Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business • Hacker News Board

Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business

#261

Post by cloverpari8 » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 1:39 AM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #44

scubakid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. For a while there, it wasn't clear to me which side of the line I was walking. Something that stuck with me from Poor Charlie’s Almanack is that low expectations are a cornerstone of a happy life. I built this for myself first, so when people actually signed up and paid, it was incredibly motivating. I was thrilled to spend my free time treating those early customers like royalty and building more of what the…

Another lesson here: you built for a specific community who is passionate, money-motivated, and concentrates in specific social spaces (forums, reddit, etc.) where you can promote your business. This isn't always a recipe for success, but it's a damn good starting point. You need to adjust to the sensitivities of the community to avoid overly self-promotional content, but you always have a clear channel to promote yo…

More importantly, the site looks pristine, with soft, artsy, techie, nature images with calming, strong, and welcoming colors and vibes, and and follows what at least used to be good SEO practices with a blog that is kept up to date frequently enough, etc.

If you don’t know a good site, you’ll never be able to develop one or pay for one without using a ok template.

Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business

#262

Post by speleding » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 7:26 AM UTC

scubakid wrote: post #260

speleding wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. The main problem I had was being too slow scaling up from 1 person. Building a good team is tricky, it's very hard to convince great devs to join you when you are by yourself at a time when they had a pick of jobs from FAANG. Even if you can match the salary of well funded startups, other companies can offer working with a larger team. So you have three options: 1. hire sub-par people, 2. get VC fundin…

I think there's a certain type of engineer that actively prefers working in a small team where you can make an outsized impact and wear many hats. I'm one of them lol. I wonder if you could bring on just one really good dev who matches that description vs scaling up to a larger team. In many cases, a very small team of A+ players can beat a large team of B players. Although it sounds like you're saying marketing/dist…

Yes, I agree, one or two good engineers should easily be enough, and preferable to a large team. In between having programmers on staff I ended up doing most of it myself. It was not for want of trying, but even getting someone to apply is hard when good engineers were getting dozens of emails and calls from recruiters a week (back then). In the end, doing too much things by myself caused my company to be a bit slower with design updates, not enough attention to marketing, etc. And although there are way more people available who claim they can do marketing, finding a good one turned out to be just as hard. But some things, like well-funded competitors appearing that outspend you on Google Ads, are not under your control. I'm still happy with the end-result though, it's a great life style business.

Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business

#263

Post by mieubrisse » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 7:35 PM UTC

Wild - I hit the same "no financial software meets my needs" around the same time as you guys (late 2020 in my case), and started building for myself as well: https://github.com/mieubrisse/wealthdraft

Only, I never had the courage to make the leap to building an actual product out of it. Huge congrats to you guys; going to take a look at Projection and see if I can finally retire my homegrown stuff!

Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business

#264

Post by scubakid » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 7:58 PM UTC

mieubrisse wrote: post #263

Wild - I hit the same "no financial software meets my needs" around the same time as you guys (late 2020 in my case), and started building for myself as well: https://github.com/mieubrisse/wealthdraft Only, I never had the courage to make the leap to building an actual product out of it. Huge congrats to you guys; going to take a look at Projection and see if I can finally retire my homegrown stuff!

cool project. I always found java a little verbose for my taste, but I bet this runs faster than our sim engine! (it's in typescript)