
Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch  - batina
https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-a-saas-startup-from-scratch-by-yourself-part-1-4d834e1df8c1#.qf7sgvbhu
======
codegeek
"Instead of coding, the vast majority of your time is going to be spent
marketing, selling, optimizing funnels, and providing support. Those are the
things that get (and keep) customers. Those are the things that you do when
you run a business. Not writing code."

This is the best part of this article for me. A lot of solo bootstrappers
don't get it. They struggle. But the fact is that you have to market and sell.
Talk to customers and do the shittiest but most important thing: Support. No
matter how much automation you create, clients will send you emails and say "I
cannot do anything. please help" before even explaining what exactly is
broken.

There is a lot of dirty work you have to do every day as a bootstrapper and
you get no relief from it. You can surely add team members or "outsource" some
of it, but you can never outsource talking to clients (both pre sales and
post).

~~~
cyberferret
Agreed. When I started writing my SaaS app, I thought the 25000+ lines of code
and 80+ database tables would be the hardest work, and that the marketing
would be a breeze afterwards.

How wrong I was! The marketing aspect proved to be just as difficult and brain
taxing as the coding. In fact, I found it almost impossible to move ahead
until I decided to bring on board a co-founder with a marketing background
(after a full year of struggling). It was only then that I realised that
marketing and sales is a whole art form not unlike programming. Both
disciplines need focus and constant energy to bring about results.

~~~
realstuff
I wonder where I can find such marketing partner and what's the expected
compensation in term of equity and whatnot?

~~~
wastedhours
I got into marketing through reading about the startup world (I think some of
the people on HN would be surprised at how much of it is a discipline once you
get passed the BS-ers), and come more from a hacker perspective.

If you're bringing them on as a co-founder, then they're a co-founder, equity
and all. It's a valuable skill as much as programming and sales are (if you're
actually building a business, that is).

The issue you'll find is that most of the places to find them will be full of
aforementioned BS-ers, or self-titled growth hackers. Have a small LinkedIn
hunt at marketers who work in-house at a semi-large organisation - in a lot of
places there's a lot of hunger to do more, but large orgs tie your hands and
often see marketing as a "support" function over and above a business driving
one.

It might also be easier to find a part timer who doesn't want to give up the
above security, but wants to exercise their creative muscles, depending on
what stage/size biz you've got and your reqs.

------
cliff0rd
Hey everyone! Clifford here, the author of the article. Just thought I'd jump
in and say thanks to everyone for all the awesome feedback - you've all
seriously made my day (and probably even year for that matter)!

~~~
danieltillett
Nice work Clifford. Any reason you used a fictional SAAS example rather than
the real Tamboo story?

~~~
cliff0rd
When I started out writing the guide, I actually didn't have any references to
Tamboo - it was just me writing about approach using some fictional examples.

I posted Part 1 on Barnacles ([https://barnacl.es](https://barnacl.es)) in
October (I believe) and a lot of people gave me good feedback but one of the
things they said was that it was really hard to find a link to my site and
that I was nuts for not talking more about my direct experiences with Tamboo
since that was something they really wanted to know more about.

So in the later parts of the guide I do talk about some very specific Tamboo
things and went away from the generalized example in the first part.

I honestly wasn't planning for it to spread to a larger audience like HN (this
is a total surprise that's just flooring me right now!), so I never bothered
to go back and change Part 1 to use a more Tamboo-ish example.

~~~
danieltillett
OK this makes sense. I would really encourage you to do another write up of
the full Tamboo story especially all the nasty warty bits that all real
business stories have.

~~~
cliff0rd
Oh, and there are plenty of those! I've been trying to incorporate experiences
as I go, and there's a good amount of nasty experiences I make mention of in
this post: [https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-
be-u...](https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-
unexpected-883642c0d7c#.ib3g08xui)

But I will definitely look to put something together that incorporates more of
what you're talking about - thanks for the input!

~~~
nickpsecurity
I just submitted that one since it was my favorite. Especially the image
metaphor at the beginning. :) I just saw this comment but extra references
can't hurt ya.

