My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

Our hardware engineering partner subcontracted the design to a team of industrial designers they'd worked with in the past. We ordered prototypes of the design from both China and vendors in the US. The Chinese versions were better by leaps and bounds.[0]

We iterated a few times from there and eventually landed on a design we liked and worked with the Chinese vendor to produce the first few thousand. The Chinese vendor kept running into issues, though, so they were producing them at about 50% the speed they quoted, which was just barely enough to keep up with our sales.

When we switched to the contract manufacturer, they took over manufacturing the cases in Vietnam. They had trouble getting started as well, but they got the hang of it after a couple of months and can produce cases much faster than we consume them.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-...

I've been thinking about risk a lot in the past year. I used to feel like I had this safety net of getting a job in big tech again if the founder thing didn't work out. When all the layoffs and hiring freezes began, I realized that my safety net may have disappeared.

It's scary to lose the safety net, but at the same time, I felt grateful that I've had the last six years to practice earning money without an employer. If I had been laid off, I'd be in a terrible position of competing against thousands of other recently laid off employees who are all desperate for work. If TinyPilot were to fold, I don't think I'm guaranteed another successful business, but I feel like I'm more likely to build a profitable business than to get a job as a developer in a poor tech economy.

Yeah, I guess I’m being somewhat disingenuous. I like optimizing systems, but I’m aware that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

You learn that very quickly at cocktail parties when people ask you what you do, ask for more than the headline answer, and then have their eyes glaze over when you get into the details.

> than working for the man, as you put it.

As a nerd/geek, and I fall into that category, working in a good skunk works type of place is pretty damn fun. It usually doesn’t pay well compared to most tech jobs, it’s often not that prestigious, but damn… it can sometimes tickle the brain like no other.

One potentially bad part of it is that most skunk works are funded in some way by the DoD, so some folks may object to that.

> Thanks for writing this out.

My pleasure.

> It seems very difficult to get into.

Hmm… my first instinct is to say that it’s not, but I might be short-selling my skills, network, and (frankly) privilege if I say that.

I think it’s open to far larger group than is actively trying to participate in it.

I think the main keys are:

- Understand fundamentals of business. I have been around this my whole life, so it came quite naturally to me. That said, it’s learnable, and a lot of things fall into the common sense or empathy categories.

- Be good at contracting and hiring/firing. There are a lot of bozos in the workforce, but there are also plenty of hidden gems.

- Be good at marketing/sales. Although it’s possible, I think it’s tough to hide behind a screen and also scale.

- Talk to your customers. PG beats this drum, and there’s a good reason. Note customers here are customers of any business you own as well as business you want to buy or entities you want to sell a business to.

- Start small, but do things that scale. People think you need a lot of money to start doing this. You don’t. If you do really well, you don’t have to ask around much before relatively large sums of money start finding you. I currently prefer to self-fund, but I’m thinking about transitioning to some sort of dividend growth entity — I think that they will be en vogue in certain circles over the next 10 years or so.