
Founders share the challenges of running a tech business - ChanningAllen
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-biggest-challenges-of-running-a-tech-business-ea87797f6d
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taylorhou
enjoy how there's perspective given from the responders with their current MRR
as well. as a founder of a bootstrapped tech-enabled service startup with
$135k+ MRR is cash flow. Accounts Receivable is a PITA and it still hasn't
been solved (even with the likes of bill.com, harvest, stripe, paypal, qbo,
etc...) - i'd almost pay for a company to outsource our AR to completely to
represent us on initial AR, 30-90 day AR, collections, demand letters, and
ultimately lawsuits if needed. bleh.

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blizkreeg
at that size, would it be better to just hire an in-house accounting/book-
keeping person?

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jermaustin1
I was going to recommend the same thing, but I also know there are plenty of
AR companies out there. YC even funded one called YayPay. I know my accountant
will chase down invoices for me if I asked him (for a fee of course),
thankfully QuickBooks Online handles this reporting, and has a one click
solution to resend Invoices. I don't do $135k/mo, and only send a handful or
two of invoices each month, so I cannot comment on how well it scales.

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taylorjacobson
wow, love the honesty of some of these, killer compilation

really liked this --> "From the start, I was aware that I was taking on a huge
project that other companies have devoted entire teams to, but I chose to look
at it as more of a mental challenge than a technical one. I knew I had the
skillset to pull it off, I just had to keep myself motivated and on track."

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c-smile
Heh, that's mine and about my Sciter project.

Sciter is pretty full implementation of HTML5 and CSS, has scripting engine on
board, etc. So, indeed, I am personally competing with teams behind WebKit,
Trident, Gecko, V8 (JS Engine), Chakra (MS JS Engine) and bunch of others.

And recently with ReactJS (Sciter got Reactor - native implementation of
ReactJs), Angular and others.

And that is really a fun project to work on - many different paradigms on the
same code base.

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throway1n
that’s the one project in the list that caught my eye - looks pretty neat.
shame it doesn't gain the attention of the electron hating mob on HN - they
all want people to work for free and give them stuff for no money but in the
name of foss. keep up the good work, your project is an example of going
against what the mob wants and building a successful product.

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tylerrobinson
> The biggest challenge was a very naive understanding of how the modern
> internet economy works. The idea that good software is easy to promote is
> just as silly as the "good software sells itself" myth. I would definitely
> spend more time learning marketing.

This resonates for me as a bootstrapped founder in the early stages with my
company. Cutting through the noise and getting the attention of my leads is
hard work. Way harder than coding.

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geuis
I’m running into these challenges right now. After my last job, I’m finally
trying to turn a 10yr+ project into a product.

I’m currently serving a bit over 2 million requests per day for the free
service I’ve run for years.

Now that I’m focusing on turning it into something more I’m realizing how slow
it is to build a product by yourself.

For example, I’ve been working on transitioning to a much more scalable k8s
architecture for the last few weeks. While I’ve had some experience over last
few years as a developer, I’ve never had to set the whole thing up from
scratch. It’s been tedious and draining but I am making progress.

The biggest issue is not having anyone to talk to on a peer basis.

In January I completely revamped the product website from being a crap page
running on Launchrock to a self-hosted site with a new design and
incorporating Mailgun to handle email.

The issue with that is I get people every day submitting their email addresses
to sign up, but to date no one has clicked the confirmation link in the emails
being sent to them to confirm the signup.

I researched this heavily before writing code and the consensus is that double
opt-in is the correct way to go. So I did that, but no one is following up
with the confirmation part.

Last week I found a minor bug that was preventing confirmation signups and I
fixed it asap and manually sent emails to the 3 people that I would manually
add them to the confirm list and remove them if they wanted. But I’ve had more
signups after that who also did not complete the signup process. I’ve tested
the flow heavily and it works.

But since I don’t really have a coworker environment anymore, I don’t have
anyone to do peer review right now. Very frustrating.

