My Second Year as a Solo Developer

https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-2/

by mtlynch • 6 years ago

1066 351 6 years ago

mtlynch.io

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Author here. Happy to answer any questions or hear any feedback about this post.

Discussion from my first annual update last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19054150

JacKTrocinskI4• 6 years ago

So 2 years and you earned $18,000? Seems rather bad, you think you can exponentially grow that in the next year or two?

icedchai2• 6 years ago

The totals on the first chart are wrong. In 2 years he lost $23k. (Or you could say the "totals" are correct, but calling it "net profit" is wrong.)

tudelo2• 6 years ago

You know, I think there might be something to any publicity is good publicity in this case. It's controversial to do something 99.999 percent of the workforce would not. So, by posting even when there is no great success, he is growing his exposure and making it easier in the future.

LaundroMat• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing. I really enjoy your writing style by the way.

I'm interested how the "raising prices to avoid feature requests from people who wouldn't become a customer anyway" worked.

I have built something for a friend of mine who is now my first customer. The tool solves a niche problem some of his peers struggle with too.

When building it, I tried to make the data models as generic as possible so that other businesses would be able to use the tool with a minimum of effort from my side.

Of course, I still foresee a lot of feature requests. How do/did you know zestful had the right basic functionality and feature-set for it to be useful to customers?

In other words, how did you separate the must-have features from the nice-to-have ones (knowing that a must-have for a particular person could very well be a nice-to-have for the market)?

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading and for the kind words.

To preface, I'm definitely not an expert at this problem, because Zestful still only has a handful of customers, but I can tell you what was helpful for me.

It is really hard to separate the nice-to-haves from the must-haves. Some customers will present their nice-to-haves as if they're must haves because they suspect that if they don't make it sound like a condition of buying, you'll never implement it, but they might buy anyway. Or they'd never buy regardless.

One of the features that I think I correctly took on this year was linking Zestful's ingredients to USDA entries. A lot of customers either explicitly asked for that feature or for something similar. Later large customers cited that feature as something that made them choose Zestful, so I'm glad I added it. I think the signal there was the high proportion of customers asking for it.

I think it is powerful to offer to implement that feature based on pre-payment of X months of service. It might drive away customers who don't feel comfortable letting you hold their money, but if your time continues getting burned by customers who request features and don't follow through, it's a good technique to keep in your back pocket.

gwbas1c3• 6 years ago

Just starting to have income near the two year mark is what I assume would happen.

Assuming you still need to make income at some point, how long would you go before you decided it was time to go work for someone else? Three years? Four years?

BTW: I'm more interested in how you self-reflect on your entrepreneurial abilities. How do you make decisions around that? How do you prevent yourself from falling in love with your work if it's not going to make money?

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

Just starting to have income near the two year mark is what I assume would happen.

Yeah, I'm encouraged by Cory Zue's progress. He's a couple years ahead of me, but I'm sort of matching up with his first few years of income:

http://www.coryzue.com/writing/master-plan/#the-master-plan

Assuming you still need to make income at some point, how long would you go before you decided it was time to go work for someone else? Three years? Four years?

Good question. At this point, I feel like I could do this indefinitely, even if I roughly broke even. The things that would change are if my life circumstances change and I need the money (e.g., having children, a catastrophic health event for me or someone in my family).

BTW: I'm more interested in how you self-reflect on your entrepreneurial abilities. How do you make decisions around that? How do you prevent yourself from falling in love with your work if it's not going to make money?

I've found it helpful to set goals and hold myself accountable for achieving them. I do enjoy writing software for software's sake, but a lot of my satisfaction in being a solo dev comes from improving my skills on the business side. Given that, I'm probably not in danger of reaching complacency - failing to earn money would mean I'm not growing in the way that I want, so I wouldn't be satisfied with that.

hopia4• 6 years ago

Pretty cool how you're able to come out in the open with all this stuff like this!

Having checked Zestful's page out, I got a suggestion for you. How about building a client lib ready for developers for at least a few mainstream languages? This should be rather easily achievable if you type in the Swagger specs to your API. That allows you to generate (Swagger codegen) those libs with possibly just minimal tweaking left on your part.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

Having checked Zestful's page out, I got a suggestion for you. How about building a client lib ready for developers for at least a few mainstream languages? This should be rather easily achievable if you type in the Swagger specs to your API. That allows you to generate (Swagger codegen) those libs with possibly just minimal tweaking left on your part.

This is something I've thought about. I'd really like to have a PyPI package that you can just pip install and it parses ingredients using the free tier, then prompts you to enter a license key when you reach the limit.

Zestful's hard for me because I could spend a year pursuing all of the ideas I have for it, but historically, feature ideas I come up with myself haven't attracted new customers. I set a rule for myself to not implement any new features until a paying customer requests it, and customers haven't mentioned wanting language-specific libraries. I talked a bit more about that in my August 2019 retrospective:

https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/08/#zestful-and-resis...

I haven't looked into Swagger much, so I'll check that out and see if I can create language bindings more easily than I thought.

discordance• 6 years ago

Are you targeting to gain revenue from your SaaS and blog alone?

Have you considered consulting or remote dev for 2-3 months a year? - that could easily enable you to hit your targets.

itroot• 6 years ago

Hey, Michael!

I was following you story since your first post two years ago. I just want to say that to succeed you need to sell something. As a software developers we can scale something (move from 1 to N, in terms of tech), but you need to find initial niche (from 0 to 1). I think that main success (as a business person) that you have is an audience reach that you had (almost every developer feels that things that you are described in your initial post). So why don't you try to play with your audience? Man, 2 years ago, when you posted you story of quitting, I was sitting in Yandex office at Moscow, and a lot of colleagues were talking about you and you story. Isn't that cool? I am not a real entrepreneur, but I really advice you to use your strengths (audience reach, mastery in writing, etc) along with you software development skills to find point of growth. Thanks for sharing and good luck!

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

Man, 2 years ago, when you posted you story of quitting, I was sitting in Yandex office at Moscow, and a lot of colleagues were talking about you and you story. Isn't that cool?

Definitely, that is really cool. That was one of the most fun parts of publishing that piece. I didn't expect it to be that interesting to people outside my circle of tech friends, but it was surprising to hear that it resonated with people in different countries and different industries.

I really advice you to use your strengths (audience reach, mastery in writing, etc) along with you software development skills to find point of growth.

I've thought about this, especially when I first quit, but I could never think of a way to make money from my writing in a way that felt exciting to me. I think I just get more excited about building a product or service, but I do keep searching for ways to use my writing to complement my non-writing businesses.

komali2• 6 years ago

How's a burger with a bun keto friendly lol. There's a big picture of a bunned burger and no mention of "by the way this specifically refers to just the patty itself."

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

The article addresses how to handle buns, but that part of the article isn't in the screenshot:

Most people eat Beyond Burgers with ketchup and a bun, but those are hard to fit into a keto diet, so you might have to get creative. Consider crumbling your Beyond Burger over a salad with fresh tomatoes and a keto-friendly salad dressing. Or try out one of these delicious keto burger recipes.

https://isitketo.org/beyond-burger

burnt_toast• 6 years ago

Just wanted to say I've really enjoyed following your progress. It's awesome to see the changes over time and I really hope I can follow in your footsteps someday. I used to check your blog weekly hoping for a blog update to help pass the long afternoons that dragged on forever at work.

By chance was it you that released the Rooster app? Apologies if it wasn't but I remember reading a blog post about an app that would text you in the morning or something and I could have sworn it was your blog. The post had a link to the app that I clicked on but little did I know that the app had been shut down and the URL was scooped up by a less appropriate website. I was greeted with a very NSFW web page while at work haha.

drawkbox2• 6 years ago

Great read with the logical analysis and openness lends well to success and navigating this adventure.

Doing your own products is definitely the way to go for sustainability. Just one big one or a few have to work. Focusing on products is nice as you don't have to work for clients but instead customers more which can be more rewarding and freeing. Having only a big client or a few end up dictating direction and freedom to pursue ideas.

Overall the experience on the business, marketing and promotions side is very helpful in all aspects of life.

I have been freelancing/contracting/product developing for 8 years full-time off of trying it for a year or two and have had to take clients/contracts here and there. This helps while you are building up products where needed. Though it isn't all bad doing contracts it can take time away but also help you, sometimes you learn about new problems and thus solutions that can become products when dealing with clients and unique industry problems. These problems can be hard to find if you aren't going through some of the pain points related to them.

I will say most products do take multiple years to make it so fail quickly and press the gas on momentum and projects that you lean towards or are more interesting. Pay attention mostly to external product user experience and presentation at this stage.

