How I built a profitable bootstrapped side project
Published in 2016, this chronicle by @squiggy22 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 134 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 38 comments
I made my side project profitable quickly with a relentless focus on costs. The only fees I have are to Apple (dev license) and Delaware (for the LLC). Any service I wanted, I found an open source project and figured it out. I use the free tier at red hat open shift for hosting. If you let yourself get nickel and dimed by layering on SaaS products, you won't get anywhere.
Of course, I'm talking about building a profitable, low-touch side business, not a mega company.
As of writing this, the main site is down, and the blog has missing image links.
Why do people host static sites on anything besides s3 (or similiar)? It's dirt cheap, (almost) always works, and can handle any traffic spike you can hope to receive.
Instead, simple static sites seem to crash and burn when receiving spikes in traffic. I do not understand it.
Wow! We built an open source app for holiday management [1] (with a very close UI to this one) and I always thought it would make sense to sell it as a SaaS. I'm glad to see someone actually did it!
[1] https://github.com/diacode/holidays ↗
Site down, read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160530160943/https://www.getdeckchair.com/blog/how-i-built-a-profitable-bootstrapped-side-project/ ↗
I always wonder why it is so difficult to find good markets. Sometimes, it seems that coming up with a good product-idea is harder than building the actual product. Why does it work that way? Is this a flaw in how the free market works? Or is this just me - a developer - not knowing what other people need from me.