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Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch

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Re: Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch 

#11
post #5

> If you want to feel good about yourself, go listen to one of the startup gurus out there that will be more than happy to spoon feed you some entreporn. I love it. Hope this stays on the front page for a while. It's both motivating as well as demotivating; that's how you know it's for real :) Props to the author, fantastic read and echoes my startup experiences to a tee!

Echoes my experience as well! Frankly, I am getting tired of all the spruikers who tout the "Just get an email list together to make a bazillion dollars a day" type rubbish. Or the "just work really really hard and it will rain money" type posts. Truth is, the grind (especially in the early days) is incredibly difficult and soul wearing. This article does a good job of articulating that.

Early last year, I was very actively working on http://www.gameref.io/ and I had never done any kind of early-stage marketing before. I remember sending literally hundreds upon hundreds of (hand-crafted) emails to bloggers, influencers, magazines, shows etc.

Even though the project is basically dead now, those few months of absolutely intense grind were very formative. I had always had the "business-y" co-founder before, and this was my first solo flight so to speak. It was SO MUCH WORK[1], but it was absolutely awesome getting interviewed by PCGamer, or Polygon, or having hardware manufacturers reach out for meetings, or being asked to speak at conferences.

Don't get me wrong, I love my day job as a typical run-of-the-mill engineer, but I'll always be addicted to that kind of start-up high :)

[1] I can't emphasize this enough!

Re: Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch 

#13
Most of your "heck yes" people will disappear or forget anything about having that conversation within a few days as well.

Also, discount anyone who has any reason to please you. Their responses are often biased and not helpful towards validation.

Re: Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch 

#14
The whole series is painfully accurate; glad to see someone telling it like it is.

That aside, article is actually not as anti-establishment as the author makes out -- unless your source of prevailing wisdom is from click-baity 4 Hour Work Weak style articles. But I doubt any serious founder puts any stock in that stuff. There's a lot of valuable info to be learned from high quality sources like Steve Blank's articles, or even a good MBA entrepreneurship class.

Re: Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch 

#16
> Some of it may seem simple. Don’t be fooled. There is complexity in simple things.

I've interviewed 80+ founders (mostly bootstrapped) for https://IndieHackers.com, and people sometimes come away from reading an interview thinking, "Well that person had it easy." We tend to underestimate the importance of the things we don't -- the part of the iceberg that's beneath the surface. In truth, the amount of work people are doing behind the scenes is often of staggering importance.

For example, Jason Grishkoff ran his popular music blog Indie Shuffle for 7 years before spinning off a successful SaaS app: SubmitHub. It's easy to look at that and conclude that he had it easy because of his blog. But Jason spent a grueling 4 months sending 1000 hand-crafted emails to his target customers in order to get SubmitHub off the ground. That's neither an easy nor an obvious path to take.

I see lots of people quit after a few weeks/months of not finding a magic bullet, so it's important to realize that there is no magic bullet for most companies.

Re: Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch 

#17
post #13

Most of your "heck yes" people will disappear or forget anything about having that conversation within a few days as well. Also, discount anyone who has any reason to please you. Their responses are often biased and not helpful towards validation.

This is true. They can still be useful if you can interview them in depth to determine why they are saying "heck yes". When doing this make sure to ask them about other services, especially failed ones. This will help you work out if they love your service or are just the type to say yes to everyone.

Re: Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch 

#18

Hey everyone! Clifford here, the author of the article. Just thought I'd jump in and say thanks to everyone for all the awesome feedback - you've all seriously made my day (and probably even year for that matter)!

Nice work Clifford. Any reason you used a fictional SAAS example rather than the real Tamboo story?

Re: Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch 

#19
post #16

> Some of it may seem simple. Don’t be fooled. There is complexity in simple things. I've interviewed 80+ founders (mostly bootstrapped) for https://IndieHackers.com , and people sometimes come away from reading an interview thinking, "Well that person had it easy." We tend to underestimate the importance of the things we don't -- the part of the iceberg that's beneath the surface. In truth, the amount of work people…

Exactly. Its hard work. Really hard work. It usually fails. You have to begin from square one. People think the path the magic bullet exists. It doesn't. What exists is hard and educated work. The secret being that there is no secret. Just don't tell that to wannabes. They will talk about the magic of being an entrepreneur. Which is bullshit.

Re: Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch 

#20

Hey everyone! Clifford here, the author of the article. Just thought I'd jump in and say thanks to everyone for all the awesome feedback - you've all seriously made my day (and probably even year for that matter)!

Nice work Clifford. Any reason you used a fictional SAAS example rather than the real Tamboo story?

When I started out writing the guide, I actually didn't have any references to Tamboo - it was just me writing about approach using some fictional examples.

I posted Part 1 on Barnacles (https://barnacl.es) in October (I believe) and a lot of people gave me good feedback but one of the things they said was that it was really hard to find a link to my site and that I was nuts for not talking more about my direct experiences with Tamboo since that was something they really wanted to know more about.

So in the later parts of the guide I do talk about some very specific Tamboo things and went away from the generalized example in the first part.

I honestly wasn't planning for it to spread to a larger audience like HN (this is a total surprise that's just flooring me right now!), so I never bothered to go back and change Part 1 to use a more Tamboo-ish example.

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