Good luck on your adventure and may your travels be rewarding personally and financially fruitful.

fonosip• 6 years ago

Interesting that as an ex-googler you dont use adwords ?

gbasin3• 6 years ago

Encouraging to see your progress, keep it up!

Reading about your projects, it strikes me that some have different potential than others for perhaps one clear reason: solving a problem vs not. Why not double down on Zestful? There is demand there, and some are willing to pay...

This post I wrote recently may be helpful for you: https://tinyletter.com/garybasin/letters/how-to-know-what-pe...

edf13• 6 years ago

Hate to be harsh - but I wouldn't call this progress... I would call this going backwards.

From what I can see he is drastically cutting back his lifestyle and all living costs and calling it a profit? The business and enterprise of being s solo dev itself is failing enterprise.

My advise (From experience) would be to be doing some outsourced/freelance work at this stage to help fund your projects.

sweetheart• 6 years ago

Cutting back on one's cost of living can easily still be progress. If he's doing this to get rich, I would agree he is failing. However I don't think thats the idea. I think he wanted a different lifestyle, and one that was more self-directed. Through that lens, an astounding amount of progress has been made.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

Why not double down on Zestful? There is demand there, and some are willing to pay...

Mainly because I don't know of any action I can take to grow Zestful. Large companies have already rolled their own solution. Smaller companies who need ingredient parsing have figured out some solution and they usually don't see it as worthwhile for them to take a chance on a new service if their old one is working fine. Customers need to find me at the time they're building a product that needs Zestful, but I don't know other ways of helping them find me beyond the SEO steps I've already taken.

gbasin3• 6 years ago

Large companies often end up getting hamstrung with homegrown solutions as they try to scale, and look for specialized SaaS solutions

LeoNatan254• 6 years ago

I like how you call that home "a modest two-bedroom home" in the linked blog. I guess it's a matter of perspective. Here in Israel, where everything is cramped, this would be something I'd be very content with.

hopia4• 6 years ago

Probably off topic here but always perplexed me how Israel is so dead expensive with just about everything you can find. Particularly with locally produced items.

LeoNatan254• 6 years ago

Well, yes, because of many factors. Terrible consumers, high taxes, little space, etc.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Haha, I moved here from Manhattan, where I lived in a 1 BR that was luxurious by Manhattan standards but tiny by real world standards.

I'm very happy with my house, but I think it's probably smaller than what most software developers in the US would choose if they lived in an area this inexpensive.

LeoNatan254• 6 years ago

If you don't have children, a larger space would be more burden than necessity. Be happy that you moved away from the jail cell. I'd move if I could too. ;-)

bilekas2• 6 years ago

How did you cut down so drastically on expenses in the second year, +50%, or was there a large investment in the first year, sorry I havent read last years update yet!

Also, I'm just coming accross your Zestful service and can't believe that is exactly what i am looking for and actually started to write, but I have other stuff to do so no point re-inventing the wheel!

Consider me a new client sir!

PS: Congratulations !

tristanperry• 6 years ago

"in August, I bought a modest two-bedroom home in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Population: 17,500."

"My living expenses here are ~$2k per month, which is close enough to the rate of return on my personal investments that I'm kind of at equilibrium."

- i.e. Michael moved to a much lower cost of living area.

onion2k2• 6 years ago

If that "I bought a house" is literal then he doesn't have rent or a mortgage to pay. That's a big chunk of most people's outgoings.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

How did you cut down so drastically on expenses in the second year, +50%, or was there a large investment in the first year, sorry I havent read last years update yet!

Mainly, I outsourced less.

This was less about cutting costs as much as it was about building faster. My first year, I hired developers to do a lot of work with me, but I realized after a few months of doing it that contractors actually slowed me down overall. Early in a product, there are so many course corrections and pivots, but contractors make it difficult to follow those because you need to give them enough to do because they're not going to just sit on unpaid standby for you, but you also don't want to just keep interrupting them and throwing away their work.

Also, I'm just coming accross your Zestful service and can't believe that is exactly what i am looking for and actually started to write, but I have other stuff to do so no point re-inventing the wheel!
Consider me a new client sir!

Fantastic! If you have any questions or run into any issues, shoot me an email at michael@zestfuldata.com.

bilekas2• 6 years ago

That outsourcing less is an interesting point actually, usually I will outsource some grunt work to get other infastructure in place, hand over interfaces and get to other things.

It's a really grat story to hear, I've been there with mixed results, financially and mentally but I plan to go back soon. Your candor is welcoming and on my previous comment about your Zestful service, I definitely will get in touch with you about something I would like to achieve.

Thanks again and best of luck in the future!

jakobegger2• 6 years ago

I read your previous post about Zestful, and this years update, and I just don't understand who would buy this as a hosted API. To me, it sounds like this should be a library, not an API. For every use case that I can think of, having a library would be 100x better than an API.

In my experience, APIs are generally slow, unreliable, and tend to change without notice.

I don't understand what advantage an API has, except making it easier for the developer to charge based on usage.

Do people really buy APIs like this? Am I missing something?

fortzi• 6 years ago

Supporting the business model is a legitimate consideration, amiwrong?

agwa2• 6 years ago

Zestful uses machine learning, so there could be a fair amount of storage, CPU, and memory requirements that make using a hosted API preferable to a local library. Also, if you read Michael's posts on https://whatgotdone.com you'll see that he is frequently improving the model. With a hosted API, customers benefit from improved accuracy immediately without having to update anything.

BlueTemplar3• 6 years ago

"Without having to update anything" seems a bit disingenuous - does this software even work offline, without having to ask for some data from an online server, just to load the front page?

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

The big advantages for the customer of a managed API are:

* No costs of installing or upgrading

* It's language independent

I agree that it's lower risk to rely on a library that you have locally, but none of my customers have ever requested that. I do offer a self-hosted plan, and a few customers have inquired about that, but they lose interest when I tell them it costs 10% more than a managed plan.

All of Zestful's commercial competitors are managed APIs as well, so I don't think customers view a locally-installed library as critical.

RodgerTheGreat• 6 years ago

Software as a service is the solution the market has arrived at for making money from software when piracy is mostly trivial and commonplace. A rentier pricing model means an entreprenur need not negotiate the value of their product up-front; they can continuously adjust price to match demand. Recurring revenue is easier to budget around than inconsistent lump-sum sales.

Finally, an API over a library means the maintainer of said API has an opportunity to harvest data about usage. Perhaps they use this to motivate new features, or perhaps they can monetize this data on the side.

I seriously doubt these decisions have any connection to technical requirements; it's all business.

untog2• 6 years ago

I agree with you entirely, but how would you build a business around a library? It's one of the side effects of the (amazing) open source ecosystem we have these days that installing some kind of paid-for package isn't really that easy. Nor is preventing widespread pirating/reverse engineering of your library if it is successful.

Although it's wildly inefficient, a SAAS offering solves those problems.

jakobegger2• 6 years ago

I bought this library a few years ago: https://www.libxl.com/purchase.html

I don't know how profitable the business is, but if the problem is popular enough it should be possible to make money?

Also, when you are selling to businesses, piracy isn't that big of an issue.

fredgrott• 6 years ago

last corner of graphic right bottom is a wrong amount.

I use to be a number guy, ie accountant hacker. Its not 18k positive as far as net revenue increase from the two years.

the percentage is probably right but not the sign before the net rev number.

and note you have to reach profits soon per how you file with the IRS..sorry to burst your bubble.

same sort of errors in the saas net rev numbers.

bone up on your accounting stats as there are books out there on how to do it

icedchai2• 6 years ago

I noticed that, too.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

I use to be a number guy, ie accountant hacker. Its not 18k positive as far as net revenue increase from the two years.

Can you clarify what you mean? What is the correct way for me to present this information?

and note you have to reach profits soon per how you file with the IRS..sorry to burst your bubble.

Can you elaborate? Are you assuming that I file as a corporation or a sole proprietor?

swalsh• 6 years ago

Just some honest feedback.

I have a use for Zestful, and the price is good. But playing around, it seems good at the easy stuff (but I can do the easy stuff myself) it's not so good at the hard stuff.

For example the string "3/4 cup risotto rice, Arborio or Carnaroli"

It identifies the unit and quantity fair enough, and it's right when it says "Risotto rice" is the product. But then it says "Arborio or Carnaroli" is a preparation method. I can totally see WHY it says that. But I'm not sure that's correct.

At your price point though, I might still use it. Ultimatley to parse everything I need to parse it would be a lot cheaper than spending even an hour writing it myself. But that was my first thoughts playing around with it.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading and for testing out Zestful!

