
Lessons we learned while bootstrapping - brianjackson
https://kinsta.com/blog/bootstrapping-startup/
======
buf
I've been bootstrapping
[https://www.castingcall.club](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.

~~~
graystevens
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.

[0] [https://breachinsider.com](https://breachinsider.com)

~~~
mikeokner
_> 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?

~~~
graystevens
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.

~~~
zenlikethat
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.

------
mikeokner
The #1 best piece of advice in the article is:

 _> The best way to get things done is to simply sit down and start working on
them._

So many people worry so much about failure that they don't even bother to
start. You can't possibly plan for every roadblock and eventuality. The only
thing you can control is your execution, and there are no short cuts. Hard
work won't guarantee success, but lack of it will guarantee failure.

~~~
j_s
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602816)

"stop trying to be clever and start trying to be done"

------
tw1010
Is it possible to block all websites from asking about enabling notifications?
Every time I have allowed it have I regretted it, and every time I see the
little dialog box asking for my permission do I feel slightly more desire to
just close down the tab and read something else.

~~~
hawkice
My recommendation: leave. Websites won't stop doing something intrusive and
annoying until it costs them more than it gets them.

~~~
enraged_camel
Yeah but how are they going to realize people are leaving because of that one
specific thing?

~~~
guntars
They are doing A/B tests on something like that, right?

------
juanmirocks
Sorry: Wrong Thread.

Does this study also consider that children remain living at their parents'
for longer and longer? For example, it is not bizarrely uncommon in Spain to
find people in their late twenties or thirties still living with their
parents.

~~~
tga
Just curious, how do you manage to post a comment in the wrong thread? Are you
using some kind of client?

~~~
vhost-
though, I can't remember what thread it was in, I saw this happen yesterday
too.

~~~
jacquesm
This has been happening for a long long time but it is rare enough that it is
super hard to track and fix.

------
dilyevsky
> Wait to receive 50, 100 or even more applications. Make sure you have a big
> pool of candidates because that’s how you’ll find your next dream employee.

> After that, we start narrowing down the list to the top 5 or 10 candidates.
> We have multiple rounds of job interviews, usually 2 or 3. Thanks to this we
> are able to narrow down our list to the top 3 candidates and make the final
> decision. Yes, this process takes time, usually weeks. If you’re not in a
> hurry you should follow this slow method, trust me, it’s worth the time.

Perfect strategy to only have people who are desperate/lazy enough to have
nothing else lined up during that time! Not sure about "best" though but they
sure as hell will be cheap.

~~~
albedoa
Yup, followed by "Oh you've received other offers? We'll see if we can
accelerate the process on our end".

No thanks, I'll just go with the existing offer from a company that doesn't
hoist neon red flags during their interview process.

------
jcadam
I’ve been building a SaaS product for the last year or so while working a day
job and raising a family, and am only now close to the point of having
something I consider beta-able
([https://www.contabulo.com](https://www.contabulo.com)).

I think I made the mistake of getting too fancy with the architecture (but
designing architecture was too much fun to resist), so I’ve ended up with
something that’s a collection of Clojure services on the backend, running on
several linodes along with rabbitmq, elasticsearch, etc. Well, at least it
should scale decently, if the need arises :fingers crossed:

So this project has probably taken way too long to get to a MVP. But hey, the
day job won’t let me do cool stuff like use FP languages, design architecture,
do front end work, etc., so I need some sort of creative outlet :)