I guess overall I’m used to building services very rapidly but being
responsible for the entire thing is someone time consuming. I’m still
adjusting to the process.

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dankohn1
I would encourage you to try to find a low-cost developer in the developing
world (perhaps via Fiverr) who could serve a QA function for you. It might
take you 4 or 5 tries, but you might be able to find someone very low cost who
would be able to work with you on QA and debugging.

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hhs
With respect to each company, what do the numbers in the parentheses mean? Is
that profit, revenue or something else per month?

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randlet
This is almost always (and frustratingly!) Monthly Recurring Revenue.

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lwb
Frustrating how?

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pb7
Revenue is close to useless if you’re selling dollars for quarters. Hard to
gauge the efficacy of businesses without the full picture.

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riku_iki
IndieHackers are usually self-bootstrappers, they wouldn't sustain long by
selling dollars for quarters.

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Alex3917
Is IndieHackers completely fucked for anyone else right now in Chrome
80.0.3987.106 on MacOS? The js and CSS static assets are getting blocked for
some reason, even after disabling all my extensions and refreshing the page in
incognito and without cached assets.

edit: Works fine in Safari, but the same thing is happening in Firefox.

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HelloFellowDevs
I had the same issue with the link on both safari & firefox, I used the
readerview on firefox as a workaround.

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userium
I'd add the struggle / time it took to really deeply comprehend what 'build,
measure, learn' means in practice. And realizing that there is a more
scientific approach to building good products. For example by using
Hypothesis-Driven Development [1]. We wasted lots of time (and money) at the
beginning with our own stupid assumptions.

[1] Hypothesis-driven development (HDD)
[https://teamsuccess.io/hdd](https://teamsuccess.io/hdd)

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madengr
Wow, a coffee company is now a tech company. I didn't bother with the rest of
the list.

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throway1n
well the 9 to 5 you work in js probably selling some non tech products as
well, yet it may be called a tech company.

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kortilla
A tech company’s product is tech. A plumber that accepts payments using square
isn’t a tech company.

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throway1n
so your company sells apis, software frameworks or hardware? or does it
leverage these to sells some other non tech product?

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kortilla
Yes, the company I work for in particular sells software that runs on hardware
for datacenter traffic management.

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H8crilA
All of those could be applied to non-tech businesses with very minor
modifications.

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chirau
The site is not working/rendering properly in both Chrome and Firefox.

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haidersf
love the honesty

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ketchupfanatic
This site is top notch, thumbs up

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andrepd
It weighs several megabytes and downloads and runs scripts from multiple
domains. All to serve a text page.

God's sake it even has its own reimplemented loading bar...

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nif2ee
Never trust anything that comes from indiehackers, this is a community of
professional indie astroturfers and manipulators of everything from renaming
the same product and launching it every couple months on ProductHunt and
buying upvotes, to baiting HNers with "How I made $X by doing Y". It's a pump
and dump scheme on sub-million dollar levels.

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gumby
Not sure why a coffee company is a “tech startup”.

(Though TBF Amazon didn’t feel like a tech company in the 1990s)

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Wordball
It has a live chat and five different tracking solutions implemented. What
about this doesn't look like a tech business?

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gumby
That’s just table stakes for a generic retail store Just because I drive a car
wouldn’t make me a car business.

I think of tech businesses primarily as those that develop novel technology
and secondarily as those who use technology in a novel and unexpected way. In
both cases technology is the differentiation.

The only novelty of this business is its message and while that might make a
perfectly respectable business (I am not part of the target market so I can
not judge) there’s no “tech” in their business plan. Think of it more like
Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein: the clothes are made in the same factories by
the same workers; the only differentiation is market positioning. Nobody would
criticize them as not being “business” or even “clothes business” but their
differentiator is marketing.

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Axsuul
I'm pretty sure Wordball's response was meant as sarcasm.

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gumby
Hah, whooshed over my head! Everybody wants the pixie dust these days.