For example the string "3/4 cup risotto rice, Arborio or Carnaroli"
It identifies the unit and quantity fair enough, and it's right when it says "Risotto rice" is the product. But then it says "Arborio or Carnaroli" is a preparation method. I can totally see WHY it says that. But I'm not sure that's correct.

Yeah, I'm constantly improving the model, but there will always be cases it gets wrong. For most of my customers, that's a mostly fine result, because very few of the clients actually use the preparation note field. Most care only about the quantity, unit, product, and USDA fields.

I'll fix the bad result on the risotto example, but it's definitely a game of whack-a-mole. There are so many variations and corner cases that it'll never be 100%.

At your price point though, I might still use it. Ultimatley to parse everything I need to parse it would be a lot cheaper than spending even an hour writing it myself. But that was my first thoughts playing around with it.

Haha, maybe I should raise my prices. But seriously, I'd be happy to have you as a customer. If you'd like to chat more about about your use case, shoot me an email at michael@zestfuldata.com.

hinkley• 6 years ago

Arborio is a kind, just like Granny Smith, bing, or Key. I wonder if it'd be easier just to have a dictionary of kinds of ingredient and anything else is a preparation.

jacurtis3• 6 years ago

Aren't you going to make him pre-pay for 3 months and not charge him until the feature is implemented???

Just got to call you out on your own article. lol

drawkbox2• 6 years ago

It identifies the unit and quantity fair enough, and it's right when it says "Risotto rice" is the product. But then it says "Arborio or Carnaroli" is a preparation method. I can totally see WHY it says that. But I'm not sure that's correct.

Simple solution: for your 'Preparation' just say 'Preparation or additional options' and the additional preparation can contain swap out products that later you can identify by brand name or common marketing name.

So when it says '"Risotto rice" is the product and the "Arborio or Carnaroli" is a preparation method. Changing that to 'Preparation method and additional options' then later parsing potential products helps it a bit.

xchaotic• 6 years ago

Sorry to say but this proves that for someone who actually has to work for a living ie earn money, corporate life is absolutely the correct choice. Even for Mr Lynch these experiments in charity wouldn’t be possible without the nest egg from google (which he acknowledged). To go from net 100k+ to below zero and still be unprofitable after two years is a financial disaster.

gk13• 6 years ago

It seems OP is perfectly happy creating small sites and products. One can earn perfectly good money from consulting or contracting, but OP chose not to.

tonyedgecombe5• 6 years ago

It's hard starting a business and most people (90%) don't earn anymore than an employee.

None the less some of us just aren't cut out for the corporate life. I'd pick poverty over the lack of autonomy, petit politics and meaningless work any day.

xwdv3• 6 years ago

What if the poverty was really, REALLY bad? As in soul crushing, no way out, maybe-kill-yourself, type of poverty? I doubt you’d make that switch so easily.

chasd002• 6 years ago

" I'd pick poverty over the lack of autonomy, petit politics and meaningless work any day."

Would you also put your kids in poverty? It's not a simple when you think beyond yourself.

Grimm12• 6 years ago

Yeah the focus on exclusively money baffles me. Like cool you get to buy a bigger house and go on some nicer vacations. Depending on the big co, they own you. I can't say I'm not working as an employee right now but every time I've been "broke" and free to do whatever project and take on work as I see fit I've been probably 50-70% happier when you factor in stress from shakier income.

That said I understand risk tolerances and it not being everyone's cup of tea but saying everyone should be a corporate employee ignores an entire set of priorities people tend to have besides stability and money.

untog2• 6 years ago

lack of autonomy, petit politics and meaningless work

This isn't a given. Plenty of (particularly large) companies will inflict this on you, but it's also very possible to work at a company and have autonomy and do meaningful work.

JacKTrocinskI4• 6 years ago

Totally agree, would never do what OP has done, I like my job and what I do plus I get paid well.

tempsy14• 6 years ago

good for you?

for most of history everyone worked for themselves. one could argue the modern day corporate structure is completely unnatural and doesn't fit (most) everyone.

theli0nheart8• 6 years ago

Sorry to say but this proves that for someone who actually has to work for a living ie earn money, corporate life is absolutely the correct choice.

Not really. This just proves that corporate life isn't the most profitable option for the OP. You just can't make sweeping statements like this based on a single anecdote.

I'll offer this to other "corporate" folk out there. I was self-employed since late 2010 until I recently (last month) joined a mid-stage startup. During my last year of self-employment I took home ~$400k in cash, and lots more in early-stage stock, and worked maybe 15-20 hours per week. There are very few corporate jobs that would even come close to that balance of take-home pay and work-life balance.

liveoneggs2• 6 years ago

how did you get early stage stock being self employed?

daxaxelrod5• 6 years ago

That's pretty incredible. What made you want to join the mid stage startup? Also did most of your income come from consulting type work or product revenue?

reflectiv3• 6 years ago

I'll offer a counter example in that the startup I joined failed miserably and I ended up losing out on a LOT of income.

I am now working for a decent 6-figure income and EXTREMELY happy with the stability and 40-50 hour work weeks...in comparison to the ABSOLUTE GRIND I went through trying to help that startup get off the ground - this is a godsend.

Your scenario is VERY UNLIKELY IMO.

SergeAx• 6 years ago

During my last year of self-employment I took home ~$400k in cash, and lots more in early-stage stock

You've lost me here. Are those ealry-stage stock of yourself, giving you were self-employed? Or you made side jobs with cash+stock payments?

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

Right - the vast majority of people even in tech need to buy their children shoes and put food on the family table and those things are going to be very hard without a stable corporate income.

neogodless2• 6 years ago

I think the correct lesson is a little different.

First, if you do rake in corporate money, and don't spend it all, you'll have a nest egg which gives you so much more choice in how you live the rest of your life.

Second, if you don't have a nest egg - yeah you can't just gamble that you'll build software-as-a-service and instantly be making enough money to live. As he said, people assumed he'd use freelance to make up the difference. He didn't, but it is an option. Now freelance/contracting can be nearly as corporate as a full-time office job, and it isn't as stable an income, but it can pay really well.

For many software engineers three months of full-time contracting could pay for a year's worth of expenses. (Assuming you make choices that align with that goal.) This would let you spend a great deal more time focusing on your business goals, and give you some freedom to fail some of the time.

s_y_n_t_a_x• 6 years ago

It's not always about the money. It's about the happiness.

If it doesn't work out, it's not like he lost the knowledge, he can still easily get a job anywhere. Probably even a bump from the startup experience.

tempsy14• 6 years ago

If you have the savings then why not? There is probably not a better time in history than to check out from being a corporate drone, assuming you have the savings. The stock index returned 30% last year...a $1M nest egg returned $300K in a year. I don't know what his savings looks like but I assume most of it is invested and wasn't included in these numbers.

bognition• 6 years ago

The returns in 2019 were exceptionally good. There’s little reason to assume 2020 will be as good.

With everything going on this year: Brexit, US elections, impeachment, corona virus, etc... it’s entirely possible this years returns could be negative.

neogodless2• 6 years ago

He talks about that a bit - most of his money was invested in a simple S&P 500 index fund, with some dabbling in crypocurrencies (which worked out in his case.)

BlueTemplar3• 6 years ago

And yet, losing money for the first 2-3 years is AFAIK typical for new companies (especially those with 1-2 employees).

bdcravens3• 6 years ago

The other choice is to not focus 100% on products, but rather, consult and work on your products on the side, and dial back the consulting as your products attain viability.

NKCSS3• 6 years ago

Nah, but it's hard to launch a successfull product; if it wasn't, everyone would be doing it.

I'm doing contracting work for multiple different customers, long-term project, and I generate 100-200k of revenue on a yearly basis from that. That leaves me with slightly higher salary than if I'd work for a boss, but I have tonnes, and tonnes more freedom and time for my kids. It's just not possible to scale that past 300k/yr, because there's only so much time you can sell.

