My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

Thanks for reading!

>I am curious about your ad spend. I noticed that it dropped 24%.

I added a few more details about that in a different reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39398746

>Can you talk about your strategy for marketing your business?

For the first two years, I was primarily reaching out to bloggers and YouTube creators that I liked. TinyPilot appeals to people in the homelab / IT prosumer community, and I've been involved in that space for a few years, so it always felt like a pretty organic way to get the word out.

There have been diminishing returns to that strategy, though. When we got our first big review, our sales nearly tripled overnight.[0] At the time, we were the first affordable KVM over IP on the market, so YouTube creators were very excited about to be able to break a story about it, and their viewers were excited to buy our product.

Since then, we continue to work with reviewers, but even high-quality reviews don't get that many reviews because we've been around for a few years and there are similar products like ours.

We've been experimenting with new channels, but nothing has been a huge hit. One of the things I'm trying to do is talk to bloggers and YouTube creators about doing projects with TinyPilot rather than just reviewing it. We had one a few years back,[1] and I think there's potential for new interesting use-cases for TinyPilot through experiments, but I haven't found anyone with a good idea yet.

It seems like our most successful channel has been word of mouth. I think it's a result of putting a lot of effort into customer service, so our customers feel good about working with us and tell other people about the product.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/02/#tinypilots-first-...

[1] https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/dslr

Thanks for reading!

>/r/tinypilot link in the footer leads to a locked sub, so it's kinda pointless.

Oh, thanks for catching that! I've been unhappy with reddit's direction ever since the 3rd-party APIs meltdown, and the subreddit was scattering our support resources, so I shut it down.

We have a dead link check as part of the build, but I guess it wasn't picking up an HTTP error from the locked sub.

I've just removed it!

Try offering an affiliate program if you haven't already. It can increase your sales drastically and you only pay for the results.

A feature that would have been useful from my IoT / embedded device development days would be the ability to fully turn power on/off of with usb port from software. It's nice feature for automated test and dev of embedded devices. Sort of adjacent to your kvm focus, but I suspect your h/w might not too far off from being able to support that use.

A full A/C plug pwr control is useful too, but a much bigger hardware delta.

FYI: You can’t “not draw a salary” and get that profit out of the company. IRS mandates that you pay yourself a reasonable amount, and pay (eye watering amounts of) taxes on that amount. You can’t circumvent any of that by just taking everything as distributions.