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Who is living off their startup fulltime?

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Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#181
I started out 6-8 months ago by reading through HN and being introduced to the entire idea of bootstrapping. We had an idea that was partly technical, but mostly good marketing (e.g. closer to the idea of the parrot book: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215)

In fact, there are sites that sell wholesale kits for the technical part of the company.

We didn't buy a kit though and took the high road of building all our software in house using hired talent. Most of the work was done through freelancers at under a $3000 budget. (We would not do this again, the code quality on first run was incredibly low and hiring better is definitely worth it).

Getting the marketing working took another few thousands, but all said and done, we got it running with under $10k investment.

What was especially hard for bootstrapping for me was that I'm not a very technical guy. Most bootstrapping ideas here require you to be the engineer, but I didn't have the privilege of that position. I had to pull off a Derek Siver (http://sivers.org/how2hire) to get the idea to work.

Now that it is running though, it's doing great. We're pulling in over $100k of profits on an annualized basis, enough to cover living costs and more for sure.

As an aside, the roadblock we're running into now is that user demands are outstripping my current system of hiring freelancers. I've posted another thread asking for hiring help if anyone has experience: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1932131

Anyway, it's been a really fun ride, and I want to tell everyone that it really can be done. Your idea needs to be creative, and you need to be in a space where bootstrapping is possible (e.g. NOT biotech). The biggest lesson is to have good judgment. While investors are often a burden, they add a lot of experience for real, and with bootstrapping, sometimes you're left completely on your own.

Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#182
post #171
post #34

My wife and I were living on AgileZen ( http://agilezen.com ) before the company was acquired earlier this year.

There are so many project management apps. What made you choose this particular niche? How did you get your first customers? Congrats. Your app looks beautiful.

haha. asked and answered.

Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#184

All my outgoings (including staff wages) are paid for by a number of small sites that I have run. They are quite diverse, but I love creating different things. Here's some of what we do: www.sourceguardian.com - encryption software for PHP. Have been running this for around 10 years. This alone would be a very good 'wage' for someone www.europeantenders.com. This provides leads for european government contracts www.u…

Hi, sorry for the stupid question here but I'm a tech newby. But why would you want to encrypt php? I thought only the hosting server can view the actual code. Is it possible to view php scripts that are not executed through a browser?

Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#185
post #10

scribophile.com is paying my salary right now. Not as much as working as a developer at a big company, but enough to live, and I'm much happier :) Completely bootstrapped. The only cash I put down was $100 for some small graphic design work, $500 for an initial Adwords campaign, and $20 for a server.

From what i get, is it more or less the same as http://page99test.com/ but with the whole texts?

Did the adwords campaing success?

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