Once you have a product, you can scale it through the roof, since a digital product, if set up well, has negligible costs, will allow you to earn way more, but only if you find something that people want bad enough to pay for and a large enough group to pay for it. Loads and loads of people have the skills required to build a product, but not a lot have the right idea and marketing to go along with it to make it a success.

dbancajas4• 6 years ago

how many customers per year? and how do you deal with insurance?

jlevers• 6 years ago

While I generally agree with you that products can scale much higher than consulting income-wise, when you say it's impossible to scale what you're doing past 300k/year due to time constraints...why not charge more for your time? If you have more people asking you to do work for them than you have time for, I'd think that clients would be willing to pay more in order to make it onto your schedule.

ianmcgowan• 6 years ago

Wait, why do you think "it's just not possible to scale that past 300k/yr"? I have at least one counter-example ;-)

In general, the way it's worked for me is if I have multiple potential new gigs, I ask for more money. When the next gig comes along, that's my new baseline. Over the last 6 years that's helped moved the hourly rate to a number I wouldn't have asked for upfront. I hate to say no to customers too, so sometimes end up working 60-70 hour weeks in bursts. It's worth it though, because when things get quiet, I can go snowboarding for a week without asking a boss for permission...

nonseobeliever• 6 years ago

I work at a big tech company and also have my own small firm for freelance work. Even though I don't have my own product and implement what customers need, ranging from new website to SIEMs and stuff, I find it pretty lucrative. And my prices are about $20/hr. But yes, I don't know if I can survive without working full job.

LE: and revenue is not that small, about 25k per year.

cambalache8• 6 years ago

$20/h is shockingly low. That is an effective rate of around 10 bucks an hour, at or below minimum wage level.

benhurmarcel• 6 years ago

Depends where

avl999• 6 years ago

Thanks for writing this. It is good to see a perspective where a business is being built up slowly as opposed to the typical "I quit my job and now my side project makes $30k a month two months in" posts we usually see.

Do you ever feel issues with motivation when you don't see growth as quickly as you'd like?

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

Do you ever feel issues with motivation when you don't see growth as quickly as you'd like?

Good question. For me, the more dominant feeling is frustration when I do something that I expect will bring growth, and then there's no measurable effect. That happened over and over again with Is It Keto. It was especially tough because the site's growth depends so heavily on Google, and there seems to be a lag time of weeks or months before Google reacts to certain changes or decides certain pages are worth putting at the #1 slot for related queries. It was tough to make a site change or publish a new post and think, "Okay, I guess I'll just wait 6-8 weeks to see what Google thinks of this."

aty268• 6 years ago

These businesses all seem like something that very well could make you money, but would never scale into a growth startup. And it seems the time it takes to build one of these or a growth startup isn't going to be too different. I might even say that you similar chances of making a similar amount of money from either.

So why not shoot for the larger moon?

gk13• 6 years ago

I think you’re underestimating the effort and luck involved in building a successful growth startup.

Why not shoot for the moon?

Some times it’s better to throw a few things at the wall and see what sticks, before going all-in on one idea.

m_ke2• 6 years ago

Ingredient line parsing is a really small market and something that sounds like a fun project to work on but is probably not a business venture that has room to grow. The number of companies that have enough recipes to justify automation, profits to justify paying for it and nobody inhouse who can implement it is really small. There's no viable price point for a product like this when you factor in the cost of customer acquisition.

Content based consumer sites are also really hard to get off the ground and it's not something that I'd recommend any bootstrapper to try unless you can charge for it.

I'm sure it's all a great learning experience though and if Michael keeps iterating the way he is now he'll definitely end up finding a worthwhile business venture.

riku_iki• 6 years ago

Ingredient line parsing

if he can scale his tech to more general cases, it can be very strong proposition.

ingend88• 6 years ago

@mtlynch what tech stack do you use?

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Different things for different projects. I'm trying to move toward mostly Go + Vue stuff.

* Zestful: Python + Docker + CRF++

* Is It Keto: Flask + AppEngine

* What Got Done: Go + Vue + AppEngine (https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone)

* WanderJest: Go + Vue + AppEngine

* mtlynch.io: Hugo (https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io)

usr422• 6 years ago

@mtlynch I've directly recognized the coder theme you use for the blog. I like it pretty much. How do you host it? Do you use github pages?

influx• 6 years ago

Do you use any web frameworks with Go?

usr422• 6 years ago

Interesting analysis. I especially like your personal goals and the "Raise prices, even if nobody's buying". This is a really valuable insight. Thanks for sharing that.

I have one question: Do you have a feeling about the market size you are in and how does this influence your planning?

rs23296008n1• 6 years ago

Good stuff.

I've seen a bit of negativity about this being a waste of time since you're not making equivalent money to old job. For those people: This isn’t any different from spending time earning a degree by returning to full-time study. And your attempts are growing. The compound interest from these investments in time and effort will help you regardless. Even if you fail on every business at first you'll still get so much experience and momentum you can't help but do better next time. And I doubt any will actually fail: each will have an element that wasn't good enough but still capable of being tweaked to fix it. Even if you don't fix it, you've still learnt something in the attempt.

TAForObvReasons2• 6 years ago

There's a simpler explanation, and the post actually touches on the point when discussing Is It Keto:

I abandoned the site in April but came back four months later after realizing that it had grown by itself without me.

As a salaried employee, you aren't actually building anything that accretes value to yourself in that way. You don't show up for work for 4 months and you'll likely be fired. Obviously it never works out forever, but the value you build when striking out on your own has a much longer potency than getting paid in cash and stock.

jldugger3• 6 years ago

I just don't understand how you can set up a business and not noticed the increased revenue.

tempsy14• 6 years ago

OP isn't explicit about it but he's effectively F.I.R.E'd. These are projects to keep the mind fresh in what is early retirement. If that weren't the case building an actual business requires a lot more time, energy, resources even as a solo founder than what I'm getting from the blog post.

ronyfadel• 6 years ago

Or OP could be T.I.R.E.D. :) He’s doing his best to bootstrap his multiple products, but is prioritizing intellectual curiosity, building neat things while not burning out. At least, that’s my view of it.

davnicwil• 6 years ago

Great post Micheal, and awesome to see it hit the top of HN - a reminder I guess that the core bootstrapper/hacker community is on here and strong as ever!

The numbers and stuff aside (which are looking promising, btw, congrats - look forward to see how the trends continue in y3) the part I liked best was the I still love it section. It's incredibly important and, I'm sure you know, the real driver behind doing what you're doing, not money.

I think there's a tendency, maybe especially for technical people, to want to quantify and maximise etc, and money is an easy metric for doing that with and therefore to focus on. But on reflection, it's pretty obviously not the main reason we do what we do.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading, David!

It's incredibly important and, I'm sure you know, the real driver behind doing what you're doing, not money.

Yeah, definitely. I ultimately do need to figure out a way to make some money, but I'd be happy to work for myself for 1/10th the compensation I'd get at a FAANG.

patio112• 6 years ago

Two cents offered because this post really strikes a chord with me, and I also spent some time chasing down rabbit holes early in my software business:

These products do not appear obviously commercializable and multiple years invested into them without materially improving the businesses does not decrease my confidence in that snap judgment. You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (appropriately priced; hundreds to thousands of dollars per year) product against those problems, build contingent on getting 10 commits to buy, and be at +/- $100k in 12 to 18 months. Many people with less technical and writing ability have done this in e.g. the MicroConf community. If you want the best paint-by-numbers approach to it I've seen, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=2s

(I'll note that What Got Done is probably a viable boutique SaaS business if you somehow figured out distribution for it, at price points between $50 and $200 per month. My confidence on this approaches total. HNers skeptical because it is technically trivial should probably reflect for a moment on how much time is spent on standups at a company with 20 or 200 engineers, what one hour of their time is worth, and how likely that company is to put an engineer on this project specifically.)

If you run an API-based business in the future: Usage-based billing is a really tricky business model for a solo developer. Note that you can say "Usage-based billing but we have a minimum commitment", and probably should prior to doing speculative integration engineering work. Your minimum commitment should be north of $1,000 per month; practically nobody can integrate with your API for cheaper than a thousand dollars of engineering time, right.

This also counsels aiming at problems amenable to solutions with APIs which are trivially worth $1,000++ a month to many businesses which can hire engineers. Parsing recipe ingredients seems like a very constrained problem space. Consider e.g. parsing W-2s or bank statements or similar; many more businesses naturally care about intake of those documents, getting accurate data from them, and introducing that data into a lucrative business process that they have.

I would encourage you, to the maximum extent compatible with your sanity, to prioritize "Will this get me more customers?" over behind-the-scenes investments like CI/CD which are very appropriate to Google but will under no circumstance show up in next year's report as One Of The Most Important Things I Did This Year.