------
csallen
_> Some of it may seem simple. Don’t be fooled. There is complexity in simple
things._

I've interviewed 80+ founders (mostly bootstrapped) for
[https://IndieHackers.com](https://IndieHackers.com), and people sometimes
come away from reading an interview thinking, "Well that person had it easy."
We tend to underestimate the importance of the things we don't -- the part of
the iceberg that's beneath the surface. In truth, the amount of work people
are doing behind the scenes is often of staggering importance.

For example, Jason Grishkoff ran his popular music blog Indie Shuffle for 7
years before spinning off a successful SaaS app: SubmitHub. It's easy to look
at that and conclude that he had it easy because of his blog. But Jason spent
a grueling 4 months sending 1000 hand-crafted emails to his target customers
in order to get SubmitHub off the ground. That's neither an easy nor an
obvious path to take.

I see lots of people quit after a few weeks/months of not finding a magic
bullet, so it's important to realize that there is no magic bullet for most
companies.

~~~
realstuff
How ironic of you showing in the particular post. He's precisely referring to
people like you and your illegitimate interviewees at IndieHackers who all
claim to be overnight successes.

~~~
csallen
Nobody on Indie Hackers has ever claimed to be an overnight success, and every
interview is transparent about the details so that readers can see exactly how
long it took.

~~~
matrix
To be fair, he has a point. The indyhackers Submit hub article is sub-titled:

"Jason Grishkoff built a $55,000/mo SaaS business helping musicians promote
their music, and he did it in under a year. Here's how."

~~~
csallen
Well, he started his business in November 2015, started charging in February
2016, and hit $55k/mo by November 2016. I don't see any hyperbole/dishonesty
in saying he built his business in under a year given that he actually did so.
Sometimes rapid growth happens!

Of course him being able to accomplish this feat stems from skills/knowledge
he acquired earlier (his blog, music industry experience, learning to code,
learning to design, etc), but that's true of any business. Nobody starts from
scratch, and the interviews cover people's histories pretty thoroughly.

~~~
wheelerwj
No he started his original blog years earlier, he pivoted/made a new product
and sold it to the same audience. That's like saying google built the macbook
pro 16 in under a year.

~~~
csallen
This is misinformed on a number of points, unfortunately.

First, Jason didn't "pivot" from Indie Shuffle. It's a separate standalone
business that he never shut down, and in fact continues to spend many hours
running even today.

Second, SubmitHub's user base consists of hundreds of other blogs and labels,
whom he spent a painstaking 4 months sending 1000+ personalized emails to
trying to convince them to sign up. They're responsible for the vast majority
of his revenue. He did not simply keep "the same audience".

This is exactly what I was talking about when I said that people read these
stories and conclude that everything was easy.

~~~
wheelerwj
No one belittling the amount of work he put into it, quite the contrary, where
saying indiegogo attempts to make things look more successful in shorter
periods of time when that's not the case.

The rapid success of submitHub is directly correlated to success of
IndieShuffle, which he spent an immense amount of time building.

~~~
csallen
Success in any area is _always_ directly correlated to some earlier knowledge
or skills which took time to develop. The fact that SubmitHub's success is
"correlated" with Indie Shuffle's is such an extreme standard that, using it,
we could never assign a starting point to anything.

Everyone is quite aware that founders acquire domain knowledge,
contacts/network, programming ability, business acumen, ideas, etc before the
very day they start their company. I know you mean well, but this comment
thread itself suggests the only people misled by the title were those who
mistakenly believed that SubmitHub was a simple continuation of Indie Shuffle.

If SubmitHub's users had simply come from Indie Shuffle, or if Jason had
simply pivoted Indie Shuffle into SubmitHub, then I would agree with you. But
neither is the case.

~~~
wheelerwj
I quote, directly from your site, from the Jason Grishkoff's own explanation
of how he got his first users:

 _I always knew I was sitting on a great source of users with the ~300 daily
emails, and sure enough, as soon as I started pointing them to SubmitHub they
latched on...

...Given Indie Shuffle's prominence in the digital music industry, word spread
fast. _

> If SubmitHub's users had simply come from Indie Shuffle, or if Jason had
> simply pivoted Indie Shuffle into SubmitHub, then I would agree with you.
> But neither is the case.

That's exactly what happened, isn't it? No one is belittling it, no one is
claiming he didn't work for it. We're simply saying, SubmitHub wasn't
successful over night.

