After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world.

If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd think of that has a big success. In the US they may very well think of that as failure, especially if they are VC funded. I remember hearing a SV VC straight up say that if you consider selling your company for $50 million a win, the you don't have the right mindset and he doesn't want to do business with you.

If you never take big swings and big risks and are happy with small wins and stable growth you'll never win the big prize. And while this might be healthier for you as an individual, it's bad for the Economy.

No matter how comfortable or secure you feel in your job, sudden layoffs can and do happen. Also, what if you develop an illness that makes you unable to work?

Having your company means you can make money while you sleep, you answer to the market (which on average is somewhat "rational") rather than to a (possibly capricious) boss, you get to grapple with a wide range of interesting challenges that take you out of your comfort zone and lead to personal growth, and so on.

As long as you are able to build a company that provides income at least comparable to what you would make at a job, I think the benefits are numerous. It is not for everyone though.

I agree and I disagree.

It is hard to bootstrap a product. It's even harder to bootstrap a product that folks want to buy. It's even harder to do that when the prevailing wisdom on this (and other tech sites) is to go the VC-funded route.

The VC funded route -- for the vast, vast, vast majority of software businesses ends up being the exact same as the bootstrapped route -- except that you lose one avenue when you find out your business isn't "hyper-growth" or isn't going to be a huge as you claimed in your pitchdeck to the VCs. You lose the ability to pare back and to be what is described as a "lifestyle business". On failure, the business gets sold or stripped for parts, unless the founder can somehow get the VCs to agree to let them 'buy it back' or write-off their investment and give it back.

Bootstrapping means taking that risk on yourself; but it also means control over your options, and that is one fundamental strength to bootstrapping you don't get with VC funded startups.

Absolutely, it's no salary or the aptly named ramen profitability for a long time if your marketing is not aligned with the folks that will buy your software, or if your software really is just selling a solution to a problem no one actually cares about.

The 'hard part' isn't the engineering. It isn't the technology. The hard part is the marketing -- the connecting the hopefully expensive problem you solve to the right folks who want to buy that solution.

To your second part, I wholly agree that selling $10/month licenses is not a viable way forward if you want to be anything more than a solopreneuer.

But to do that, you need to hone your positioning so that you get in front of the folks with money who need to solve the problem your solution solves.

In your case, it looks like you run a web-auditing tool (according to your bio) called caido.io; and it looks like you're targetting basically everyone who needs to audit a website.

In the thought that "there are more fish in the ocean so why not fish there", that is a seemingly sound idea.

But you don't really want to spend your time trying to fish in the ocean if you have a barrel you could fish in and get the same result... dinner. (I did not come up with this metaphor, that was Jonathan Stark -- who writes a lot about positioning in this context).

The question you have to ask yourself is, are you positioning your product so that the CISOs or the large cyber-security firms would want to buy it? And if you did, do you think they'd trust your product at a mere $25 per month?

Anyway, the point to all this is that the problem is learning how to position the thing you build and get it in front of the right folks, and that's a marketing problem, not a technology problem, and that's something that we as engineers have ignored for far too long collectively.

I wish you the best of luck with your product -- we need more small software businesses in this world!