there would be a correlation. The first is "someone had an idea", and the latter is "someone had an idea that outsiders vetted and decided to put money towards". Of course the latter would be more likely to succeed. That doesn't mean the latter would not have succeeded had they foregone investing, nor that the former would have succeeded had they only been able to raise funds.
So you're saying you disagree with the parent that started this thread, that there isn't even a correlation. I'm not saying I agree, just that even if there is such a correlation it does not imply causation, for a -very- obvious reason.
Would you give some random programer 10 million ? Every one of us could probably create a website, but only a select few could create a business ready to receive funding.
"Leave" is wrong idea in this context. If it generates money, hire some support staff and just leave it running. Do not sell, where would u invest anyway? $5m profit over a few years is very common for a small businesses.
And selection bias. The most successful startups attract the most VC interest.
It's like Harvard grads. Yes, they're a very high calibre and more successful on average, but a lot (not all) of that is selection instead of creation.
Bootstrapped, small, one person companies are still startups, where the odds of success are less than 10%, while venture-backed startups is 20%-30%. [0][1] What non-survivors are excluded from these cohorts?
That’s not survivorship bias. And the measures of success in the article I cited are universal. The way you’re describing success (not going out of business) is included in those sources.
To be clear: staying in business is the universal success metric I mentioned and cited earlier (not funding or exit). Here’s another source citing the same 9/10 failure (10% success) rate for all startups in the U.S.
> Many small businesses start up every month but the failure rate is high. As of 2019, startup failure rates are around 90%. 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in their 10th year. [0]
Small bootstrapped companies can still exist and succeed against these odds (several are cited in the article), but to make the claim that these odds don’t apply to bootstrapped startups is foolish wishful thinking.
This has been analyzed by many, but the stats you see reported often are that 9/10 startups fail while 7/10 venture-backed startups fail [0]. Perhaps the reason why a startup has no investor interest is because the market is too small, so cutting the data by TAM (if possible) might be interesting. We don’t have data for these micro-TAM startups showing whether they succeed more or less than any other startup. But the data we do have does show an advantage to raising money from VC vs. not. But to be clear, my point is that funding should be a more complicated and nuanced discussion. And if there’s a $5M+ potential return, like the author proposes, then there should be investor interest. The question is whether it’s a good idea for the company to raise.
I suspect this includes outsourcing a whole series of functions from support functions such as finance, accounting, tax and legal, to even what would be considered core functions such as UX, coding etc.
Taken to an extreme, the startup could remain a handful of people while benefiting from a much larger team which is not included in the headcount.
If you cut out the bloat, planning meetings, etc., you can stand up an MVP pretty quickly while doing the coding yourself.
I think most of the tricks are CSS frameworks, re-using parts of old projects, no-code MVP, outsourcing non-tech things.
Many of the successful indie founders seem to be non-technical business people who give 0 cares about coding something the right way, so they just smash stuff together without a care to get it out the door.
You should be outsourcing as many of those as possible anyway, even if you aren’t going for the bootstrap play. There’s no strategic reason to have a finance, HR or legal team unless you have 100s of employees. That’s not to say you ignore those things, but there are so many quality SaaS services that do those at a tiny fraction of the cost of an FTE it only makes sense to use them.
Or the company is started in a country where those things don't require several full time positions. Where I live I can run a company as a software engineer (No formal education in finance, legal etc) without any problems. Things which aren't solved automatically by accounting software is usually available to read up on online.
In todays market where developers are commoditized “resources” it’s only logical for the “ninjas” or “superstars” who repeatedly see their role being perceived as “working bees” who don’t want to fall into this management / worker dichotomy or choose serving a “management” queen.. to rebel and redefine the work as they see fit, a good enough business where work is done and is more aligned with the interests of the working class, so no VCs and no conforming to top to bottom hierarchies.. just work
I left Software Architect / UI position at big corp when management had ordered to use then-hot Angular on large web app. Without investigation, acceptance testing, etc. Just unconditional directive.
