Your home page/blog is by far the cleanest, fastest, and most functional I've seen. Can I ask what you use to publish it? I can't find any reference to a platform in the HTMl source (which is amazingly clean BTW).
My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
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Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
#32This was such a great post. I read last years as well, and it was super interesting to see how things evolved.
I am curious about your ad spend. I noticed that it dropped 24%. Can you talk about your strategy for marketing your business?
Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
#33I run an IT firm. Pretty sure you’ve solved a huge problem with remote hardware diagnostics for us. Ordered one for test.
Thanks for making this.
Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
#34Your home page/blog is by far the cleanest, fastest, and most functional I've seen. Can I ask what you use to publish it? I can't find any reference to a platform in the HTMl source (which is amazingly clean BTW).
Thanks for reading!
Edit: Sorry, I just realized you meant my blog, not the TinyPilot website. My blog is just Hugo + Netlify, and the source is public.[2]
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The web tech stack is actually one of my biggest regrets. It's a static site generator called Gridsome[0] that the maintainers abandoned about three months after I used it to launch the TinyPilot website.
At the time I made the TinyPilot site, I was very excited about Vue, so a Vue-based SSG seemed great. Since then, I've come to find SPAs and most frontend frameworks to be way too much complexity, so I've moved away from Vue, but the TinyPilot website is still stuck on Vue 2.x and bootstrap-vue (which is tied to Vue 2 and Bootstrap 4).
So, it keeps creaking along, but building the 100ish pages on the site takes about five minutes, whereas I think something like Hugo could probably do it in a few seconds. Plus, we get random runtime errors[1] that are pretty hard to debug.
Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
#35Your home page/blog is by far the cleanest, fastest, and most functional I've seen. Can I ask what you use to publish it? I can't find any reference to a platform in the HTMl source (which is amazingly clean BTW).
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Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why the sharp drop in adspend?
Good question! I actually hadn't noticed it changed that much, but you're right. The biggest difference was that in 2022, I hired a paid ads consultant to set up ads automation for me on a few different platforms. That had a high up-front cost, but then it was inexpensive to maintain those ads in 2023. I also spent money experimenting on more channels in 2022, so in 2023, I cut out spending on the ones that weren't e…
Could you share platforms/channels were more profitable/worth it and which of them weren't? I love your blogs btw!
Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
#37"I realized that the dominant factor was the size of our codebase. We have three times the code that we did three years ago. And every line of code requires time to maintain. So, if I keep the number of developers fixed but increase the size of the codebase, then a higher proportion of our time must go to maintaining old code."
That part is so true. Even trying to make everything systematic has a cost.
Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
#38Very nice blog and just overal awesome to read.
Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
#39That's very cool, Michael. Really great to see your business doing well, congrats! Really interesting to see that adding a metal box and making the product more premium made a huge impact on revenue. Have you run any pricing experiments after that?
Thanks for reading! > Have you run any pricing experiments after that? No, I haven't tinkered with the price much for the past few months. I have a hard time doing price experiments because at my volumes, I have to collect a few weeks of data before I think the evidence is strong, and I don't have a good way to A/B test different prices in parallel, so it's easy for two different time periods to have different result…
> we get emails for a couple of weeks after from people who are annoyed they paid a higher price just before a reduction
What if you just explicitly guarantee a price match for say 30 days? People would feel safe and you can do your experiments.
Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder
#40Congrats Michael! I've been following along with your story on and off since 2019-ish, very cool to read about how things are getting along.