Good. But I think this is the most important piece of advice that one should follow:
> Actually show up every day.
It is the easiest thing anyone can do, however, it is the hardest for anyone to do every. single. day. nonstop.
You can find 5 users who will pay but that doesn't validate a million a month.
What does product validation mean here.
Failures don't get on HN front page
Hey, btw congrats :-)
https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-f...
Earlier in my career, I worked on some things as a corporate engineer that were hard to care about, and there's just no comparison.
>Caring is kind of a superpower.
>the quality of work.
>I was thrilled to spend my free time treating those early customers like royalty
Well, the secret's out, thanks for that, now anybody can do it ;)
> Back in 2021, I was inspired by the financial independence movement and wanted a better way to plan my own life. I couldn’t find the right tool, so I started building.
That sounds a bit like selling shovels to the miners. Which is not a, uh, dig at the project, just an observation.
We're all building tools for other people. As long the users like a product, I think it's moot to call it shovel selling.
In this case it seems legit.
There’s an ARR metric trap in the founder community where people focus on revenue rather than on reaching a level of take-home income comparable to what they could make at a normal job. The former is a lot easier than the latter (especially in the US for people who can take home $250K fairly easily working in tech) - as the saying goes, you can make infinite revenue by selling dollars for 99 cents.
For extreme examples of ARR growth at 0% profit paying off, look at Uber, Amazon, and ServiceNow. I know these are very much outliers. All three had rapid revenue growth but profits at (or far below) zero. But for all three, the founders are sitting pretty today.
But congrats to the OP. It is impressive growth for a bootstrapped business.
Congratulations for walking this line correctly.
I agree that some sort of market validation is necessary to at least pretend you are on the former not the latter. Those early usage spikes are helpful reminders that there is a business here somewhere.
I'll also make a note that you spent time on marketing from the early days. Writing blog posts, promoting said posts, having a Discord server, committing to answer emails, all of this is marketing and its likely lead to success more than the code.
I notice whenever there was a dip in revenue, marketing (in the form of more blog posts) was the response. I suspect that was intentional, and definitely a better approach than "let me go away and silently code more features."
So there are valuable lessons to others here. Congratulations not just on the current success but also on sharing the path that leads to success. Ultimately you can show the way, but you can't make people learn from it.
Oh, and I like the bootstrapping approach. I did the same, and I'm not sorry. It's longer and harder but also skips an enormous amount of extra work.
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 they wanted.
If I had instead come into this with the expectation of quick success, I doubt I would have made it through those early years.
And cheers from one bootstrapper to another. It's not easy, but I can't imagine a more rewarding way to build.
The struggle is real, thank you for being a positive light to all who are on this path. Best to you!
Partly I was scared of putting my own projections at risk. But eventually I realized I'd have way more regret if I passed up the opportunity to go all-in on something I loved.
What's your journey been like so far?
fuzzfactor•1d ago
>that only counts recurring revenue.
>monthly revenue has consistently been 20 to 50 percent higher.
That's the way to do it.
Where you virtually have to go back and figure how much earlier you had actually reached a major milestone.