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We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

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Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#81

Post by throwaway11002 »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #49
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. > I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret. I know it's your choice but haven't you still sacrificed your personal life, so why not try to become 10x?

I don't spend the money I already make. Not sure what I would do with 10x money. 1% ungrateful complaining consumer out of 1 million users are 10k users. I don't like dealing with them. At 10x the business they might become 100k or more. I would rather have 10k high paying Saas customers and weed out the ungrateful ones there but to their face. Currently we are working above the board with no dark patterns. We have o…

Can I ask how you're handling customer service? I'm a one-man company and it's the most draining part of my business. It's so tempting to outsource first line support but I also feel there's some value in answering all the emails yourself because you know your customers' needs.

And I'm not sure how to even outsource support. Do I just hire someone part-time from some gig website and pay them for X hours/week? I think one dedicated customer support person would do wonders for my business but it would require about ~5-10 hours of work per week. And customer support is something you get better at the longer you do it, so I don't want to constantly hire replacements, especially if it's going to be just one person doing support.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#82

Post by throwaway11002 »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #68
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In today's world consumer don't want to pay for anything, unless they really want the product and they don't have a way to get it otherwise Knowing this, how do you create and market your product to get people to buy? I feel like with B2B it's easier to convince people to buy purely by showing them value, whereas B2C seems more impulse driven.

Think about how many non-basic need products that you know which consumers pay which is not some kind of exclusive or monopoly: Utilities, Cable, Cell phone, NetflixEtc, Uber*. Today's consumer doesn't like to pay for anything, especially if it is a digital product. They will do whatever they can to get out of paying either by pirating or trying to get a refund/chargeback after using it. Sometimes they will do an imp…

How do I identify the ungrateful ones early enough? :D

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#83

Post by weakwire »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #7
eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 month…

This thread totally hijacked the OP. Extremely interesting.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#84

Post by brandonmenc »

robertlagrant wrote: post #67
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year you delay having kids, you are reducing the amount of time you will spend with your kids and grandkids. As you get older, the quality of time you spend with them will also get worse. My wife went through lot of difficulties in her pregnancies. It would have been easier for her body, if we had kids earlier. My drive to get out of the corporate slavery was the reason for the delay. So I regret the delay.

This is exactly right - I've had my kids in my mid 30s, and while there are upsides, there are downsides. At a friend's wedding, his great grandmother was there. Hearing that, I realised there is an amazing upside to having kids a little earlier.

My great grandmothers were alive until I was in my 20s, but they were like, practically in arranged marriages when they were 14.

I know this is an extreme example but, talk about downsides!

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#85

Post by raverbashing »

robertlagrant wrote: post #67
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year you delay having kids, you are reducing the amount of time you will spend with your kids and grandkids. As you get older, the quality of time you spend with them will also get worse. My wife went through lot of difficulties in her pregnancies. It would have been easier for her body, if we had kids earlier. My drive to get out of the corporate slavery was the reason for the delay. So I regret the delay.

This is exactly right - I've had my kids in my mid 30s, and while there are upsides, there are downsides. At a friend's wedding, his great grandmother was there. Hearing that, I realised there is an amazing upside to having kids a little earlier.

Well, what's life but not a sequence of "pick your own adventure" choices.

But live for yourself and what you think is good. It's always a tradeoff. Having your grandparents at your wedding is nice, sure, but you can't optimize for everything.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#86

Post by daniellarusso »

throwaway11002 wrote: post #81
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't spend the money I already make. Not sure what I would do with 10x money. 1% ungrateful complaining consumer out of 1 million users are 10k users. I don't like dealing with them. At 10x the business they might become 100k or more. I would rather have 10k high paying Saas customers and weed out the ungrateful ones there but to their face. Currently we are working above the board with no dark patterns. We have o…

Can I ask how you're handling customer service? I'm a one-man company and it's the most draining part of my business. It's so tempting to outsource first line support but I also feel there's some value in answering all the emails yourself because you know your customers' needs. And I'm not sure how to even outsource support. Do I just hire someone part-time from some gig website and pay them for X hours/week? I think…

Do you have an FAQ that is part of your first auto-reply when somebody contacts support?

Do you have helpdesk software?

Are you using an answering service/receptionist to answer calls and then send the support issue to your support email or software?

Make as much as you can self-service for your users.

Have brief videos explaining your solution, so you can easily reply with a link to the video and ask them to follow up with you if they have more questions.

