31–40 of 49 posts
This resonates for me as a bootstrapped founder in the early stages with my company. Cutting through the noise and getting the attention of my leads is hard work. Way harder than coding.
I’m currently serving a bit over 2 million requests per day for the free service I’ve run for years.
Now that I’m focusing on turning it into something more I’m realizing how slow it is to build a product by yourself.
For example, I’ve been working on transitioning to a much more scalable k8s architecture for the last few weeks. While I’ve had some experience over last few years as a developer, I’ve never had to set the whole thing up from scratch. It’s been tedious and draining but I am making progress.
The biggest issue is not having anyone to talk to on a peer basis.
In January I completely revamped the product website from being a crap page running on Launchrock to a self-hosted site with a new design and incorporating Mailgun to handle email.
The issue with that is I get people every day submitting their email addresses to sign up, but to date no one has clicked the confirmation link in the emails being sent to them to confirm the signup.
I researched this heavily before writing code and the consensus is that double opt-in is the correct way to go. So I did that, but no one is following up with the confirmation part.
Last week I found a minor bug that was preventing confirmation signups and I fixed it asap and manually sent emails to the 3 people that I would manually add them to the confirm list and remove them if they wanted. But I’ve had more signups after that who also did not complete the signup process. I’ve tested the flow heavily and it works.
But since I don’t really have a coworker environment anymore, I don’t have anyone to do peer review right now. Very frustrating.
I guess overall I’m used to building services very rapidly but being responsible for the entire thing is someone time consuming. I’m still adjusting to the process.
This site is top notch, thumbs up
God's sake it even has its own reimplemented loading bar...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why a coffee company is a “tech startup”. (Though TBF Amazon didn’t feel like a tech company in the 1990s)
well google is an ad company, what’s your point
Note what I said about Amazon: it didn’t look to me like a tech company when it started, but actually it was (for its time). And since then has continued to aggressively differentiate itself through investment in tech development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has a live chat and five different tracking solutions implemented. What about this doesn't look like a tech business?
That’s just table stakes for a generic retail store Just because I drive a car wouldn’t make me a car business. I think of tech businesses primarily as those that develop novel technology and secondarily as those who use technology in a novel and unexpected way. In both cases technology is the differentiation. The only novelty of this business is its message and while that might make a perfectly respectable business…
enjoy how there's perspective given from the responders with their current MRR as well. as a founder of a bootstrapped tech-enabled service startup with $135k+ MRR is cash flow. Accounts Receivable is a PITA and it still hasn't been solved (even with the likes of bill.com, harvest, stripe, paypal, qbo, etc...) - i'd almost pay for a company to outsource our AR to completely to represent us on initial AR, 30-90 day AR…
This exists; invoice factoring companies make this process relatively straightforward.
I’m running into these challenges right now. After my last job, I’m finally trying to turn a 10yr+ project into a product. I’m currently serving a bit over 2 million requests per day for the free service I’ve run for years. Now that I’m focusing on turning it into something more I’m realizing how slow it is to build a product by yourself. For example, I’ve been working on transitioning to a much more scalable k8s arc…
I'd recommend sticking with the managed k8s services unless you have a team. In my experience as a solo dev k8s has been a huge help and very hands-off once setup. It was a bit of a struggle at first but IMO worth it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s just table stakes for a generic retail store Just because I drive a car wouldn’t make me a car business. I think of tech businesses primarily as those that develop novel technology and secondarily as those who use technology in a novel and unexpected way. In both cases technology is the differentiation. The only novelty of this business is its message and while that might make a perfectly respectable business…
I'm pretty sure Wordball's response was meant as sarcasm.