~~~
csallen
> That's exactly what happened, isn't it?

Not quite. I suppose I just know more of what happened behind the scenes than
is apparent in the text-based interview, because I recorded a podcast episode
with Jason afterwards. Two things:

1) Yes, Indie Shuffle's users latched onto SubmitHub, but Indie Shuffle is
just one of 250+ blogs and labels whose readers use SubmitHub. It's a small
percentage of the total revenue and users. 2) Yes, others in the industry knew
about Indie Shuffle, but Jason had to spend months and months sending cold
emails and doing sales in order to land other blogs and labels as customers.

I agree with you that it didn't happen overnight. And I also don't think
you're belittling what Jason did, at least not intentionally. My only point is
that it's easy to conclude that the surface level details of any business'
story played a much bigger role than they actually did.

In this case, Indie Shuffle was crucial for Jason understanding the problem,
coming up with the idea, and even beta testing the product. But the user
acquisition responsible for the massive sales happened the hard way, and it
happened in the last year.

------
dvt
> If you want to feel good about yourself, go listen to one of the startup
> gurus out there that will be more than happy to spoon feed you some
> entreporn.

I love it. Hope this stays on the front page for a while. It's both motivating
as well as demotivating; that's how you know it's for real :)

Props to the author, fantastic read and echoes my startup experiences to a
tee!

~~~
cyberferret
Echoes my experience as well! Frankly, I am getting tired of all the spruikers
who tout the "Just get an email list together to make a bazillion dollars a
day" type rubbish. Or the "just work really really hard and it will rain
money" type posts.

Truth is, the grind (especially in the early days) is incredibly difficult and
soul wearing. This article does a good job of articulating that.

~~~
dvt
Early last year, I was very actively working on
[http://www.gameref.io/](http://www.gameref.io/) and I had never done any kind
of early-stage marketing before. I remember sending literally hundreds upon
hundreds of (hand-crafted) emails to bloggers, influencers, magazines, shows
etc.

Even though the project is basically dead now, those few months of absolutely
intense grind were very formative. I had always had the "business-y" co-
founder before, and this was my first solo flight so to speak. It was SO MUCH
WORK[1], but it was absolutely awesome getting interviewed by PCGamer, or
Polygon, or having hardware manufacturers reach out for meetings, or being
asked to speak at conferences.

Don't get me wrong, I love my day job as a typical run-of-the-mill engineer,
but I'll always be addicted to that kind of start-up high :)

[1] I can't emphasize this enough!

------
chrisan
In Part 3 of the series[0] he hits home pretty hard. Often when I have an idea
for something I also take that "opportunity" to learn something new or
interesting, something I don't do at my day job

> Use Java/.NET/PHP/Rails/Perl/VB in your day job? Then
> Java/.NET/PHP/Rails/Perl/VB it is.

> I don’t care if you don’t know ASP.NET MVC and only know WebForms. Just use
> WebForms. Does that suck? Yes, it does. But do it anyways.

> Learn something else once you’re making money and you can afford to pay
> yourself the time to learn something else.

> I once spent three months learning production-grade Scala for a project I
> thought it would be awesome for. That project never got off the ground, and
> now I make $0.00 a year from having learned Scala.

...

> Take a lesson. Use whatever you know.

> The same thing goes for architectural concerns.

> Microservices? STOP.

> Crazy ass front-end stuff with ReactJS or Angular2 with TypeScript? STOP.

> How about some hot new NoSQL platform? STOP.

> What about going cloud with AWS or Heroku? STOP.

I've learned a lot, made little, and most of my extracurricular
activities/skills have basically been funneled back into my day job.