For similar reasons, I would suggest devoting approximately zero cycles to cost control. You don't have a cost problem and no amount of cost control will bend the curve of your current businesses to sustainability. You have a revenue problem. Your desired state in the medium term will make it economically irrational for you to think for more than a minute about a $50 a month SaaS expense; marketing and sales gets you to that desired state, not cost control.

lsinger• 6 years ago

What Got Done

There are several paid SaaS apps and / or Slack bots that do this. It’s a viable niche, but has gotten somewhat crowded in the past few years. Earlyish example: https://iDoneThis.com (worked there 2014/2015)

blackearl• 6 years ago

Seems like a better thing to integrate into existing apps rather than a standalone product

cs02rm0• 6 years ago

You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (appropriately priced; hundreds to thousands of dollars per year) product against those problems, build contingent on getting 10 commits to buy

I don't doubt that you're absolutely right, but this bit strikes me as hard. I've struggled to find one business owner with a problem they perceive, let alone 10 with commitments to buying a solution for the same problem.

Ironically, it strikes me that there's a gap here for a business to solve; connecting entrepreneurial devs with business owners aware of problems.

amelius• 6 years ago

Ironically, it strikes me that there's a gap here for a business to solve; connecting entrepreneurial devs with business owners aware of problems.

This. Why hasn't this gap been filled yet?

agwa2• 6 years ago

Michael published an interesting post about his attempt to talk with owners of sheet metal shops: https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/01/#sheet-metal-resea...

patio112• 6 years ago

Is the problem that you can’t identify owners, that you can’t successfully get in touch with business owners, that you can’t convince them to talk to you, that you can’t get signal from those conversations, or that you are accurately getting the signal “Actually literally nothing could be better about my life.”

Draw the funnel diagram, with numbers if necessary. Having talked to many devs who believe similar, I think the most actionable advice is likely “Organize your next N weeks to talk to many, many more business owners than your last N weeks.”

MiracleUser2• 6 years ago

Yeah, this is why I have been working as a data analyst. I've taken on as many vendor management responsibilities as I can and help out with COGS and revenue attribution analysis for finance. I have been collecting ideas while making steady wage, and eventually I'll pull the trigger on something

I have a backlog of like 200+ viable new product / feature ideas that help solve some business problem or improve the efficiency of activities people do with financial transactions involved. Many are too small to be stand alone for sure, but I do not believe million dollar ideas are grown in a silo

jrumbut• 6 years ago

I don't think anyone on Upwork or whatever other job board would complain if they were out there asking for custom work and you showed up with a ready-made product.

Beyond that, every business owner kvetching on Twitter. Problems are everywhere!

Certainly can be very hard to get 10 business owners with the same problem to all line up and pay thousands for your software, but problems are easy to come by.

Edit: filtering for problems solvable by any particular solo developer's skillset in less than 2 years is another challenge.

Gepsens• 6 years ago

That's exactly what I went to solve 6 years ago, didn't work, but the space is probably more mature now

dangero• 6 years ago

I like this idea and would use it if it existed

shanecleveland• 6 years ago

From the post:

"... I outsourced much of the writing. That cost me more than it should have because I knew nothing about hiring and managing writers, but the experience taught me a lot ..."

"... no love for Xero ..."

As an entrepreneurial dev who is also a business owner, it sounds like he may have some problems there to solve!

Not sure if those are viable, just pointing it out. The easiest problems to solve are your own or at least ones you encounter yourself. Doing some consulting may help to see problems in business or industries that are not your own.

rafiki6• 6 years ago

I think the approach here is a bit backwards from what the rest of the world has always done to a degree. Software Development is a specialized skillset, not unlike a trade. If we are solving a problem for someone with software, we are essentially like a typical contractor you hire to do something at home. What you're doing here is trying to convert that into a scalable product under the assumption that many other might also have the same problem. This might be true, but as in construction, the product makers aren't selling to the consumer directly but rather the tradesperson.

Every "tech" company is not actually selling tech, but rather is selling something tangible, a product of sorts. Software developers are selling their labor.

If you want to find out the scalable product or solution in a particular business or domain, I think you really need to be a part of that industry or have someone who is.

Otherwise, even if you end up developing a SaaS that satisfies the needs of 100 customers, you won't really ever truly be able to scale. So my suggestion is start talking to friends and family in other industries.

exolymph2• 6 years ago

Frankly, if you can't do this part on your own, you're gonna fail anyway.

f2000• 6 years ago

My experience is that even if you find a business owner with a problem there's a steep climb to build a product and sell it. I'm a developer & my brother is a mortgage broker - I even worked for a few months in his office during the sub-prime bubble :-) I saw first hand many processes that could be improved , even coded a few hack "solutions." In my case, it was just too easy to get a high paying dev job than take on the risks and costs of starting a business. Coincidentally, a recent indiehackers podcast with Dave Sims of Floify (a mortgage broker product) validated what was needed. I recommend listening to this episode - very good info developing a successful product for a domain you don't know:

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/136-dave-sims-of-floify

euro_expat• 6 years ago

Yeah, you are right here. It sounds nice to talk with business owners, but you'd be doing it for months to get any valuable insight. Better to build something that you can probably sell and talk with people in the course of selling it, not upfront. You can always pivot a bit once you're in a market.

balfirevic3• 6 years ago

These products do not appear obviously commercializable

It looks to me like some people have a well-developed intuition to distinguish between products in "seems like it would be useful to me" category vs. products that have a good chance of actually being commercialized.

I certainly don't. When reading various indie hacker stories I'll be damned if I can predict with reasonable success which ideas have a good chance of taking off and which don't.

mixmastamyk2• 6 years ago

He gives the clue to finding that. Talking to lots of businesses about what they need. We don't pop out of the womb with that sense.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading, Patrick! I'm a big fan of your work, and your Indie Hackers interview was one of the big motivators that sent me down the solo developer path.

You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (appropriately priced; hundreds to thousands of dollars per year) product against those problems, build contingent on getting 10 commits to buy, and be at +/- $100k in 12 to 18 months. Many people with less technical and writing ability have done this in e.g. the MicroConf community. If you want the best paint-by-numbers approach to it I've seen, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=2s

Thanks, I'll check out that video!

I hear that advice a lot from people I respect, and I put a lot of effort into that over the past year, but I was never successful.

The biggest problem I ran into was that there's this "disconnect problem." I know I'm a competent developer and can build niche solutions to $10k problems, but I don't know which companies have $10k problems. I can guess at it, but they sometimes don't even realize their $10k problem has a software solution. The companies also don't have incentive to talk to me to explore the possibility if I'm just a developer off the street.

In 2019, I tried to do this with stone quarries[1], sheet metal shops[2], and email copywriters[3], but the first two mostly wouldn't talk to me and the latter didn't seem to have enough opportunity for a niche business.

I would encourage you, to the maximum extent compatible with your sanity, to prioritize "Will this get me more customers?" over behind-the-scenes investments like CI/CD which are very appropriate to Google but will under no circumstance show up in next year's report as One Of The Most Important Things I Did This Year.

I get a lot of pushback about my love for CI/CD, and it always puzzles me. Is CI/CD seen as difficult or time-consuming? For me, it's such a net positive on my time and mental energy to know that basic functionality works before I push to prod. There have been many times where CI has caught breaking changes that I'd otherwise have to catch by waiting for customers to complain or manually smoke testing my product after every push. And I don't have to do much to set it up - just slap in a Circle CI config.yml and flip a button.

I would suggest devoting approximately zero cycles to cost control. You don't have a cost problem and no amount of cost control will bend the curve of your current businesses to sustainability. You have a revenue problem. Your desired state in the medium term will make it economically irrational for you to think for more than a minute about a $50 a month SaaS expense; marketing and sales gets you to that desired state, not cost control.

Thanks, I agree completely and you succinctly articulated a feeling I've long struggled to put into words.

I often get pushback about spending O(hundreds) of dollars on non-essential expenses, and it always feels like it's missing the forest for the trees.

[1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/05/#an-app-for-rocks

[2] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/01/#sheet-metal-resea...

[3] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/06/#taking-on-google-...

cushychicken3• 6 years ago

I don't think any of these businesses would pay for What Got Done, but I think there are a zillion businesses very geographically close to you that would.

I note in several of your posts that you live in Western MA. You're two hours by car (assuming you miss traffic!), or three hours by train, from Boston. I can think of ten companies off the top of my head that fit the mold Patrick mentions as potential customers for What Got Done, that would not bat an eye at paying the upper limit of prices mentioned. (My current employer being one of them!)

Happy to help you brainstorm potential customers via email - I'm at (my_hn_username)@gmail dot com.

aosaigh• 6 years ago

Just a friendly passing comment, but I'm not sure you have the correct take-aways from speaking with business owners.

With the quarry example, you couldn't get them on the phone. How about conferences, meetups, trade shows etc? Furthermore you probably need to search for companies that might _want_ to speak to you: younger owners, companies with less to lose etc.