I had Sciter[1] prototype at that moment - used as self-teaching tool to understand how browsers work.
Since then I am almost solo (one or two contractors sometimes) on the project. ~10 years of non-disturbed (literally) flight.
You might be surprised. Instagram was bought for 1B and had 13 employees at that time.
"Instagram launched 10 years ago. By the time it was bought by Facebook in 2012, it only had 13 employees — including founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger."
Probably seems more rare because the only stories you hear are "X raises 100 million" instead of "X is a profitable company serving a tiny niche making 100 million in revenue"
Is that a necessary condition though or due to the environment? A security company I worked for got acquired and in a relatively short time they went from 100 to 300 to 600 quickly in preparation for the acquisition. I am not sure those people were required for the valuation or if they were part of the standard game plan of a sale.
You exchange the relationship from boss to customer and business partner. You divide your customer facing work unto three categories: DELIVERY, MANAGEMENT, STEERING
The relationship must be strong and you must have a working relationship, can never be caustic. Make sure that you are making the customer shine, always. Be a trusted advisor when you can. Say yes a lot, but setting expectations and saying no is also okay and important.
Risk tolerance and thick skin is key. The financial reward is sky high.
This is great. One question I've had for a while - do founders typically get one time bonuses or sell their own shares during later funding rounds? I feel like with a lot of these businesses that are successful, there's probably opportunities along the way to sell and make a few million. Especially with unicorn founders I'm often in awe that they stick with it - I'm sure they had opportunities to pocket $100 million and walk away.
This might be an extreme one, but the Bird founder appears to have cashed out $44m.
It makes sense for VCs to let founders cash out a bit -- just so you can be comfortable and focus on hyper-growth of the business rather than making short term decisions. I've heard the amounts are usually more like <3M (enough for a house and car or college for kids) and not like the example above. The more the founder cashes out, theoretically the less incentivized they are to grow the company.
The article was "ghost written". Meaning that if you're a founder who has no time or ability to write but want to put out content, HSG will do all / much / some of the writing for you under your name and also promote the content. HSG lists Paddle as a client.
Does anyone have a list of good resources / tools / communities for solo creators?
I recently decided to take a solo project and run with it. The technical promise is real, and I'm excited about my vision for it. Unfortunately in this context, I've spent all 10+ years of my career in scientific computing and big tech - so despite having a few friends in the startup world, most of this is really new to me, and I don't actually know anyone who has gone the solopreneur / micro-startup route.
Any and all tips, tricks, pointers, articles, and advice are welcome - I'm really excited to take this risk, but I'm feeling increasingly clueless about how to handle many of the organizational / non-technical aspects of this process.
Perfect, thank you. Looks like an invitation code is needed to sign up, if any generous soul would like to send one to glenn.hope[at]protonmail.com I would be forever grateful!
If I have a SaaS (e.g. website that offers some service) then is there a good service that takes care of the technical part of user registration, payment and user support / CRM?
Even if there are services like stripe and Auth0, as a solo developer it takes considerable time to connect all these together to get the basic functionality to actually sell things and integrate it into my product.
It just looks like they are offering there services mostly for non-developers (low-code / no-code) and I couldn't find anything about whether they have an API that I can use from my own code to check for registered users and if they paid etc.
> as a solo developer it takes considerable time to connect all these together
Well hopefully it you’re a developer it doesn’t take that long. I just switched a SaaS to Stripe from PayPal last week and it took less than 30 minutes. These SaaS support tools/websites are increasingly easy to use, making time to market for even a solo dev pretty easy.
I can't speak to the others in the list, but I'm building Nodewood, and I have heard this worry from other people as well! Consequently, one of the features I'm working on is a deploy process that can target different cloud providers and set up VMs, managed databases, etc for you.
I feel your pain personally, as well, so I built and already have an Ansible script I use to deploy Nodewood.com, but it turns out that Ansible doesn't play well on Windows, so while I'm happy to make it available to customers, I can't really justify making it the default deploy method.