[0]: [https://hackernoon.com/make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-
fun-...](https://hackernoon.com/make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-fun-and-
profit-part-3-of-the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-be2b00f697c9#.cx9jfkf1d)

~~~
pc86
> _Use Java /.NET/PHP/Rails/Perl/VB in your day job? Then
> Java/.NET/PHP/Rails/Perl/VB it is._

Another way to put this (that I've seen on HN a handful of times so bear with
me) is that it depends what the product is for?

If you only know C# but want to learn Go:

\- Do you want to make money? Write it in C# \- Do you want to learn a new
language, struggle, (most likely) produce little value, and scrap the whole
thing a half dozen times in two months? Write it in Go

------
zinssmeister
So much truth in this series. A lot of what he talks about I can back up with
my own experience building and running SaaS apps. "I want you to understand
first hand that building a SaaS startup is mostly a marketing optimization
problem — not something that you can just code your way out of."

Part 2 & 3 can be found here

[https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-no-bs-approach-to-
bui...](https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-no-bs-approach-to-building-
your-saas-startups-launch-list-part-2-of-the-epic-guide-
to-8cc371be772c#.ruedms8fs)

[https://hackernoon.com/make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-
fun-...](https://hackernoon.com/make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-fun-and-
profit-part-3-of-the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-be2b00f697c9#.umcnekiie)

------
intrasight
I especially appreciated this:

"Think of building your SaaS app like a game of chess. You want to win the
game with the least number of moves possible, but you have to think about how
each of your moves potentially affects the overall game (and your chances of
winning)."

The analogy is even better with a one-person SaaS startup because you really
can only make one move at a time (you can only do one thing at a time). The
value in this series of articles is to get you to think strategically about
those early moves and not to waste too much time thinking about the moves in
the future that you currently have no visibility into.

------
matrix
The whole series is painfully accurate; glad to see someone telling it like it
is.

That aside, article is actually not as anti-establishment as the author makes
out -- unless your source of prevailing wisdom is from click-baity 4 Hour Work
Weak style articles. But I doubt any serious founder puts any stock in that
stuff. There's a lot of valuable info to be learned from high quality sources
like Steve Blank's articles, or even a good MBA entrepreneurship class.

~~~
amarghose
I have mixed feelings about this. The 4 Hour Work Week created my "why" for me
that's kept me going through thick and thin. I definitely realize that it's a
ton more work than it's made out to be (and while Tim Ferriss simplifies what
it takes, he doesn't downplay the amount of work involved).

My company is also at a point where my business partner and I could reasonably
step away and spend 4 hours a week literally running the business but of
course, that's not what business is about, it's about helping our customers
and we work hard every day to do that.

Think my "issue" here is I was one of the people who only had that source of
prevailing wisdom for a long time and while I can't say it helped me create
the business, it did create the dream that led to me starting, and powering
through, what I currently do.

(also, while my partner and I both work hard on the project we both happen to
be on a tropical island in Thailand at the moment ... but it's 8 am and
beautiful and I'm sitting here on HN :-D )

~~~
Radim
In my experience, that "tropical island" trope goes hand in hand with the "4
hour week" BS.

I lived in tropical Thailand for 2 years (wife had a job there; now we live in
Korea). And let me tell you, you'll get bored out of your mind sooner rather
than later, and find yourself "sitting here on HN" more often than you'd like
to admit.

Creative people live for the thrill of being "in the zone", utilizing their
potential to the max. Tropical surroundings or "4 hour weeks" have
surprisingly little to do with that.

~~~
amarghose
It's not my first time here. I can't say I'd stay here long term but it's good
for focusing for a few months with high quality of life and good balance.

------
koolba
> This might be going a little too far, but at the same time it’s probably not
> going far enough: Code is the least important thing about a SaaS business.

This is true about software businesses in general, not just SaaS businesses.
Arguably more so for enterprise products where all that matters is smiling
faces.

None of your customers care about your beautiful build-test-CI-deploy pipeline
and unless it's actually saving you time to add new features[1] it's not worth
it.

[1]: _Shocking twist: It does save time!_

------
brosky117
"Start Small, Stay Small" is a great book that really goes into detail about
this. Highly recommend it!

(No affiliation, just really like it)

------
reversefungi
Good article on the dangers of starting a business without actually knowing
anything about how to do business. I've been reading "The E-Myth Revisited"
and it's been really incredibly helpful in showing all the common pitfalls
that folks fall into when trying to start up their own business, usually using
the same logic of "These jokers don't know what they're doing, I'm gonna start
my own thing and do it the RIGHT way!"

