Lessons we learned while bootstrapping

There's a few other comments in here talking about their own experiences, so I'll add mine as well. I'm working on a bootstrapped startup called FormAPI: https://formapi.io ↗

I launched about a month ago, and my MRR is 3 figures. Here's a few of the marketing ideas I've tried.

* I spent around $100 on AdWords, but didn't get any conversions. I think my ad was pretty good, but my theory is that most of my target audience are using ad-blockers.

* I started a blog, and wrote a post about Rails/React development [1]. It was included in the Ruby Weekly newsletter, which was great, although it didn't get too many views (< 1,000). The blog post doesn't mention an author, so they used "FORMAPI BLOG" as the subtitle. This was a nice surprise, since sponsored links are very expensive. (I'm booking a sponsored link for early next year.)

* I ran a "Bitcoin Treasure Hunt" [2] with a few programming challenges. I had a good spike of about 60,000 views, so some programmers might remember the service next time they need to generate PDFs. I couldn't get any attention on Reddit or Hacker News, but maybe I'll have better luck next time.

I learned a lot from this experience, so the next one will be much more interesting, and it won't have any ambiguities or mistakes. It will be less of a "scavenger hunt", and will have more fun challenges with algorithms and logic puzzles. (There's a signup form at the bottom of the post, if you're interested.)

* I paid for a short marketing consultation with someone who has a lot of relevant experience. They've been really awesome, and have provided a lot of great advice that I'll be implementing soon. Lots of things to improve around pricing, SEO, UX, social, PR, etc.

The initial launch went pretty well on HN and Product Hunt, but that traffic has died down, so now I've just got to put in consistent work over the next few years.

[1] https://formapi.io/blog/posts/json-patch-with-rails-5-and-react/ ↗

[2] https://formapi.io/blog/posts/bitcoin-treasure-hunt/ ↗

here's my problem if anyone is willing to lend a helping hand: i'm building an enterprise saas product that involves some cool buzzwords and potentially really adds value in the space i'm targeting but i'm getting no traction.

i have an mvp (phone app and webapp) to demo to customers. i have the decks and sales pitch. i'm a reasonably smart and articulate person and communicate well (able to "speak sales"). yet because i have no company history, no clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i can't get any traction. at least i think this is the reason i'm not getting any bites? i had leads (through my FFF investors) - i've had probably 10-15 sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where (the latest one fizzled out yesterday). pricing isn't the issue because i've floated several different pricing schemes to customers and while some are more attractive than others it's never been the deal breaker. maybe i have poor product/market fit but i've experimented with adjusted the product offering too and no significant change in reception there either.

now supposedly i should be learning something about my market segment but the problem is i constantly get contradictory signals - one customers says it's a great product but too early, another says it's not a useful product maybe i'd like to consider building such and such product, one customer says price is too high, another doesn't even mention it.

i'm really at a complete loss for how to turn this thing around and i'm burning through cash (although i'm not above taking cost cutting measures - fired one of us three 3 weeks ago and cut my own pay this month).

I’ve been building a SaaS product for the last year or so while working a day job and raising a family, and am only now close to the point of having something I consider beta-able (https://www.contabulo.com ↗).

I think I made the mistake of getting too fancy with the architecture (but designing architecture was too much fun to resist), so I’ve ended up with something that’s a collection of Clojure services on the backend, running on several linodes along with rabbitmq, elasticsearch, etc. Well, at least it should scale decently, if the need arises :fingers crossed:

So this project has probably taken way too long to get to a MVP. But hey, the day job won’t let me do cool stuff like use FP languages, design architecture, do front end work, etc., so I need some sort of creative outlet :)

Now if I can only find some folks willing to test this thing. So far I’ve only gotten a small handful of email sign ups via my landing page. Maybe it’s time to spend some money on AdWords, etc.

this blog post is a kind of guide to starting your own company and making millions of dollars. this is a little unrelated but i just find it funny to read this guide because its very convoluted. there is actually a much simpler guide that their guide is a derivation of. here is the actual guide:

step one: be more intelligent than most people

behind almost every business, behind almost every professional success and behind almost any success in general that ive seen, is a highly intelligent person. i find it irritating to read because the concept of a guide is spelling things out so that anyone can follow the steps and get the same result. successful people always benefit from high intelligence, money and success will always be unfairly skewed to the benefit of those who happened to be born with better brains and into better developmental circumstances. nobody needs this guide because they are either smart and dont need a guide or dumb and in which case cant use this guide.

I've been bootstrapping https://www.castingcall.club ↗ for about 2 years now. Although I don't have a team (just me) and I've not in the 7-figure range (still in 6), a lot of the lessons from Kinsta holds true.

I wanted to point out one bullet though: Automation

My product is a SaaS product. I've automated every single thing possible from self-creating wikis to recommendations. I stepped away to visit Japan for 3 weeks earlier this year and came back to a site that increased in value.

I've thought about raising money for it so many times but I always come back to this. Answer to someone else, or keep growing it on my own terms.