I like the idea of solo development. However, I don't see the value in the solutions offered. A marketplace for css components? A headline generator or optimizer?
Maybe I am just too close to the technology to appreciate what people are buying.
that is kind of part of the equation. these super successful one-person shows build things that sound extremely niche, trivial to sometimes even stupid. But that is the reason they can grow their companies under the radar. the key part is that they know about a real pain their audience has and that audience happens to be much much bigger than outsiders or even the founders themselves thought/think.
As someone who pulled this off, it was less about discovery and more about being part of it already. The problems are much easier to understand and address when they're actually problems you're facing yourself.
Mine isn't anywhere near paying the bill yet, but it's at 60+ customers for $20/year.
It's exactly as you described. I had a pain point which was trivial for most, but not for me. No existing solutions solved it properly so I decided to make it myself.
While searching for a solution, I found that a lot of other people had the same problem. It was bad enough for them that they took time out of their day to write their complaints online.
In solving my own problem, I was creating something that other people might've pay for. And they did!
I quickly learned that marketing was the most important part of the process.
* there's an app with obvious business model (monthly pay per user), immune to piracy (everything is mediated by their servers; no account, the app doesn't work)
* the functionality was deemed valuable enough by Slack to acquire a startup that barely got off the ground
* people love this app
The Universe sent a clear signal.
Hacker News is supposed to be a breeding ground for hackers that are interested in building software businesses.
How many of the people that read the Slack HN acquisition thread fired up Visual Studio or XCode and started building a copy of Screenhero?
I spelled out the obvious opportunity for the tens of thousands of people who must have read that post. It was even the top voted comment.
Everyone ignore the signal.
BTW: "clone Screenhero" opportunity is mostly gone. Not completely but there are at least 2 startups cloning it.
I'm pretty sure it took at least 2 years before they started copying Screenhero (one of the startups is actually by a guy from the original team, I think).
So for at least 2 years there was a clear opportunity to build a multi-million dollar business by a very small team.
But your example, Screenhero clones like Pop (https://pop.com/), are in a large, competitive market. That doesn’t fit the qualifications of a small, underserved niche like the article describes.
I fit very well in the article description. It's not only about finding the right niche and riding the wave, is also about execution, otherwise competitors will eat you.
There's luck involved of course, but after 10 failed tries you'll get an eye for it. Just an example: there are sub-markets that don't have specialized products, they all use products built for everyone instead that specific niche, like instead of a CRM for everyone niche it down as CRM for mechanics (i'm sure there are many of them, but you get the idea).
by being directly involved in other areas and seeing the problems that non-developers wouldn't know how to fix
the problem with most software engineers is they only know tech. Most of these "niche" businesses are created at the intersection of tech and marketing/design/business
It’s very often a niche the founder themselves are part of. If the founder writes content and builds a headline A/B tester, it’s often possible to make a tool, so some adwords and marketing and get a couple thousand sales at less than a $100 a month each.
One thing I’ve been wondering about, as someone who’s considering making the switch.. is the role of hiring contractors for things you yourself aren’t a specialist in (ex: for me, design). When I hear “one-person” and read posts like this, they sometimes give the impression that indie hackers do everything themselves.. which I imagine is really not the case. Does anyone have insight into that?
Yes that's right. Almost none of these people have built everything themselves. Design, copy writing, marketing, development, accounting are just some of the things that can be outsourced easily.
we are looking for additional product validation. Would you be interested to tell me a bit more about your situation and what you would consider useful in a call?
I started out designing everything from scratch, but realized it's 10 times faster to just use a commercial vue/html theme. You don't need custom design, especially if your product is not design-related.
It's absolutely possible to do everything yourself. Most skills relevant to indies have a low "skill ceiling" - ie. it's easy to learn just enough to be dangerous.