In the sheet metal example, it sounds like you had already decided what you wanted to build for them before even meeting them (an improved software solution for their shop management apps). Maybe trying to just speak more generally about their processes and difficulties would tease out problems you might not have considered.

I'd return to this approach/phase and give it another go to find a market fit for the ideas before you start doing a line of code.

dhruvkar6• 6 years ago

>stone quarries

I deal with stone factories/quarries everyday (but mostly in Brazil and India)!

Let me know if you're still interested in this space.

zrobotics• 6 years ago

One thing to consider- you approached everything with the assumption that businesses want a SaaS; the sheet metal post made it sound like you were surprised that the shops didn't want a SaaS. Software Developers like SaaS, because it makes more money and had recurring revenue. However, to a business owner that just sounds like another bill that they don't want. Owners at small to medium companies, in my experience, are very cost-conscious.

For example, I'm currently evaluating warehouse management systems. It appears that everyone in this space runs a SaaS; with ludicrous prices where they want to bill per shipper/ac count. We still plan on being in business in 3 years; and after 3 years we will have paid more than what it would cost to develop this system ourselves. If you are mostly focused on tech it's easy to think that everyone likes the idea of SaaS; but realistically the only people who get excited about that idea are the people cashing the checks every month. I have heard much lamentation and whining about having to 'subscribe' to software instead of just buying it.

austhrow743• 6 years ago

The biggest problem I ran into was that there's this "disconnect problem." I know I'm a competent developer and can build niche solutions to $10k problems, but I don't know which companies have $10k problems. I can guess at it, but they sometimes don't even realize their $10k problem has a software solution. The companies also don't have incentive to talk to me to explore the possibility if I'm just a developer off the street.

They sometimes do realise their $10k problem has a software solution though. You need to be in the pathway for when they go looking to solve it, not go to them.

Advertise in the white pages as doing custom software development. You'll get plenty of businesses contacting you ready to pay money to solve all sorts of problems not currently addressed by off the shelf solutions. Very rarely are they actually willing to pay anywhere near the total cost to build it, but enough to make building it worth it to you if you can get a couple other customers on board.

gwbas1c3• 6 years ago

Looks like this guy is trying to run a lifestyle business, and his investments pay enough interest that he can coast for a long, long time.

To be quite honest: He's spending all day playing.

That's a position I envy quite a bit.

eugenekolo• 6 years ago

How many years of work do you have in the tech industry? It seems in the current market (not even assuming SF salaries), and without kids/other dependents, it's fairly easy to reach that point. Just curious, because a lot of people have this mentality that they need to work forever and ever, but it often is just a mindset.

You can easily amass 500k-1M and just coast on 40k/year in expenses for a long time. If it's something you want... a lot of people want kids, or to live in high cost areas, or to accumulate wealth to pass on, or have dependents such as elderly parents, or enjoy money a lot.

tempsy14• 6 years ago

Make $300K a year for 10 years while keeping expenses low and investing most of that in a bull market makes it pretty easy to do.

WD-423• 6 years ago

I'm not sure I understand this attitude. There is a specific lifestyle he is trying to achieve and the is working towards being successful at reaching it. At what point does it stop being "playing" and become just living? Do you have to be miserable at a 9-5 job to be considered serious by society?

cushychicken3• 6 years ago

I'll note that What Got Done is probably a viable boutique SaaS business if you somehow figured out distribution for it, at price points between $50 and $200 per month. My confidence on this approaches total. HNers skeptical because it is technically trivial should probably reflect for a moment on how much time is spent on standups at a company with 20 or 200 engineers, what one hour of their time is worth, and how likely that company is to put an engineer on this project specifically.

I perceived an almost audible crack from how hard this statement hits it out of the park.

TAForObvReasons2• 6 years ago

I would suggest devoting approximately zero cycles to cost control. You don't have a cost problem and no amount of cost control will bend the curve of your current businesses to sustainability.

I strongly disagree with the perspective here. Cost control isn't the core problem for the author, but every dollar matters at this stage. The difference between "we're losing money every month" and "we're break even" and "we're slightly profitable" is huge when talking to parents and other people in the social circle.

0xff00ffee• 6 years ago

He also has a nest egg from working at a big corporation and successfully playing the stock/crypto market. That helps give him time to play around like this. I don't sense any urgency.

Reedx• 6 years ago

reflect for a moment on how much time is spent on standups at a company with 20 or 200 engineers, what one hour of their time is worth
Your minimum commitment should be north of $1,000 per month; practically nobody can integrate with your API for cheaper than a thousand dollars of engineering time, right.

That's my thinking as well, but haven't had much luck getting companies to accept this kind of pricing. Even though it's all inbound interest (no advertising or outreach) and they're sometimes large companies.

Here are the problems I'm aware of:

1. People generally don't think about the cost of standups or meetings or per hour employee cost. That's just not something typically being considered.

2. They've compared with other APIs or use other APIs/SaaS and are used to <$100/mo. So $1k/mo or even $500/mo is a shock and they decline or disappear. Apparently deciding they don't actually need it that bad or going with their 2nd choice.

How do you overcome these? Do you actually point out that the API is cheap compared to employee cost? Help them justify it to themselves and/or their manager?

milesvp• 6 years ago

To be fair, anything more than ~$250/mo probably requires some kind budget approval which will quickly scare away many underlings, and means now you're in the realm of enterprise sales. Now you should probably be charging closer to $10k/mo just to deal with that headache. It's another reason why having 3 tiered pricing can really help, with a 4th tier being "contact us for enterprise solutions". It can allow you to sneak past some of these organizational hurdles, by allowing people to select the price that will cause them the least headache. Joel Spolsky talks about this a lot, how there are holes in the market for pricing due to these frictions.

tempsy14• 6 years ago

This is appropriate advice for someone who actually wants to be a solo founder.

Even if he's not explicit about it, every lifestyle decision I'm getting from these blog posts is that OP has effectively F.I.R.E'd and these projects are mostly for fun.

heipei2• 6 years ago

Thanks for the Youtube link to that talk, over the past year I've read so many interviews, blog-posts and watched talks about bootstrapping businesses, but this was the most concise, honest and no-nonsense summary I've seen yet. Now I'd be interested in finding someone talk at length about selling to Enterprise customers as a bootstrapped one-man show, Jason Cohen touches on it briefly in the Q&A.

zerkten• 6 years ago

For similar reasons, I would suggest devoting approximately zero cycles to cost control. You don't have a cost problem and no amount of cost control will bend the curve of your current businesses to sustainability. You have a revenue problem.

I'm curious why you use this wording. It comes of as slightly brash, and to many, suggests that you shouldn't worry about costs. In my experience have to be "penny wise, pound foolish" making reasonable efforts to manage cost.

You can pile on loads of tech debt which matters little at this scale (e.g. your CI/CD example), but when you are small the costs can bite hard. You quickly limit your choices and end up spending time looking for funding, if you don't have some sort of reasonable constraint.

moltar• 6 years ago

I think your advice is on point.

But my impression of the author was that they are well off already and is just trying to have fun while also possibly earning money down the road. In other words, they are trying to follow their passion.

rjpr• 6 years ago

If you run an API-based business in the future: Usage-based billing is a really tricky business model for a solo developer.

Can you elaborate on this? Is it just because of the inconsistency in revenue or is there some technical challenge I haven't considered?

I'm currently developing a usage-based API SaaS as a solo developer so this in particular really piqued my curiosity.

leonroy• 6 years ago

Inconsistent revenue is one - low price charged per transaction (usually) is another issue. Couple those with small subscription numbers to start with and you can see that it can take a while, if ever, before your SaaS can pay the bills.

nlh• 6 years ago

All personal stuff aside (and on that note - I’m a huge fan of this story Mike and love what you’re doing!)

This is a great piece of advice for solo devs out there:

Great! You can pre-pay for three months of service, and your billing cycle won't start until that feature is available.
I've never been burned on a feature request since.

I imagine it’s super easy to fall into the custom feature trap when the temptation of a big new customer is right around the corner, and this seems like an excellent solution!

bkinnard• 6 years ago

Reading the post makes me most curious about how you live so cheaply? Halfing your burn rate doubles your time to death which more than doubles your chances of success

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

Reading the post makes me most curious about how you live so cheaply?

90% of it is just location.

When I was in Manhattan, I was spending ~$7k/month. Part of that was higher cost of my apartment and health insurance, but another big part is just the culture. In NYC, it wouldn't be unusual for me to go out to a $80/person dinner, spend $25 on drinks afterwards, another $25 on Ubers, then another $20 on brunch in the morning.