Now if I can only find some folks willing to test this thing. So far I’ve only
gotten a small handful of email sign ups via my landing page. Maybe it’s time
to spend some money on AdWords, etc.

~~~
mikeokner
_> Contabulo is Coming Soon_

 _> We’re currently working hard on getting Contabulo ready and hope to launch
a beta in the very near future._

That's probably killing you. My advice would be to get rid of that
immediately.

It sounds like in general you need to reprioritize and refocus. You use the
words "SaaS product," "project," "creative outlet," and "this thing" to
describe your efforts thus far. "Things" don't make money, _businesses_ do.
You need to stop being an engineer building a product and start building a
business if you actually intend to generate income from this endeavor. To that
end, I suggest a few immediate actions:

\- Give users the ability to sign up and pay you money. If users can't pay
you, you'll never make a dime. Stop worrying about architecture or feature
development or closed betas and focus 100% on attracting and retaining high-
quality customers. Don't do any further development beyond bug fixes until you
have paying customers and can articulate why additional features will drive
growth.

\- Consider offering a free trial to get "testers" instead of a beta (but
don't call them that). The free trial will allow you to collect feedback from
real customers without establishing an ongoing expectation of free or reduced
cost that can kill long-term revenue. In general, startups price too low. Read
a few articles like [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-
rubber-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-
duckies/) and [https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-
product/](https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-product/)

\- Spend a lot more time & effort on your branding/marketing. In particular,
your site currently shows two screenshots that look quite similar to Trello +
photo attachments, and has a bland tagline of "Organize. Collaborate. Get
stuff done." Differentiate yourself from potential competitors and clearly
communicate value. Also, minor nit but there's no reason a static landing page
should show a loading bar before revealing the content. That alone is going to
cost you real $$$ in page bounces.

~~~
andrewstuart
>> Stop worrying about architecture or feature development or closed betas and
focus 100% on attracting and retaining high-quality customers.

Hang on... don't you need a product that people want to use and pay for? You
can't just magic that up out of nothing. There's a necessary amount of
development required isn't there to get something built that people are
willing to shell out for.

~~~
mikeokner
Yes, but this individual already has a functioning product or is very close.
Too many engineers think "I'm going to put out the most perfect product with
all the features I want" when what they need is to put out a usable basic
product, start making money, and iterate on new features based on what their
customer wants.

------
treis
I wonder how profitable these I make $X,XXX,XXX in revenue and here's how type
posts are. I counted 17 people in one of their pictures and if you assume they
cost $100,000 each, that's $1,700,000 in salary cost alone. Then there's 3
offices and all of the other overhead/costs they have to pay.

I've worked on some hobby SAAS stuff and every time I look at the numbers to
see what it would take to equal my salary the numbers are staggering.

~~~
telesilla
>$100,000 each

I think that's the key point made here, that these high salaries are not
demanded if you aren't hiring on the U.S. west coast.

~~~
dboreham
Parent may be saying that 100k is a reasonable per-clueful-person cost pretty
much anywhere. I'm in the middle of the USA and I wouldn't expect to hire a
competent engineer for less than $100k.

~~~
beberlei
Anywhere in the us maybe, nowhere else in the world except maybe switzerland.
The blog post specifically mentions being remote and not all in the US

~~~
treis
Yeah, I'm sure it's cheaper in other areas. It's mostly just an observation. I
wonder what sort of profitability companies like this have and how it would
compare to someone's salary that manages a department of ~20.

------
mlevental
here's my problem if anyone is willing to lend a helping hand: i'm building an
enterprise saas product that involves some cool buzzwords and potentially
really adds value in the space i'm targeting but i'm getting no traction.

i have an mvp (phone app and webapp) to demo to customers. i have the decks
and sales pitch. i'm a reasonably smart and articulate person and communicate
well (able to "speak sales"). yet because i have no company history, no
clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i
can't get any traction. at least i think this is the reason i'm not getting
any bites? i had leads (through my FFF investors) - i've had probably 10-15
sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where
(the latest one fizzled out yesterday). pricing isn't the issue because i've
floated several different pricing schemes to customers and while some are more
attractive than others it's never been the deal breaker. maybe i have poor
product/market fit but i've experimented with adjusted the product offering
too and no significant change in reception there either.

now supposedly i should be learning something about my market segment but the
problem is i constantly get contradictory signals - one customers says it's a
great product but too early, another says it's not a useful product maybe i'd
like to consider building such and such product, one customer says price is
too high, another doesn't even mention it.

i'm really at a complete loss for how to turn this thing around and i'm
burning through cash (although i'm not above taking cost cutting measures -
fired one of us three 3 weeks ago and cut my own pay this month).