Bootstrapped Levels.fyi up until now to $2m run rate. We’re 2 founders, but I absolutely believe this phenomenon of solo creators is the future. The pros of solo are evident: everything lives in one head / one stakeholder, singularly focused on core value by necessity (separation of concerns, do one thing really well, no sprawl), no meetings
Building an audience with strong engagement is replacing the “seed” round so to speak. Don’t need anything else, just an ability to ship and iterate fast.
> Building an audience with strong engagement is replacing the “seed” round so to speak.
For funded startups this is established area: buy online ads and receive views for your product. How solo can do it efficiently without significant monetary investment into digital marketing?
podcasts, speaking engagements, blogs, twitter, substack, HN, Product Hunt, Instagram, small communities, early customers, newsletters.
The reason digital advertising is so popular with VC backed startups is because they need capacity. If you are starting a bootstrapped startups getting a flywheeling going starting with 50 people is fine.
is this stuff really that new? I feel like I've been reading about solo founders who are able to bootstrap some company into the hundreds of thousands to low millions per year, for several years now on this site
what seem new is all the products around it, like "micro private equity"
Any developer through sheer will can mold himself into a one man startup that builds a powerful product that normally requires the efforts of a massive team.
Where things typically fall apart is when it comes time for maintenance and support.
I’m sorry, yes, any dev can build a product, but is it something people will pay money to buy? That is 90% of the problem. If you have to do support, count yourself lucky cause that means you actually have customers
Lol, this is me, a 100x dev, screwed over by big co employer. Decide to go solo and slowly build a company to compete with them. Started part time 12 years ago. I think I could easily hit $1B valuation within 10 years. It is already super profitable and still growing. Eventually I’ll cost the competitors so much business that it’ll be much cheaper for them to buy me out for $Bs. If not it’ll still throw off $Ms in cash per year.
By my definition 10x/100x dev means a person who makes decision which require 100x less resources to execute to achieve the same goal.
For example, one can build clean, maintainable and monitored codebase/infra, which will support business goals and rapid evolution in long term, while some group of mediocre engineers can build overcomplicated system, over-polluted by bugs and technical debt, which will be significant liability rather than useful asset.
I’m amused that the 100x dev caught more flack than a likely solo $B bootstrap. In my view developer ability follows the Pareto distribution.
I was born to program and have done it all my life and it’s all I do. I’ve been formally trained and have worked at world leading research institutions. I’ve always been considered a bit of a freak by my peers.
I currently have two direct competitors, both have 100s of developers and are staffed by thousands. Despite starting after them I was able to ship a key feature long before them.
That's probably what it means but it's also a weird thing to measure because depending how you define "average" you can juke the stats any way you want. If I said "hire" to a random resume that comes in for a job, the value of either the median or mean developer is likely very close to zero if not negative, and that's probably true even if you just look at devs who are actually employed writing code for generic companies. If you restrict to better companies you quickly climb the productivity curve, and at places like Google it's pretty rare to find someone who is a 10x dev as compared to company peers (though you can have 10 or 100x impact pretty easily if you're good at almost any part of business other than writing code and know how to thrive in a bloated corporate environment).
Cash, as in free cash flow. Maybe not the best usage of the term, but better than revenue. And secret in that people in this niche don’t advertise the opportunity as new competition would cut into profits.
ConvertKit is an example of this.
The founder started by selling books and then made a course on how to sell books, got a pretty big audience around that and then started to build ConvertKit. Eventually he figured out who he wanted to market ConvertKit to and his prior audience of people wanting to sell things online was a great match. Naturally a lot of people who bought his books and courses are a great fit for his email service because the whole premise of his course on selling books is around building an email list. The books ended up being a lead generator for his SAAS app.
That's not to take anything away from Nathan's work. At the end of the day he made a very successful and well deserved business but the specific circumstances around it are a bit different than what this blog post makes it out to be. It was a 10 year journey with multiple good ideas at the right time to get to that point. All of it is documented on Nathan's site. I remember reading some of his posts many years ago.