In Western Mass, I do make efforts to live cheaply, but so much of it is just the ease of not spending money when nobody in your social circle spends like that.

microcolonel• 6 years ago

Side note: when presenting a simple revenue-expense-profit-loss chart, it can help to chart the expenses as cutting from the bottom of the revenue (tough though, when you are funding the expenses externally, in this case you have to put the loss below the zero line). Anyway, it makes it clear when your expenses intersect your revenue, and you switch to profit rather than loss.

christiansakai• 6 years ago

I read your original post 2 years ago, and was waiting for the conclusion. Thank you for posting this.

epicgiga5• 6 years ago

Very illustrative warning to other devs.

Just because you're coding and building things, doesn't mean you're doing work, or that you're going to make any money.

Most devs are salarymen because that's the best role they can play in society. Their employer plugs them into what the market actually wants. 99% of them are inequipped to perform any that business aspect themselves. They just want to build stuff. Like this devs projects -- a hobby not an enterprise.

The best thing any likeminded dev can do is this: do not write a single line of code until you've vigorously screened for market demand. If you can't pick up a phone and talk to businesses, this isn't for you, or you need to partner with a so called "extrovert" or sales type.

Do not even so much as ponder the technical implementation of an idea for at least a month, don't touch a terminal, and don't type a single char of code.

If you can't restrain yourself from doing so, save yourself the wasted time, money, and energy. If you want a hiatus, just have a real hiatus and fly to a Thai island for 6 months.

heipei2• 6 years ago

Part of the problem that I have with some of these accounts is that they so often focus on tiny and mundane problems that individuals have. I don't know if this is a conscious decision or just an unintended consequence of the fact that B2C ideas are easy to find (you just watch your own daily routines) and are more shiny since everyone knows about customer-facing products but fewer people know all the gears that power corporations large and small.

The "Is it Keto" site is a nice hobby but if I seriously wanted to make money with a product/SaaS/platform I'd ring up everyone I knew from previous jobs and ask them which problem I should solve to save them hours of work every day. If you do that your product will become irreplaceable, while a site for helping you with your Keto diet is probably the first thing anyone would cut out if they wanted to save some money. That's the issue I have when founders focus so much on these lifestyle and purely optional products.

epicgiga5• 6 years ago

It's worth noting quite how vigorously you have to apply this concept.

My first business attempt _did_ factor in market demand, but didn't consider the depth or capacity to pay ("nice to have" vs "take my money"). So I burned out doing 70 hr weeks for something that was never going to make real money vs what I could get as a salaryman or contractor.

If you're starting out, you really really shouldn't be aiming for a new unique solution to something, unless you're planning on the VC route.

It is far wiser to copycat. Aim for a massive crowded market (e.g. weight loss), because your chance of missing is hundreds of times lower.

Indeed an even more effective tactic is to buy an existing business in a space, and develop it. It rips out all the market risk. This is how freelancer.com started for instance.

redisman4• 6 years ago

Seems like the author didn't have any financial pressure due to years at Google so it's hard to judge how serious he was about making money. I think if he didn't have money for rent this month (my experience as a "solo-dev" back in the day) then he would've done consulting/contracting or more profit driving ideas. Making $5000 a year is not realistic for most of us so this just seems like a long vacation with some coding.

But yes B2B is very underrated among younger devs especially. They have huge problems in scale and complexity and most of the money is in there.

say_it_as_it_is2• 6 years ago

OP shares his struggles with the world and this is the best you can come up with? The illustrative warning here is for anyone in OP's position to not post personal nor professional difficulties with randoms on Hacker News.

Share wisdom, not criticism.

epicgiga5• 6 years ago

I did both. You just have to finish reading before you start typing.

See, did both again!

tempsy14• 6 years ago

OP has effectively F.I.R.E'd even if he doesn't say that explicitly.

These projects are fun things to do that keep him fresh more than anything.

huhtenberg• 6 years ago

If you can't pick up a phone and talk to businesses...

This is not required by any means.

It helps if you can communicate well and be generally not afraid of or annoyed by people, but being an energetic extrovert is absolutely NOT required. Not at all.

localhost• 6 years ago

I think it's especially important to make sure that you interview customers and find out what their problems are before you even think about writing a single line of code. You should strive to get a mix of qualitative (because the stories you hear will let you empathize with the customer problems) as well as quantitative via surveys / small ad experiments. Once you have some signal, then proceed to start exploring solutions (and again, this isn't about writing code, you can do this entirely with mockups/napkin drawings, whatever it takes to get your point across) and test those solutions with the customers you interviewed earlier. Once you have some evidence that a) you have a problem that customers will pay to solve, and b) you have a solution that you have validated THEN you proceed to start writing the code.

The biggest change at my company is doing product development this way: understand the customer problem and the solution before writing code.

Hope this helps.

cdiddy22• 6 years ago

Are health insurance costs included in your current $2k monthly expenses? Did you buy the house outright?

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Yep and yep. Health insurance in MA is $250/month for a high deductible plan (I was paying $500 in NY). This year, my insurance is only $40/month because I qualified for a subsidized plan based on my 2019 income (or lack thereof).

cdiddy22• 6 years ago

Interesting. I am in MA as well and it seems health insurance would be 500 a month for me(1 person). Maybe thats the higher end plans though.

senderista• 6 years ago

If you're netting at best a few grand a year and need to survive on savings anyway, why not just drop the business pretense and work for free on stuff you actually find interesting? A popular open-source project could yield more long-term value for one's career than an unprofitable or barely profitable "lifestyle business".

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading!

The plan is for my income to increase over time. The benefit of launching businesses is that each time, I learn skills to increase my chances of success in the next attempt.

icebraining3• 6 years ago

A popular open-source project could yield more long-term value for one's career than an unprofitable or barely profitable "lifestyle business".

Only as a launchpad for another job or consulting gigs, no? What if he wants to work solo?

say_it_as_it_is2• 6 years ago

@mtlynch you're brave for sharing your experiences and struggles with the world. What kind of help are you searching for?

alexellisuk2• 6 years ago

If folks liked this story, check in with Daniel Vassallo who quit a job at Amazon on well over 500k / year salary and benefits to start out on his own as a solo, small-business founder. https://twitter.com/dvassallo

He shares lots of personal stats like his incoming & expenditure - quite inspirational and can show that circumstances and luck can also play a part.

willj• 6 years ago

Naive question by someone who’s never started a business: when bootstrapping companies while keeping your day job, how do you deal with intellectual property clauses in employment contracts, such that your employer owns the “inventions” you create in your free time, on your own equipment, unrelated to the business area you work in? I know laws vary by state, but I would find it especially disheartening if you spent years of effort and sacrificed your social life only to have your product snatched away from you once it finally became profitable or popular.

My non-lawyer reading of the internet’s opinions suggest that you need to discuss it with your company, or possibly edit your employment contract before signing, but the latter seems a bad suggestion if you’re afraid of not getting a job. I’ve also read that these kinds of clauses can even apply several months after you terminate at your day job, which suggests that you can’t even start on the product until months after you’ve left.

All of that makes me unlikely to try to build a business in tech, since I would never have the capital to take such a long break away from a company, nor to build a product for a long time before it’s profitable without having a day job to support me.

pid_02• 6 years ago

how do you deal with intellectual property clauses in employment contracts, such that your employer owns the “inventions” you create in your free time, on your own equipment, unrelated to the business area you work in?

By not signing those things, plain and simple. I have never signed an employment contract and I never will.

icebraining3• 6 years ago

Does that mean you never worked for a company (in an IP-related job), or actually managed to find companies who hired you without signing a contract? If the latter, what kind of companies do that?

giarc• 6 years ago

My employer (not a tech company but a healthcare provider) has a system whereby I submit a Potential Conflict of Interest document. They review and either give me their blessing to continue work (outside work hours obviously) or further review is to be conducted.

par• 6 years ago

most of the time you just roll the dice. As long as what you're doing is not in the same line of business as your employer, and you part on good terms, most of the time it's fine.

jacurtis3• 6 years ago

This is actually a good distinction. If your side project is related to your employer's line of work then it is easy for your employer to argue that they own that creation, even if you used a personal computer and did it at night, etc.

So for example if your employer makes inventory management software for coffee shops, and you decide to make an inventory management tool for grocery stores... then your employer will easily own your creation.

On the other hand if you work for a search engine platform (ie Google), and you invent an API tool that parses recipes, and you did it all on your personal laptop and personal time, then you should be fine.

roland35• 6 years ago

Another important thing to keep in mind is to not use company resources in any capacity - your work laptop, work 3d printer, work time. This actually came up in the first season of silicon valley!

henryfjordan2• 6 years ago

Your intuition is correct, you really should try to make sure your employer is aware of your intent to work on your own IP and you have some written document acknowledging that fact. Many companies have a form you fill out on your first day listing such projects. You owe your employer a duty of loyalty and so your projects cannot compete with them, and it helps to have them review the scope of the project and sign off on that fact. If you don't get this agreement from your employer, you might still technically be fine to work on your own business but you risk a court battle about it.