Highly recommend everyone check it out before starting a new business. I've
been helping my father with his own small business, which is a bit of a total
mess. Some of the advice in this book has been incredibly illuminating,
regarding why so many small businesses are structured to fail, rather than
aiming for success from day 1. Between that and a book like "The Personal
MBA", I think that would be a solid background before getting anything off the
ground.

I don't work for any of these folks or the authors, they've just made a big
positive impact in the way I think about business.

------
gtirloni
'Startups for the Rest of Us' seem like a decent podcast in that area.

[http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com)

------
tarr11
Most of your "heck yes" people will disappear or forget anything about having
that conversation within a few days as well.

Also, discount anyone who has any reason to please you. Their responses are
often biased and not helpful towards validation.

~~~
danieltillett
This is true. They can still be useful if you can interview them in depth to
determine why they are saying "heck yes". When doing this make sure to ask
them about other services, especially failed ones. This will help you work out
if they love your service or are just the type to say yes to everyone.

------
businessmonkey
I chuckle as I read these comments. Seems like you guys just needed a
Marketing Monkey! ;) I could replace the word "marketer" and insert
"developer" and that would be my experience. I've been bootstrapping a startup
and thought it would be easy to hire a developer - a code monkey - who could
knock out some code. But I ran into a few BSers who took me for quite a bit of
money - hard learned lessons. More than anything, I want to find a co-founder
with complementary skills and who shares the same vision and passion. But
then, if this was so easy, everyone could and would do it. Therein lies the
rub. I see many amazing ideas generated from developers that fail due to a
lack of skilled Business Monkeys. And, likewise, until I found a few good
devs, I was not able to get my idea to the market. But now that we got our
SaaS startup to market, I concur with the other comments here about how a
majority of time is spent with customers, engaging in support functions. It
sucks, but it's very instructive. Those interactions add value to our business
and make the product stronger. Keep up the great work and don't give up the
fight. Success won't come quickly, but it will come to those who are
persistent and who persevere.

------
foxhop
Hey Clifford,

I just read your blog posts regarding real SaaS experience. I'm a fellow side
project sole founder bootstrapper. I launched linkpeek.com 4 years ago to
Hacker news and earned the number 1 position and had exactly 0 sign ups. The
struggle is real.

I'm sort of intrigued about tamboo, and I want to see what I would get if I
signed up. But the urgency of the 24 hours makes me afraid to sign up when I
don't have downtime to tinker with your tool.

What you should do for tamboo:

    
    
        * create a couple quick animated gifs of your UI and recordings. Put them on your homepage  / landing page.
    
        * create a couple youtube videos showing what the recordings look like, a prime example would be the video which helped you debug the sign up flow and then a follow up with the fix!
    

I have some example UI/UX gifs on remarkbox.com and I used licecap on the mac,
but there are linux alternatives.

PS: you should remove this part - it smells like bullshit -

"That's why I'm giving you a free 24-hour pass to use Tamboo on your website -
but only if you try it out today."

PSS:

Your contact form is busted and won't post, and it takes like 1m for it to
reply that "something went wrong. please try again."

------
mack1001
This article is spot on and just so timely for me. I just signed up for
adwords after finding it tough to reach my target customer segment on FB.
Never under-estimate the challenge of reaching your target market and
convincing them to buy.

~~~
danieltillett
Is your target customer in the small and medium size market? If so you will
struggle finding any scalable pay per click method that is cost effective if
your lifetime customer value is under $2000.

If your LCV is over $2000 then you can support a direct sales model which
works really well in the SMB market - the only problem is few SMB targeted
products can support direct sales.

~~~
mack1001
My service is for medium to large enterprise customers and lifetime value is
probably much higher than $2000. But I am still validating if they would even
value it or pay for it. Reaching the buyers (VP/Director Software Engineering)
to validate is in itself an art form and an exercise in careful tuning. I
cannot afford to be at conferences or get highly targeted lists. If you are
interested - my landing page is
[http://opensourcebay.io](http://opensourcebay.io)

