Bootstrapping Technology For Eight Bucks a Day
Published in 2009, this chronicle by @jawngee 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 Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 90 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 19 comments
A great idea while you're getting your site off the ground is to use Nearly Free Speech [1] as your host. While it's not the best deal for a busy site, a low-traffic site costs $1/GB transfer, with no bottom limit. I'd also suggest using something like OddCMS [2] that serves static content, so you don't have to spend money on a database.
Obviously, using these instead of Slicehost and MySQL (or similar technologies) will restrict what you can do with your server, but when you're really shooting for low price, they can't be beat. I've paid two cents (yes, cents) for the last two weeks of hosting my software company's website [3] (~500 views/day).
[1]http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ ↗
[2]http://www.oddcms.org ↗
[3]http://www.tranquilapps.com/ ↗
Love the price breakdown, jg!
I'd agree with everything except:
1) Basecamp -> Google Docs (I know you said this...)
2) Pivotal Tracker (honestly the worst UI I've ever seen) -> Lighthouse (or Github Issues if you're really cheap)
3) Slicehost -> Linode (but I'm probably biased and I run Rails)
4) Probably not get a CDN up front.
5) Would add Balsamiq Mockups to the list of things to get - true gamechanger
If you're not in an industry which requires nation-state level scaling, you can get all of the above for close to eight bucks a month. While I wouldn't go back to shared hosting (doesn't play well with Rails, which I migrated to in year two), I did run my business on it for a year and change without major incident.
Being able to make a startup for really cheap is definitely good for younger people who are just starting off in the world, as well as the business industry.
I'd love to see a startup that combines all of this into one simple place.
Yeah, it's quite cheap. You just forgot rent, food, utilities (including a broadband connection) and the depreciation costs of your laptop :)