It's an impressive accomplishment. I've always struggled to get through the valley of despair in a new project. I've decided that I can only build and sell things that I regularly use. Otherwise the signal is just too weak, and I eventually get burned out. But if I'm always a user of one, then at least it's validated for me.
Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
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Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#12Congratulations!
> Back in 2021, I was inspired by the financial independence movement and wanted a better way to plan my own life. I couldn’t find the right tool, so I started building.
That sounds a bit like selling shovels to the miners. Which is not a, uh, dig at the project, just an observation.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#13Congratulations! But I’m disappointed with no mention of profit level in this post or another one linked. My last business I scaled to 500K ARR in less than two years, with $20K in total annual profit including the $0 my cofounder and I paid ourselves for many hours of work. I shut it down a year later and strongly regret the amount of work I put into it.
There’s an ARR metric trap in the founder community where people focus on revenue rather than on reaching a level of take-home income comparable to what they could make at a normal job. The former is a lot easier than the latter (especially in the US for people who can take home $250K fairly easily working in tech) - as the saying goes, you can make infinite revenue by selling dollars for 99 cents.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#14Congratulations! But I’m disappointed with no mention of profit level in this post or another one linked. My last business I scaled to 500K ARR in less than two years, with $20K in total annual profit including the $0 my cofounder and I paid ourselves for many hours of work. I shut it down a year later and strongly regret the amount of work I put into it. There’s an ARR metric trap in the founder community where peop…
Profit margin started out around 90% in the early years, but is looking more like 65% this year now that we're making a concerted effort to reinvest into growth, building a team, etc.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#15Survivor bias Failures don't get on HN front page Hey, btw congrats :-)
People do post their failure stories, or "post mortems", on HN and elsewhere. We should be able to make space for both as both offer valuable lessons.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#16The validation piece I don't understand. From first sale to first dip to each peak and fall when was the validation reached? First sale, 1k revenue? You can find 5 users who will pay but that doesn't validate a million a month. What does product validation mean here.
I only have a product that makes $6k per month, but from my point of view, the validation is how many paying users sign up per day. Even one per day can add up. Hope this helps.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#17It's an impressive accomplishment. I've always struggled to get through the valley of despair in a new project. I've decided that I can only build and sell things that I regularly use. Otherwise the signal is just too weak, and I eventually get burned out. But if I'm always a user of one, then at least it's validated for me.
Caring is kind of a superpower. And not just in terms of signal, but also the quality of work. I don't think this would have gone anywhere if I hadn't cared deeply about solving the problem in an elegant way.
Earlier in my career, I worked on some things as a corporate engineer that were hard to care about, and there's just no comparison.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#18Congratulations! But I’m disappointed with no mention of profit level in this post or another one linked. My last business I scaled to 500K ARR in less than two years, with $20K in total annual profit including the $0 my cofounder and I paid ourselves for many hours of work. I shut it down a year later and strongly regret the amount of work I put into it. There’s an ARR metric trap in the founder community where peop…
If ARR grows enough, there should be plenty of room in there to pay the founders.
For extreme examples of ARR growth at 0% profit paying off, look at Uber, Amazon, and ServiceNow. I know these are very much outliers. All three had rapid revenue growth but profits at (or far below) zero. But for all three, the founders are sitting pretty today.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#19It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
Congratulations for walking this line correctly.
I agree that some sort of market validation is necessary to at least pretend you are on the former not the latter. Those early usage spikes are helpful reminders that there is a business here somewhere.
I'll also make a note that you spent time on marketing from the early days. Writing blog posts, promoting said posts, having a Discord server, committing to answer emails, all of this is marketing and its likely lead to success more than the code.
I notice whenever there was a dip in revenue, marketing (in the form of more blog posts) was the response. I suspect that was intentional, and definitely a better approach than "let me go away and silently code more features."
So there are valuable lessons to others here. Congratulations not just on the current success but also on sharing the path that leads to success. Ultimately you can show the way, but you can't make people learn from it.
Oh, and I like the bootstrapping approach. I did the same, and I'm not sorry. It's longer and harder but also skips an enormous amount of extra work.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#20Congratulations! But I’m disappointed with no mention of profit level in this post or another one linked. My last business I scaled to 500K ARR in less than two years, with $20K in total annual profit including the $0 my cofounder and I paid ourselves for many hours of work. I shut it down a year later and strongly regret the amount of work I put into it. There’s an ARR metric trap in the founder community where peop…
I share your frustration with the endless focus on revenue, rather than profit (looking at you, indiehackers.com). I suspect in many cases it is because they are embarassed to disclose their profit.
But congrats to the OP. It is impressive growth for a bootstrapped business.