~~~
shafyy
It's hard to give advice without knowing more details, but this sounds like
there is really no need for what you're offering.

How did you come up with the idea? How do you know it's something people want
in the first place?

To me, this sounds more like a fundamental product problem as opposed to a
sales/marketing problem. Try talking to (potential) users and find out what
version of the general idea you want to build they could use and why.

Even if they say something like "too early", ask "why". Ask it 5 times, like a
small child. "Too early" is just an excuse because they don't have the balls
to say no. Find out what the underlying reason is.

~~~
mlevental
> It's hard to give advice without knowing more details, but this sounds like
> there is really no need for what you're offering.

this has occurred to me of course but i just don't think it's true. without
giving too much away it's a simple app that makes distribution of content at
tradeshows much easier, personalized, and trackable (lead gen/capture for the
content producer). if that's not a thing that tradeshows dearly need then i
don't know what is.

> How did you come up with the idea? How do you know it's something people
> want in the first place?

everyone on the "advisory board" has decades of experience in the industry. it
was one particular advisor's idea and i've run with it.

> Try talking to (potential) users and find out what version of the general
> idea you want to build they could use and why.

truf

~~~
hencq
> without giving too much away

I don't really understand this attitude. Why are you keeping this a secret?
Aren't you trying to sell your app/service? That seems hard if you're not
willing to tell people what it is/does.

~~~
HumanDrivenDev
Perhaps they don't want to announce to the world that their SAAS is in
trouble.

------
wheresmyusern
this blog post is a kind of guide to starting your own company and making
millions of dollars. this is a little unrelated but i just find it funny to
read this guide because its very convoluted. there is actually a much simpler
guide that their guide is a derivation of. here is the actual guide:

step one: be more intelligent than most people

behind almost every business, behind almost every professional success and
behind almost any success in general that ive seen, is a highly intelligent
person. i find it irritating to read because the concept of a guide is
spelling things out so that anyone can follow the steps and get the same
result. successful people always benefit from high intelligence, money and
success will always be unfairly skewed to the benefit of those who happened to
be born with better brains and into better developmental circumstances. nobody
needs this guide because they are either smart and dont need a guide or dumb
and in which case cant use this guide.

~~~
bacongobbler
Sure, if you look at it from the closed mindset that nobody improves or can
"git gud".

It's been proven time and time again that humans can learn and adapt to
achieve their own aspirations. Take one quick look at the special olympics;
you'll see a very large group of individuals who have all overcome amazing
obstacles to become olympians.

Similarly, highly intelligent people may not have the domain knowledge
required to understand how to bootstrap a company. Their knowledge domain may
come from a completely different environment or culture which has its own
mindset on how to bootstrap a company. Being smart does not necessarily make
you more equipped than "dumb" (and highly motivated) people, but it does give
you a decent head start.

------
tabeth
Random sidenote: I feel that a _ton_ of sites have the exact same visual style
as kinsta. Is this a template or something? If so, which one is it?

~~~
helloimraghav
Relevant:
[https://twitter.com/chopse/status/930935055274225664](https://twitter.com/chopse/status/930935055274225664)

~~~
mattmanser
Her personal site is terrible though, slow loading, 3.2Mb, has to compile and
run all the javascript before it even starts displaying anything.

Why listen to someone who's basically got the new version of a flash website?

Also, try making your screen half width, as if you had two browser windows
side-by-side, something I do regularly.

I mean, it's one thing to throw mud about everyone copying stripe, it's
another when your own site is shockingly bad.

All it does is show that perhaps it's better to have designers copy successful
designs given what they'll sometimes do left to their own devices.

------
uladzislau
The first tip - red ocean/blue ocean strategy contradicts what these guys have
been doing themselves - 1. take a proven "premium WordPress hosting/WPengine"
model 2. use hip violet cartoonish website design as hundreds of other
startups. 3. run affiliate program with huge payouts $500/referral
(potentially). Now I'd take every advice mentioned with a grain of salt.

