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Bootstrapping a Software Product

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Re: Bootstrapping a Software Product

#51

Post by mzarate06 »

garrettdimon wrote: post #47
mzarate06 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cited early advertising as a good idea, and that continued advertising was a bad idea. Can you talk a little bit about your paid advertising strategy? Where did you advertise? Are you willing to share your daily advertising burn? Any insight as to why the first $5k in advertising was worth it, but everything after that wasn't?

"Spend" is a very misleading and even distracting metric. Before going to deep into this, it's worth noting that you should never rely on advertising as your sole source of traffic generation when bootstrapping. It gets expensive, and it generally doesn't generate immediate returns. Pay-per-click can be an exception, but that's also an expensive game to get into. Unfortunately, much of our advertising experience isn'…

Very helpful, thank you.

Re: Bootstrapping a Software Product

#52

Post by clark-kent »

mmorrell wrote: post #49

Thanks a lot for this. The point about not going open-source probably just saved me 6 months-1 year of potential time spent. I knew something was bothering me about making my idea open-source at the same time I am making it. Although I'm an idealist, and like open source software, having money doing what I love was my whole goal in the first place.

How did you save time by making your software closed source?

Re: Bootstrapping a Software Product

#55

Post by gfodor »

martinced wrote: post #54

+1 but starting with $16 000 is not exactly bootstrapping. If $16 K is bootstrapping then most YC startups are bootstrapped. I think a "real" bootstrap starts with way less than that.

Pretty sure bootstrapping has less to do with the size of the strap and more to do with the fact that you're doing it yourself. $16k of your own money is a lot different than $16k of someone else's.

Re: Bootstrapping a Software Product

#56

Post by mmorrell »

clark-kent wrote: post #52
mmorrell wrote: post #49

Thanks a lot for this. The point about not going open-source probably just saved me 6 months-1 year of potential time spent. I knew something was bothering me about making my idea open-source at the same time I am making it. Although I'm an idealist, and like open source software, having money doing what I love was my whole goal in the first place.

How did you save time by making your software closed source?

Focusing on shipping the product with all desired features instead of worrying about which features to include/exclude in each version. e.g. not wanting to include a very unique/new/proprietary feature in the open source library , that nobody else had. I was creating 2 versions for each of my projects, and had planned on continuing as such.

Re: Bootstrapping a Software Product

#57

Post by rcirka »

garrettdimon wrote: post #48
rcirka wrote: post #46

Good points in the slide. A question through, why have 2 web server and two database servers? Was it for performance or redundancy reasons?

I can't tell from your question if you're asking for a simple "performance" or "redundancy" answer or if you're asking for a deeper explanation about application architecture. So, I'll try to answer both. The short answer is redundancy. With virtual servers, problems on the host machine due to neighboring virtual servers can be frequent. This can slow down the application server and lead to performance problems. With…

I was just curious. I would hope RoR would be able to handle more than 60 requests per minute. Nowadays I don't bother with manual replicated servers, cloud servers handle a lot of those problems, but I understand everyone has their reasons.

Re: Bootstrapping a Software Product

#58

Post by mootothemax »

garrettdimon wrote: post #37
mootothemax wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've put together a great deck here, thanks for sharing it! Can you give us a few rough details of what your initial customer acquisition strategy was? (Or even something a bit more current, although I realise that might not be information you'd like to share). From what I can tell, Sifter is in a very, very competitive market, and I'd be fascinated to know how you gained customers - and potential customers' intere…

I answered this in a little more detail further down the page, but the short version is that I didn't really have a customer acquisition strategy. I just had a little overlap from my blogging and a product that I wanted to build. The rest was pretty basic. Do things and tell people. By talking about it, I was able to reach a fair amount of people who were interested and start from there. In terms of a competitive mar…

Very informative, thank you :)

Re: Bootstrapping a Software Product

#59

Post by [deleted] »

garrettdimon wrote: post #37
mootothemax wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've put together a great deck here, thanks for sharing it! Can you give us a few rough details of what your initial customer acquisition strategy was? (Or even something a bit more current, although I realise that might not be information you'd like to share). From what I can tell, Sifter is in a very, very competitive market, and I'd be fascinated to know how you gained customers - and potential customers' intere…

I answered this in a little more detail further down the page, but the short version is that I didn't really have a customer acquisition strategy. I just had a little overlap from my blogging and a product that I wanted to build. The rest was pretty basic. Do things and tell people. By talking about it, I was able to reach a fair amount of people who were interested and start from there. In terms of a competitive mar…

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