Keep track of both issue count and resolution time.

You may find it better to automate something you only do 4 times a month, but takes 8 hours, versus something you do 8 times per day, but only takes 5 seconds.

Finally, keep track of support issues by type, so you can see emerging trends and find your biggest pain points (# of tickets with a particular issue * median resolution time of particular issue).

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#87

Post by herodoturtle »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #46
randomsearch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret. Don't answer if this is too personal - but why the regret? It sounds like you have had kids, so perhaps it got harder? Or you had fewer than you wanted. Why do you regret it?

Every year you delay having kids, you are reducing the amount of time you will spend with your kids and grandkids. As you get older, the quality of time you spend with them will also get worse. My wife went through lot of difficulties in her pregnancies. It would have been easier for her body, if we had kids earlier. My drive to get out of the corporate slavery was the reason for the delay. So I regret the delay.

Hey man, if it's any consolation, my folks had me when they were very young, and I barely spent any time with them whilst growing up. As immigrants we had it pretty tough financially, and they were always working long hours (always for someone else) to try make ends meet. They harbour significant regret about not being more present in my childhood.

These days they're of course much older, and I am in the lucky position to be able to look after them financially, but they're also filled with added regret about depending on me - they feel like failures because rely on me to cover all their expenses - despite my best efforts to assure them that it's ok.

So to your point, whilst having kids younger means you can spend more time with them when you're older, it's not necessarily the better solution if it requires a trade-off in terms of first establishing yourself financially - and from reading your other comments - it sounds like you and I both started off in life with relatively little, so I think the choice to first secure ourselves financially before having kids makes more sense.

I delayed having kids with my wife until relatively late (I was 37 she was 33), and whilst I know this will probably reduce the amount of time I'll get to spend with my children when I'm much older, the peace of mind that has come with having first established my SaaS before starting a family is immense.

In fact one could argue that the reduced stress alone will probably add 10 years on to my life :-)

Thanks for sharing your inspirational comments above and below. Enjoyed reading all of them. And congratulations on the success - I'm sure it is well deserved.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#88

Post by daniellarusso »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33
eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

Silicon Valley is a blind search algorithm for novel scaling advantages from digitisation. These advantages exist for mass retail. The medium-sized businesses who tried to compete with Walmart and Amazon had to adapt fast or fail. These advantages do not (EDIT: have not been shown to) exist for commercial real estate; WeWork was a dud. Most American commerce is, and should be, in the hands of these medium-sized busin…

There is also the public health issue.

Many Walmarts were shutdown for multiple days to disinfect the store after an excessive number of employees tested positive for COVID.

Mom and pop stores would reduce spread simply because there is less concentration of people.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#89

Post by reasonabl_human »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #55
newbie578 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats to you for finally succeeding! Just that your way of climbing doesn't sound quite fun. Spending 7 years working 14 hours a day, full of stress, and fail 20 times straight? That sounds like a recipe for disaster. I wonder how many people are doing the same things you were doing and are still not successful... I got a simple question, was it worth it and what would you change?

I love building products. The financial success was a side product. I should have qualified my statement about failures better. Current one: Financially successful for me. Another one: Financially successful but got screwed over. Another one: Was very successful with adoption, but timing got wrong and didn't become financially successful. 2 others: Moderate success but financially not successful. It was really tough,…

Thanks for all of your insights here, really great stuff. The 2y growth mindset is especially refreshing to hear.

Also if you are looking to expand into new ideas and want eng folks with more time on their hands I have a group that would be interested. Currently we are evaluating ideas to go off and build after coming to terms with the big tech corporate grind.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#90

Post by 0xfaded »

nmfisher wrote: post #23
0xfaded wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We compete with companies founded with people that have access to clients with way more purchasing power and better supply pipeline. Your wording flipped a bit in my head. That exact wording could be said of Europe. There's a whole show and dance to make it seem like it's not, but when everything is about government grants and consortiums, it is.

> Your wording flipped a bit in my head. That exact wording could be said of Europe. There's a whole show and dance to make it seem like it's not, but when everything is about government grants and consortiums, it is. Sounds very much like Australia, too.

Hey, I'm originally from Australia. My take is that Australia is ever so slightly better off since you don't have all the EU state support regulations to comply with. It's unbelievable how good the EU is at wasting people's time. You're also slightly higher on the VC dollars per capita.
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