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We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

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Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#71

Post by philipyoungg »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #17
andi999 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating. Is your product b2b? How fast did you discard the 25 ideas? It sounde like you needed 3 month at least, so 8 years? What did you live on during that time? So in short:please tell me more

It's a consumer product. It is very draining. In today's world consumer don't want to pay for anything, unless they really want the product and they don't have a way to get it otherwise. Many users would use the product and then file chargebacks. Many users will go to any extend to get out of paying coming up with either sad stories, lies or threats. When it's a low cost, high volume product (5m+ paying customers ove…

May I know what your product is? I'm working on www.stayinsession.com for almost a year now. It's B2C and extremely rough.

And as you said: loathe customer support for B2C.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#72

Post by josephg »

austinjp wrote: post #62
artemonster wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you stumble on all the ideas to try? I am at a point that I want to try literally anything , but its is exceptionally hard to judge success chances if the target niche is absolutely outside your domain/experience. How did you find all these 20 ideas?

Personally I have at least one business idea every day, probably due to some neuro-divergence issues. The problem is determining which are worth pursuing. By their own admission, OP's 20+ ideas didn't work. You only need one, it just has to be the right one :) Snark aside, I guess receptivity to novelty is critical when pivoting. At that point, though, the pivot should be based on data. Creativity is still required,…

I have a friend who made a project out of brainstorming 5 project ideas every day. They had to be stuff he could realistically build (physically or with code). Sometimes he would riff off a single idea - some problem he wanted solved. Other times he just sort of free associated.

He said it was hard at first, but it got easier over time. His ideas didn’t dry up. They multiplied.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#73

Post by jack_riminton »

sub7 wrote: post #51
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley is a blind search algorithm for novel scaling advantages from digitisation. These advantages exist for mass retail. The medium-sized businesses who tried to compete with Walmart and Amazon had to adapt fast or fail. These advantages do not (EDIT: have not been shown to) exist for commercial real estate; WeWork was a dud. Most American commerce is, and should be, in the hands of these medium-sized busin…

WeWork is not done and has been a big win for everyone involved

Apart from Softbank?

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#74

Post by habosa »

eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

The SV startup business model is basically: "I've identified a profitable industry which seems 'unoptimized' ... if I used VC funding to outflank every traditional player in this industry would there be room for one billionaire? And could that billionaire be me?"

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#75

Post by mh_ »

mh_ wrote: post #53
jampa wrote: post #3

Nice writeup! Speaking as someone that tried to be a founder from Brazil: I imagine that making it on Silicon Valley must be hard task on itself but making in an underdeveloped country makes odds stacked against you. We compete with companies founded with people that have access to clients with way more purchasing power and better supply pipeline. I'm a bit curious on how the team got overcame this issues, and would…

We were a little bit lucky in this regard, because we had some authority in the niche (2 members of our original team had spoken at security conferences internationally for the previous 10 years). I have lots of thoughts on this though. I think with a low enough burn rate, you can overcome this with a great product, and taking just one bite at a time. ie. one happy customer, then another. Actual customer happiness is…

I've previously pondered how we would have approached our early steps if we were completely unknown, and the best option i can think of is a kind of sincere, influencer marketing approach.

i.e. if you dont have the voice in the industry that people will listen to, find people who do, and get them to see your product. Most industry leaders are constantly looking to up their game, so you should be able to catch their eye, and if your product is awesome, they will say so

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#76

Post by AussieWog93 »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #63
artemonster wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you stumble on all the ideas to try? I am at a point that I want to try literally anything , but its is exceptionally hard to judge success chances if the target niche is absolutely outside your domain/experience. How did you find all these 20 ideas?

Don't over think. Just start building anything that you feel could be useful to someone. Don't fall in love with the idea. The idea you start with will never be the idea when you are successful. It will evolve or likely you will pivot to another related idea. Facebook today isn't what it started with. Flickr and Slack started as gaming companies. Google today is very different from what they started with. It would he…

I've seen people take the advice of "build something that could be useful to someone" the wrong way so many times. That "someone" shouldn't be an abstract, hypothetical customer but a group of people that contains someone you intimately know, such as a close friend, partner or yourself. I think "build something that would be useful to someone that you personally know, and many others like them" is a much more concrete way to think about the problem, and will enable you to achieve success with high probability.

(Just as a disclaimer, I started earning enough income from side projects for both my wife and myself to quit our full-time jobs about a year ago and start a family, but we're nowhere near the multi-millions in yearly profit that OP or bootstrapper10x are.)

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#77

Post by xwdv »

robertlagrant wrote: post #67
bootstrapper101 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year you delay having kids, you are reducing the amount of time you will spend with your kids and grandkids. As you get older, the quality of time you spend with them will also get worse. My wife went through lot of difficulties in her pregnancies. It would have been easier for her body, if we had kids earlier. My drive to get out of the corporate slavery was the reason for the delay. So I regret the delay.

This is exactly right - I've had my kids in my mid 30s, and while there are upsides, there are downsides. At a friend's wedding, his great grandmother was there. Hearing that, I realised there is an amazing upside to having kids a little earlier.

Don’t get too hung up on it. While it’s cool to be a great grandparent, a great grandparent has tons of grand kids, and a lot of them don’t really give that much of a shit about you at the end of the day unless you’re some kind of interesting person. No descendants will care about you as much as your immediate children. I love my grandparents, but barely see them or talk to them even knowing the time is short.

Think of the advantage of having kids later: Your kids get to be born into a deeper and better future, and may some day enter the 22nd century, lucid and able.

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#78

Post by xwdv »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #39
baxtr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super interesting. How did you make money when you were testing 25 ideas? How did you and your family survive and how did you finance the iterations? 25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?

Timeline: 7 years: Work for someone else. Try 5 ideas on the side. Save money 3 years: Tried 2 ideas and spent all the money 4 years: Worked for someone else. Tried 20 ideas on the side. Last became profitable and then I quit. It was really tough. I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. I grew up really poor, so had to do it the hard way. But I had an overwhelming desire to not work…

If you’re getting older and don’t have kids yet, would you recommend then not having kids at all or still having them anyway?

Maybe it would be better to seek a young wife then if you plan to be ambitious?

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#79

Post by digaozao »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #49
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. > I was working 14 hours every day between full time job and my other ideas. We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret. I know it's your choice but haven't you still sacrificed your personal life, so why not try to become 10x?

I don't spend the money I already make. Not sure what I would do with 10x money. 1% ungrateful complaining consumer out of 1 million users are 10k users. I don't like dealing with them. At 10x the business they might become 100k or more. I would rather have 10k high paying Saas customers and weed out the ungrateful ones there but to their face. Currently we are working above the board with no dark patterns. We have o…

Congratulations for the integrity. Hard to find online businesses totally honest without dark patterns

Re: We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

#80

Post by nonane »

bootstrapper101 wrote: post #7
eric4smith wrote: post #2

The vast majority of businesses.... 1. Are outside the valley 2. Started with minimal or no funding 3. Hire a ton of employees overall 4. Give their founders comfortable lives. 5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing. 6. You've never heard about.

I run one of these companies. USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company. Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives. Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people. We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 month…

What is your preferred tech stack for quick iteration of ideas?
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