------
nathan_f77
There's a few other comments in here talking about their own experiences, so
I'll add mine as well. I'm working on a bootstrapped startup called FormAPI:
[https://formapi.io](https://formapi.io)

I launched about a month ago, and my MRR is 3 figures. Here's a few of the
marketing ideas I've tried.

* I spent around $100 on AdWords, but didn't get any conversions. I think my ad was pretty good, but my theory is that most of my target audience are using ad-blockers.

* I started a blog, and wrote a post about Rails/React development [1]. It was included in the Ruby Weekly newsletter, which was great, although it didn't get too many views (< 1,000). The blog post doesn't mention an author, so they used "FORMAPI BLOG" as the subtitle. This was a nice surprise, since sponsored links are very expensive. (I'm booking a sponsored link for early next year.)

* I ran a "Bitcoin Treasure Hunt" [2] with a few programming challenges. I had a good spike of about 60,000 views, so some programmers might remember the service next time they need to generate PDFs. I couldn't get any attention on Reddit or Hacker News, but maybe I'll have better luck next time.

I learned a lot from this experience, so the next one will be much more
interesting, and it won't have any ambiguities or mistakes. It will be less of
a "scavenger hunt", and will have more fun challenges with algorithms and
logic puzzles. (There's a signup form at the bottom of the post, if you're
interested.)

* I paid for a short marketing consultation with someone who has a lot of relevant experience. They've been really awesome, and have provided a lot of great advice that I'll be implementing soon. Lots of things to improve around pricing, SEO, UX, social, PR, etc.

The initial launch went pretty well on HN and Product Hunt, but that traffic
has died down, so now I've just got to put in consistent work over the next
few years.

[1] [https://formapi.io/blog/posts/json-patch-with-rails-5-and-
re...](https://formapi.io/blog/posts/json-patch-with-rails-5-and-react/)

[2] [https://formapi.io/blog/posts/bitcoin-treasure-
hunt/](https://formapi.io/blog/posts/bitcoin-treasure-hunt/)

------
foobaw
I admire them - they use 20+ SaaS products, and most of them are extremely
useful for automation leading to saving tons of time and effort.
Unfortunately, they're quite expensive for people just starting out with zero
funding.

------
wolco
Hire cheap and hire people smarter than you. Good luck with that.

------
jimnotgym
Please can we move on to a better term than 'bootstrapping'. It is non
specific, means little to non-HN peeps and is just hard on the ears. How about
self-funding?

~~~
HumanDrivenDev
As a fellow pedant who has complained about tech lingo before ('legacy' always
makes my skin crawl a bit), what's wrong with 'bootstrapping'? The term has a
fairly rich history in computing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping#Computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping#Computing)

~~~
jimnotgym
I'll take your 'legacy' and raise you an 'on-premise' (as in not in the
cloud). I assume Oracle and Microsoft marketing want us to believe that
premise is the singular of premises? I'm afraid I think different...

Bootstrapping does have a fairly rich history in computing. It has found an
excellent meaning or two. Does it need another not quite analogous one? I
dunno, I was in business and in Private Equity (at a very junior level) for a
long while before I was in computers, and prefer the jargon of classic finance
I guess. Likewise I don't like 'burn-rate' and 'runway' as the naive twins of
'cash-flows'. I could go on but my stuffy finance background is never likely
to win me a popularity contest...

------
Hnrobert42
That's reasonably interesting article with decent tips. But the life he
advocates sounds god-awful. God-awful.

~~~
dang
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN? All this really says is some
combo of "like" and "don't like". Others can't learn from that.

A more substantive comment might say what specifically is interesting, or
point out something specific about "the life he advocates".

~~~
Danihan
Pretty sure he means section number 8, dealing with long and unpredictable
hours.

Did you read the article?

~~~
dang
That's separate from whether the comment was substantive.

------
ttul
There is no boot strapping. You’re always either leveraging capital, or
people. And by “people” I mean yourself too as the founder. And by “capital” I
mean the rich parents who provided a cushion for you when times were tight
personally.

