Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch
Published in 2016, this chronicle by @batina details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 735 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 104 comments
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
...
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-and-profit-part-3-of-the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-be2b00f697c9#.cx9jfkf1d ↗
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."
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.
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)
I've interviewed 80+ founders (mostly bootstrapped) for 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.