I am sure you are an industrious hard worker. And to do this successfully, you need to expand your determination, resourcefulness, and sheer visceral grit far beyond what you have ever done before.
It is not easy. AND, you can do it, if you decide to.
Allow me to advise you: for each of these three options, write out all steps in the process of building an MVP through that method. As much detail as you can. Get to the point where you can imagine being successful using ANY of them. Then you will have clarity to choose.
And then: follow it to the end, regardless of what it asks of you. Then you will change your HN username. You will see yourself as a true entrepreneur; not because you want to be one, but because you KNOW you are.
Best of luck building your MVP. Keep at it, and you will be successful.
(Source: I am an entrepreneur who bootstrapped my company to 6-figs revenue while retaining 100% equity, expecting to break 7-figs in 2022, and believe I will reach 8 figs by 2023 or earlier.)
"expecting to break 7-figs in 2022, and believe I will reach 8 figs by 2023 or earlier"
That will be something and would love to learn why/how you think you can achieve that being bootstrapped. Going from 1M to 10M in 1 year being bootstrapped has to be something special. Not doubting but just wondering how you believe you can achieve this without funding/extra money ?
Different business models have different capitalization requirements; some (e.g. a grocery store chain) are nearly impossible to rapidly scale without massive outside investment.
If a business model has (a) a high enough gross margin, and (b) good-enough intrinsic economies of scale, then by the time it reaches several $100k in revenue, there is a good chance it will be crystal clear how to scale up 7 and then 8 figures. And you will be sitting on a big enough pile of cash that there is no need to take outside funding to implement that. Many B2B SaaS business models in particular can find themselves in this excellent situation.
You can still take outside funding; after all, a growing business at that point is attractive to outside investors. But then it becomes a choice about growth rate in exchange for keeping equity and strategic control. I decided in my case it was completely unnecessary, so I am not doing it.
These are the sort of people have profiles with "be kind" on them, and constantly congratulate themselves for being tolerant and inclusive (unlike the angry fearful intolerant divisive subhuman others).
This would be my concern also, same as with other tools like repl.it, etc. But it could still be useful for a prototyping phase. (Potentially. I have not used it.)
Some people here are giving examples of using Bubble a few years ago, and found it too limited to be useful. Have any developers here used it recently?
When I first looked at Zapier about 2.5 years ago, as a developer I found it limiting and just not useful compared to writing custom webhooks that I sometimes glued together with cron jobs, etc. But since late last year, Zapier has matured so much I am able to use it for almost every integration I need. It has probably saved me ~100 hours of development time in the past year alone.
I wonder if Bubble might have passed a similar threshold of utility, so that it is useful even to people who DO have good coding skills.
Yep. My partner is non technical and has been using Bubble since October. I have great impressions. The responsiveness editor could be better, or maybe just better documented.
As a developer, you can't come in thinking you'll just get it. Bubble has renamed things for simplicity to non-technical folks and you need to take the time to learn their system.
Something I found great is Bubble's API Connector plugin and their REST Data API to. It lets you to call out to external APIs and CRUD into the bubble database. When my partner's app had a bit of "complex" backend logic that couldnt be easily done in the Bubble UI, I wrote a lambda function and they call it using the Bubble UI.
Bubble has been great for them. As their product / company grow that may not always be the case. But I think it'll hold up for longer than most developers believe, well beyond the initial prototype phase.
Thanks, this is the exact kind of intel I was looking for. Especially that they have a API connector and REST API - I was betting they DID have that, as it's a moderately easy thing for them to ad that makes custom extensions possible.
(With Zapier, I have used their so-called "Webhook" connector for that - set up an endpoint on my webapp that accepts a POST with a JSON payload, then make a zap that send data there in response to some trigger.)
Yes, last moth. Bubble is such a nightmare to use and learn that it’s simply easier to learn something like Vue with Firebase. Just to get a basic value from JavaScript code to display in UI, you need to put together this weird pipeline sort of logic. The back end requests aren’t really back end, the logic is still front end regardless of where the code is executed. The result is there is no way to implement a queue. Using an API that rate limits, can’t use it in Bubble. For API calls things have to map into their weird data types and in their world, a phone number is an integer.
But the biggest issue is that learning curve is even higher than tools like react. And the steps to do basic things are so tiresome it’s just easier to write code. UI prototyping is fast, sure. But not much faster than tailwind.
Would not characterize it this way. I mainly use Zapier for marketing automation tasks, as do quite a few other people - regardless of whether that is what it is "aimed" at, marketing is a major use case for zapier in practice.
Pushing something into a spreadsheet is certainly a widely used zapier idiom. In 2021, it is capable of far more complex tasks, though.
I am a career software engineer who successfully learned how to sell. Specifically, high-ticket ($3k-5k) B2C sales. Starting from having absolutely no sales skills in December 2019, I managed to reach a close rate of close to near 50% for well-qualified leads by early this year.