~~~
mack1001
And I am pretty sure, I broke all rules about landing pages mentioned in the
article :-)

~~~
danieltillett
Yes. If you are going to direct sell it is not so critical, but if you are
going to try to use PPC then you need to get the value story front and centre.

------
automatwon
_I’ll get to spend all of my time writing code that I could finally be proud
of. I’ll get to code things the right way — not the jank ass way these ass
clowns do things. I’ll have a build server for continuous integration and have
automated unit tests for everything and I’ll use that cool new framework I
just saw the other day on HackerNews_

You caught me.

------
syntex
This is very similar to what Jonathan Blow is telling about programming games
as Independent devs
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM)

~~~
coffee
That is an amazing talk by Jonathan Blow, never seen it before, thank you for
posting it.

------
jeffreyrogers
This is a good read, but I'm a bit concerned by his product Tamboo[1], which
lets site owners track exactly what their users do on their sites. I was
looking at competitors and found Smartlook[2], whose website asks "Is this
super-awesome service even legal?" A better question might be, "is it
ethical?" and generally when you're asking is it legal the answer to _that_
question is no.

[1]: [https://gettamboo.com/](https://gettamboo.com/) [2]:
[https://www.smartlook.com/](https://www.smartlook.com/)

~~~
pesfandiar
In my opinion, the legal aspect is unclear too. In case of brick and mortar
stores, AFAIK, most jurisdictions require a noticeable sign revealing
surveillance/videotaping. The law hasn't quite caught up online though.

Regardless, I'd say it's ethical if they clearly tell users they're being
watched. I bet no one would use the service if it was required.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Yeah, I'm not totally against the idea, but I know a lot of people have
concerns around privacy online and how data about them is collected. I agree
that you should let your users know you're tracking them in this way if you
use something like this.

------
rsp1984
Right in the beginning:

 _The stone cold truth of the matter is that most of the people pandering this
advice are only doing so to build up their “guru” status ... They do this so
that look up to them. They do this so that you talk about them (getting you to
help them grow their audience). They do this so that you’ll feel like you’re
somehow less than they are ... I promise I’m not going to do any of that to
you._

Really? Just a couple of paragraphs down:

 _First off, you should know that your idea probably sucks ... It doesn’t
matter what you think ... we’re not going to refer to your precious game-
changing idea as “your idea” anymore. We’re going to refer to it as “your
guess”._

Ok, so first he's telling you that he's the honest guy who would never
bullshit you and really would never try to make you feel less than him. Then
goes on to do exactly that.

To me that's an immediate red flag. I don't know the author personally and
can't tell what his intentions were when he wrote his essay but I've had the
past displeasure of dealing with sociopaths who showed the same kind of
behavior.

(Edited for less drastic choice of words)

~~~
cliff0rd
Wow, I'm really sorry if it came across that way.

Where I was coming from with this was that I was sick of seeing all of these
posts and podcasts where they were saying things in a very humblebraggy way
like "Yeah, I only got something like 3,000 signups for that but was able to
launch anyway" or "Yeah, I did a soft launch to $25K MRR just to my Twitter
followers" or "I spent a weekend ranking #1 for this keyword and it took off
from there" or "I've never spent a dime on advertising and I've never done any
marketing and I don't spend more than 10 hours a month on this thing, but it
pays for my awesome lifestyle."

I was referring to that kind of attitude when I wrote about how they do that
to make you feel like they have some secret knowledge you have to pine for.

My approach was to say "That's total bullshit. Let me show you what it's
really like." Because in my experience it's been nothing like that. In my
experience, that was fairy tale land.

