Nice, congrats!

Yeah, I think depending on what bubble you're in, bootstrapping to 400k and 2x'ing every few years is either failure or amazing. The VC/hypergrowth path doesn't appeal to me, so I think something that gives you $100k+/yr in profit is a huge success.

> I'd love to learn more about your process of the sale.

Sure, I wrote a couple of posts with the details.[0, 1]

[0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/

[1] https://mtlynch.io/lessons-from-my-first-exit/

I found it helpful to go in with low expectations.

I was listening to a lot of podcasts about bootstrapping while I was still at Google in 2017-2018, and even the big success stories usually had 5+ years of failing or succeeding only marginally. So, I went in with the expectation that I'd probably fail for the first 5 years, and so there wasn't that feeling of disappointment from not earning much the first few years.

I also had a lot of lucky conditions that made it easy to take the risk at the time, including no family to support, lots of savings, low expenses.

> I'm also quite lucky that I was aiming for lean-FIRE before I left Facebook, so I have the luxury of being able to keep at it, but sometimes it is demotivating seeing peers / others.

Yeah, honestly I do sometimes think, "Wow, if I'd stayed at Google and kept getting that comp (which was about 50% equity IIRC), that would be a lot of money." But I also am very pleased with my life now, and I know I wouldn't have enjoyed my job nearly as much for the last 8 years had I stayed an employee. And that's a huge amount of my life to not do what I'd like to do.

It's hard to say. I think it could go either way.

My optimistic take is that it has a similar effect to cloud computing on solo bootstrapping. If you tried to start a SaaS company in 2005, you'd have a hard time because in addition to knowing software, you'd also have to know how to provision servers in a data center, so you didn't see a lot of one-person software success stories from that era. But then with cloud computing, it radically lowered the barrier to entry, and there were lots of one-person SaaS businesses making $1M+/yr.

So, the best case for me is if that AI increases the power of solo bootstrappers even more so if you're great at software but terrible at website design / running ads, you don't have to hire people to help you anymore, and you can achieve more by yourself.

The pessimistic outcome is that it becomes less profitable to be a bootstrapped founder because the reduced barrier to entry means you're competing with 10-100x as many people and that companies are more comfortable building in-house tools with AI rather than purchasing B2B SaaS products.[0]

I actually have a hard time imagining B2B SaaS dying because AI makes it easy to roll your own tools. I feel like even if you reduced dev cost to nearly zero, there's still headache of maintaining an app. Like, for my last business, we were paying $200/mo for HelpScout to manage support emails. If one of the devs said they spun up a reimplementation of HelpScout over the weekend that we could run for $2/mo, I'd still say no because the cost of managing it internally is at least $200/mo of people's focus.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441

I didn't have a particularly big audience. I had about 2k mailing list subscribers on my main blog, but a pretty small percentage of them purchased. And I had something like 600 subscribers for the book because I've been saying I'd write it since 2021, but all I had was a mailing list.

> How did you go about building that audience and list, and what helped the most to doing that?

I haven't been focused on growing the list that much.

My main goal right now is to get feedback from readers and use it to improve the book. Once the book is done and I can't think of ways to improve it, I'll probably switch to focusing more on finding more places to find paying readers.

> Which lists / audience converted the most for your book offer

I find the most paying readers from HN, actually. I don't think it's the most in terms of conversion percentage, but it's the most in absolute terms because HN is so big. And then there are secondary effects of something doing well on HN because people share the link on other, smaller sites and social media.

> how did you promote or otherwise let folks know about your book?

The thing that's always worked best for me is writing blog posts that I hope my target audience will find interesting. So the thing that's worked for the book is adapting parts of the book to standalone blog posts and sharing those online.[0] A few of those posts did well on HN because I tried to make them interesting to developers interested in writing/blogging.[1]

> What was the compelling ask to pre-order a book?

Haha, maybe I should craft that more. It's mainly that they get to read more of whatever samples they've already hopefully found useful.

My pitch for early access is that early readers get to read it and ask me questions and help shape the book.

> And, how do you plan to publish the book?

I'm already publishing it as a PDF/epub that I sell through Stripe.

I might eventually do a print run or sell Amazon, but I hate dealing with Amazon and physical products, so I'd have to be really confident it would have a big impact on sales.

[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/

[1] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...

Almost all growth was done via word of mouth. There are business models whose network effects lean in this direction. In order to use my product, you must bring along peers so it's inherently 'viral'. I fell into this by accident rather than by some grand design, but it became obvious to me after I saw it happen. Design a business in which the flywheel can spin without you, if you don't want to spend your time marketing.

My next business that I'm working on is B2B, so I'll have to have a much stronger handle on marketing and sales. But I'm more ready for that now, after a decade of running a B2C business.