There is a great deal of advice already in this thread. If you have any specific questions, ask and I will answer if I can.
As a software developer, one of the things that I feel that always holds me back when selling something I made (an MVP for example) is knowing all the things that the software can't do or is not super polished.
How do you sell something when you yourself might have doubts about the product? not because it's not good, but because you know it can be improved?
Obviously you can't wait until the product is "perfect" because that will never happen and there will always be things that are slightly broken or unpolished, etc. so how do you get those first sales that might give you the push you need to keep going (financially, emotionally, etc) with an "unfinishd" product?
First, don't assume something is a shortcoming in their mind unless they indicate it. Odds are HIGH you are being nitpicky about things that are just not a big deal to them.
Second, develop a more positive focus.
More specifically: get out of your head about some ideal that may never be real. Look at the product in terms of what it can actually do, NOW, and the benefits people will get from it, NOW.
Focus on how it will help them, in its current form, and communicate that.
When you do this, it is easy to be up front about what it will NOT do. In fact, in most of my sales calls, there is at least one point where the prospect expresses an expectation that it will do something for them that it doesn't. I immediately, directly, almost forcefully call that out. "Let me clarify, it will not do X. That is not what it is for. It will instead do Y for you, which lets you do Z." (This is just me being my normal, brutally-honest self, but from a sales-tactic perspective it builds credibility and trust.)
Focus on how the product can benefit them, in your thinking and your communication, and then it's easy to be up front about the rest. Otherwise you can never help people who need what you are selling more than they need that money.
It seems obvious but I guess I've seen too many salespeople tell the customer whatever they want to hear and I loathe that as it's definitely dishonest, so I felt like I would need to do the same to be able to sell, but apparently that's just a misconception on my part.
This is exactly what we do. It is like having a locally run staging environment, and is really great. Can exactly test things like http server configuration, cron jobs, multiple nodes (vagrant vms) coordinating with each other, etc.
Reading some of your replies, you are good at coming up with reasons you cannot be successful.
A friendly suggestion: this attitude may be holding you back more than you realized before now.
What to do instead, is repeatedly ask yourself: "how can I do this?"
Apply this to many specific areas:
- How can I change my CV so it comes across differently?
- How can I begin a small startup without money or other resources?
- How can I move towards my goal without any new degree?
- How is my training in veterinary medicine an asset?
- How can I do medical ML for veterinary medicine?
- Et cetera...
You have a choice now to dig into your heels and say to yourself reasons why none of what I say above will work, and why your situation is truly and utterly hopeless.
OR you can say different things to yourself, maybe get a different result.
Those are all very obvious questions that I have been asking myself for years, without finding useful answers.
The objective reality is that I did not succeed. Somehow people think accepting that means I have a negative attitude. I haven't given up on ever working again, but I'm not delusional enough to think I haven't been unemployed for a long time.
If you are getting more job requests than you can handle, have you considered just raising your rates? Increase it by 10% every few weeks, for example, until you are not having to turn away good jobs. You can always decrease again if you overshoot.
Good point! Yes, we have increased our rates but not kept them very high. I guess that's one of the reason potential clients continue to approach us. I think we are at a point where it makes sense to grow our team, but there are these constraints about wages etc as I mentioned in my description. We want to be as thoughtful and smart about hiring as possible. We are currently growing but we want to make sure whatever we do is sustainable in the long term. One option is to partner with other freelancers and sub-contract some stuff and we have done in few instances, but there's additional risk to that approach and probably not very beneficial in the long term
You might be surprised at how many clients continue to approach you even as your rates increase. In fact, there have been many examples in which people in your situation got MORE offers for work as they increased their rates - apparently it can make you appear higher quality ("they must be great if they charge this much!")
That may or may not happen in your case, but it is worth testing - especially because that higher income will make it MUCH MUCH easier to grow your team.
While that's definitely a valid approach, it does have the downside of making you more of a manager. I've done both, but eventually stuck with raising my rates (for now) because I much prefer working on some interesting projects myself over managing others. And because I tend to do full-stack stuff (including server management and often even UI/UX and some degree of product development), it's varied enough.
None of them.
I am sure you are an industrious hard worker. And to do this successfully, you need to expand your determination, resourcefulness, and sheer visceral grit far beyond what you have ever done before.
It is not easy. AND, you can do it, if you decide to.
Allow me to advise you: for each of these three options, write out all steps in the process of building an MVP through that method. As much detail as you can. Get to the point where you can imagine being successful using ANY of them. Then you will have clarity to choose.
And then: follow it to the end, regardless of what it asks of you. Then you will change your HN username. You will see yourself as a true entrepreneur; not because you want to be one, but because you KNOW you are.
Best of luck building your MVP. Keep at it, and you will be successful.
(Source: I am an entrepreneur who bootstrapped my company to 6-figs revenue while retaining 100% equity, expecting to break 7-figs in 2022, and believe I will reach 8 figs by 2023 or earlier.)