So I tried to write the guide as if I were the one it was written for - I
wanted to put something out there that I wish I could have read 5-10 years ago
that would have given me a brutally honest view of what was involved, just how
bad it could be, and that would have shown me what the most important things
to focus on were. And most importantly, to get me to think critically about
everything I was doing. Hence the strong tone. I wanted to write something
that would have gotten my attention and would have made me stop and think and
avoid wasting time. So that's what I wrote.

~~~
Signez
> I wanted to write something that would have gotten my attention and would
> have made me stop and think and avoid wasting time. So that's what I wrote.

And that exactly what happened for me as a reader: I've read it _because_ of
this introduction. It was really eye-opening in a way ‑ it is so easy to
forget how much work is behind the non-code side of a start-up project.

------
tzury
This is sharp written, voice of truth and reality. I know of on my own,
running Reblaze for the last five and a half years.

Almost nothing comes in easily, and you end up every day with more open tasks
that you have started with.

Teams, Dev, Ops, BusDev, partners, legal, HR, taxes, you name it. And all in
all, you got to keep the product and production in their path, keep your
customers and employees extremely happy, and the cash flow!

As we all know:

    
    
        Cash-flow does not matter, until it is matters, 
        and when it is matter, it is the only thing that matters!
    

I guess we could have take Reblaze to the VC path at start, but hey! Would
they ever let keep the product the way we believe it should [1]

[1] [https://www.reblaze.com/using-the-cloud-for-web-security-
wha...](https://www.reblaze.com/using-the-cloud-for-web-security-what-you-
need-to-know/)

------
0xbadf00d
What a refreshing read, it came across as authentic advice with actionable
points - I feel that the "value your own time above all else" and "prepare to
be wrong" are all too often missed in the more glitzy & glamorous "I make n$$$
per month" posts.

------
nickpsecurity
If you like that, then check out his Expect Everything to be Unexpected write-
up. My favorite reality check. I posted it in its own thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217086)

------
DrNuke
Thanks for inspiration, I'm in! Will try and put something out by 8 Jan!!

------
ahallock
There's lots of good stuff here, but while your code might not be the most
important aspect of your SaaS startup, your code can't be garbage either. I've
seen lots of startups and early-stage businesses rot from the inside because
of bad coding practices and not being able to deliver features in a timely
manner or what they do deliver is broken and buggy, driving customers away.

If you can't deliver the features your customers need because of shit code,
that really does matter.

------
robocat
His "interlude" article on the same topic is epic:

[https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-
be-u...](https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-
unexpected-883642c0d7c)

------
cloudwizard
I agree with almost everything except advertising on FB and Twitter. I have
worked at several startups that had ZERO return on thousands of advertising on
FB. Our Google ads cost more but had an actual return. There is a reason that
they cost more.

~~~
throwawaylalala
It's easy to waste money with Facebook. It's also easy to make money with it
when using the right process.

~~~
orasis
Any tips on what the "right process" entails?

------
crypto5
Just curious, how many new visitors/sign-ups author received for his service
using this content marketing? ;-) (Totally no offence.)

------
html5web
Nice write-up! Note to the author: Your website is really slow! Try to use
live text instead of images, also use progressive images.

~~~
ReverseCold
(That's Medium, a blogging platform. It's very fast for me at least, mabye
your internet?)

------
wiradikusuma
Shameless plug, I want to share an online course I'll be teaching mid-Jan
2017: [http://wiradikusuma.com/](http://wiradikusuma.com/)

It's more like "an opinionated step-by-step guide to bootstrapping a startup,
so i can use it myself", with "study case" of actually building one (as the
course progresses).

------
pryelluw
This is a really good read for anyone interested in starting a business or
side gig.

------
charliepark
If you're interested in bootstrapped SaaS writing,
[https://startingandsustaining.com/](https://startingandsustaining.com/) from
Garrett Dimon is really good as well.

~~~
robodale
Never head of Garrett, and I'm always looking for more material. Thanks for
posting that.

------
dimino
And _this is why_ , mom and dad, I don't start a company just because I know
how to code. None of this stuff interests me.

~~~
20years
This is really honest and I commend you for saying it. I think too many people
don't think about all of the things that are involved before jumping into
starting a company. I sure didn't.

It is not as sexy as the tech blogs, gurus and mainstream media make it out to
be. Bootstrapped or not. Seems like there is this uptick lately with promoting
bootstrapping. Don't get me wrong, it is the way I started and grew my
businesses but it is hard. It is also soul crushing when something that you
invested huge amounts of your own time into and most likely your own savings
fails. You can't really blame anyone else but yourself.

I always felt that those of us that go down this path are a little crazy ;)

------
dimino
I feel like a legitimate "disruption" of SaaS would be a company that has an
easily adaptable, well tested, and smartly engineered code base...