I’ve also read that these kinds of clauses can even apply several months after you terminate at your day job, which suggests that you can’t even start on the product until months after you’ve left.

These would be non-compete clauses, illegal in California but legal in many other states. Your employer doesn't own any IP you create once they stop paying you, but if you are bound by a non-compete you'll need to be more careful.

scaryclam• 6 years ago

So much this. Don't rely on just not using company time or resources. Be open and honest. Get it in writing. If they won't give it to you, there's no chance of them being ok with it just because it's not on company time or resources. Know the boundaries before committing. Then you and your employer can keep a trustful and productive relationship while you try things out.

patchworkguilt• 6 years ago

Agree with what has already been said (dont use company resources like a work laptop, dont work on it during typical work hours, dont build a product that might in any way compete with your employer, etc.) As far as work contract goes, (I am NOT a lawyer, just based on experience), it's worth reading over and seeing what the language is around IP. Most states protect your right to build stuff on your own time (enables innovation, also you aren't the property of your company) making some more draconian contracts unenforceable. But it is always better to be proactive, rather than assuming a court battle will be unlikely because 1) who knows and 2) court is never cheap. If you want to work on something and you are worried about the language in your contract, talk to your employer about the project and getting some form of written exception for it. Side projects generally make for more capable, satisfied employees, so if a company made a massive stink about literally owning anything you make anywhere in your life, I'd be very very wary, as that mindset is a scary sign.

jacurtis3• 6 years ago

Generally, when an employer owns your "inventions", this only applies to "inventions" created while using the employer's resources. Most employement contracts will make it sound like they own every waking thought, but in most cases when this has been taken to court, the precedent has been set, that it really only applies to inventions or ideas that happen in relation to and using employer's resources.

So this means that an employer can argue they own software that you build:

- On a company-issued computer

- Using contacts you garnered through work

- On company time (this is complicated for salary employees, but definitely applies to time in the office, or standard business hours when you are expected to be working)

- Work collaborated on with other co-workers

Now I should clarify, I am not a lawyer. None of this is legal advice, yada yada...

But generally you can work on side projects and skirt around intellectual property clauses as long as you make sure to distinguish work time and work resources from your personal projects. The biggest thing is to avoid doing it while at work (or when expected to be actively working if you are remote), and avoid using a company computer or piggybacking off company resources (for example making a sub-account in your employer's CI/CD tool to run tests for your software).

So make sure you have seperate accounts for everything, avoid doing it on company time, and use a personal computer (not a work-issued computer) and you should be absolutely fine with working on a side project.

adventured2• 6 years ago

Most employement contracts will make it sound like they own every waking thought, but in most cases when this has been taken to court, the precedent has been set, that it really only applies to inventions or ideas that happen in relation to and using employer's resources.

A simple example of this that I like to point out to people in tech to help them understand that an employer doesn't inherently own your soul, is picture yourself starting a Pizza Hut franchise (convenience store, or anything equivalent) strictly on your own time and dime entirely outside of work. Does your employer get to own that business, get to take it away from you, just because you work for them 9 to 5? Nope and it sounds particularly absurd when you frame it with something more traditional. Or imagine starting a real-estate renovation business, where you renovate houses in your own spare time; same thing, does IBM get to own your house renovation business just because you pull 9-5 for them? Hell no they don't.

The only serious risk difference re starting tech businesses (vs other traditional businesses) while working in tech is in cases of competitive issues if you start something directly in the employer's wheelhouse. Then you better lawyer up well ahead of time and navigate it very carefully.

dhruvkar6• 6 years ago

So awesome seeing your posts at the top of HN!

> I've also noticed that readers are less interested in business lessons unless the story involves thousands of dollars — earning or losing large sums both seem to work.

I would love to read more about the mundane, small business lessons, because that's where I am. And I'm positive I'm not the only one.

Keep writing about the smaller day-to-day struggles, you got readers!

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Hey Dhruv, thanks for reading! Always fun to hear from you again.

sealthedeal• 6 years ago

love it! If my two cents matter to you... I did a similar thing for a few years, and it wasnt until I went all in on one product/problem did I finally start to see some great returns.

With that said, I have a friends dad who owns like 10 different businesses and he has people manage all of them, while he sits back and collects. These are not software businesses they are more brick and mortar like long term storage, etc, but maybe you can build the same model with online businesses! :)

Good luck, and thanks for posting, really enjoy reading the content!

rickitan• 6 years ago

I see a lot of comments criticizing your path and progress. Making remarks like "why didn't you stay at Google".

I applaud your decision, effort, and perseverance. I admire your risk taking and having skin in the game. Trying to make it out on your own.

People forget the journey is not just about the money. It's about learning, growing and bringing your ideas to life. Being an artist, and expressing yourself through products.

Keep on going my friend. There's no doubt you'll get there.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading and the kind words!

I think you and I see it similarly that there's satisfaction in growing and learning even if the money part hasn't fallen into place.

cambalache8• 6 years ago

Nice words, similar words were said to me. Now I am broke and semi-unemployable. So onlookers beware.

roytang• 6 years ago

May I ask why you find yourself semi-unemployable? I'm in kind of a similar position as the OP in that I have a significant nest egg so that even if I spend a few years derping around and failing at a bunch of things, I figure that I just need to stop before that nest egg gets anywhere near dangerously low and go back to looking for freelance or consulting work, even at lower rates, should that become necessary to survive. I'm asking about your situation in case there are other pitfalls I need to be wary of.

iamlily• 6 years ago

God bless you for writing such a good post

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

oliv__• 6 years ago

FYI: on isitketo.org/cream-cheese, the link to "keto dessert recipes" is broken (it's an internal link). Looks like it's being prefixed with the domain and the url ends up having two http segments.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

Fixed! Thanks for the heads up.

let_var• 6 years ago

Michael - firstly, kudos for sticking to your solo dev plans. Hiccups are part and parcel of the game. I like your Is This Keto app. And second, keep at it!

m0zg• 6 years ago

What Got Done is basically Google's internal Snippets. I wish there was an on-prem setup to do that. The idea is basically every week you write, in free form text, what you've done, and possibly what you're planning to do, and your team mates get to view it, and subscribe to updates conveniently. If you're anything like me, you will find this valuable not only day to day, but also when the review time comes and you need to beat your chest a little. I tend to forget how much I've done.

mtlynch31• 6 years ago

I wish I'd found you when I was trying to gather enough customers to make What Got Done a business!

Yeah, I loved Snippets as well. I wrote a little ode to them last year.[0]

I wish there was an on-prem setup to do that.

What Got Done is open source now. The standard version has a dependency on Google Cloud Firestore, but I have a working branch that runs on Redis.[1] You'd need to implement a new auth solution because What Got Done depends on UserKit, which is still in closed beta, but you can still use their dummy backend (configured in What Got Done by default) which accepts "password" for any username.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/status-updates-to-nobody/

[1] https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/tree/redis-persist

gramakri• 6 years ago

Great read, thanks for writing this. One of the hardest parts of doing a bootstrapped startup is the peer pressure and the perceived opportunity cost. The numbers won't add up for a bootstrapped business for many years (I am talking upwards of 5 years even). The only thing that keeps you going is your ambition ('this is what i want to do', 'nothing else i would rather do').

The best way I have learnt to deal with this is to surround myself with people who think similar.

snambi• 6 years ago

Question: why did he leave a job to build these sites? He could have built them while continuing a full-time job.

smnplk• 6 years ago

The data for North Korea is missing.

alexellisuk2• 6 years ago

I'm also a solo developer, or at least building a Ltd company starting at one. I wrote up about my developer setup here, and thought it might be of interest.

https://blog.alexellis.io/building-a-linux-desktop-for-cloud...

Would folks like to see more posts about branching out and working for yourself? I'd consider writing-up my perspective from the UK if it was interesting to people here.

mpurham• 6 years ago

I can closely relate to this post. Often times I build and develop software that is simply not worth my time. I think one important thing that you are doing well is capturing data for revenue. I think you should also take your hourly rate and multiply it by the amount of time it is taking you and that will give you a better idea of what this is costing you to build. I've started to capture this data for myself (https://marcell.me) to get a better idea of what it is actually costing me.

My Second Year as a Solo Developer

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