Lessons from bootstrapped companies founded by software engineers

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/lessons-from-bootstrapped-companies

by BerislavLopac • 3 years ago

99 33 3 years ago

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

GravityLab• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed the read. Is there anything like this for how companies like these marketed their products to generate interest in potential users and onboard new users?

vore• 3 years ago

  Instead of working fixed hours, I frequently spread out my work throughout the day and week. This is a distinct part of Formspree culture, that comes from how my cofounder and I prefer to work. 

  We encourage our team to choose their own hours, so if you don’t feel like working a particular afternoon, you can just take it off. On the flip side, when you feel the itch to get something done on the weekend, it’s ok to push code.

What?? Push code on the weekend??? I hope the people at Formspree enjoy being inconvenienced at totally random times for when someone breaks something on a weekend!

dudul• 3 years ago

Better to break the build on a weekend when nobody is around to be inconvenienced.

t1mmen4• 3 years ago

Weird take. Since when does “pushing code” equal “releasing to production”?

FWIW, I love this mentality for healthy, work/life-balanced teams. It works if you structure around it. I often get the itch during the weekend to do a little work, so I go for it, because I can balance my days as I see fit. Ride the wave of creativity when it arrives, go do something else — like taking a hike, or running errands — when you can’t get shit done.

wizofaus3• 3 years ago

I assumed the GP was just concerned about somebody pushing code to a shared trunk branch that happened to break a build. Though as it happens I do know of some shops that literally do have a CI/CD pipeline that's so automated such a push would result in a production update (of course such a set-up wouldn't even allow a push if it did break the build, or cause any of the steps in the pipeline to fail). But yes, I'd normally interpret "pushing code" as pushing to your own feature branch, in which case I'd wonder "is it really so unusual for devs to do this out of hours"? I've certainly done it on weekends before, but with no expectation that anyone would review/merge the changes until normal business hours.

satvikpendem2• 3 years ago

Is that with the understanding that your employer is more amenable to you taking time off during the weekdays if you do happen to spend time working on the weekends? Because many employers would want to have it both ways and not allow you to take time off the weekday just because you worked during the weekend.

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

Isn't this the penultimate goal of CI/CD? Release anything, anytime, anywhere? I'm envious of a business that trusts their process (and their employees) that much.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

Yes. Also rollback plans/systems and canary releases and things like that should be used to minimize the effect of mistakes. CI/CD cannot prevent 100% of mistakes.

xyzelement• 3 years ago

// Isn't this the penultimate goal of CI/CD

What's the ultimately goal then? :) (it took me forever to learn than penultimate means "second most" so I am passing it on!)

slavetologic• 3 years ago

This type of cynicism on hacker news is out of control

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

The culture you want is one of responsibility and ownership. If you push to production, you make sure there are some people around to help if there is an outage. You make sure there is a rollback plan etc.

is_true• 3 years ago

I do it all the time. I prefer to enjoy the world while others are working. Weekends are also a nice moment to break things, most of the people I work with wouldn't notice.

hcks• 3 years ago

Imagine having nothing better to do on your weekends than coding for a form SaaS lol

esafak• 3 years ago

The slash between CI and CD means they can be decoupled. Push whenever you want, see if it builds. See it deployed the next business day.

dave333• 3 years ago

As co-owner of a mildly profitable bootstrapped software enterprise it seems to me the common major weakness is lack of sales and marketing expertise to make it go bigger. However for many software people this is a feature not a bug.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

Yes, while more money is welcome, hiring staff beyond say 3 people is not really what a solo dev wants to do. Ideally hire no one!

benjaminwootton• 3 years ago

I don’t even think it’s expertise. Assuming you have a good and valuable product, sales and marketing is still just extremely hard.

You have to remember that 90% of the startup successes we hear about are VC funded, so can make a significant loss on sales and marketing. To fund it from cashflow makes the game even harder still.

makestuff• 3 years ago

Yeah I have some decent side projects that I think could be useful in the marketplace; however, I have no skills for the sales and marketing of it.

It seems to be common advice to bootstrap your business, but at some point you need a salesperson to get the product into the hands of users. The only exception to this is if it is something truly revolutionary like the next Google/Amazon/etc.

B2C bootstrapping seems even harder because you really need to know how to acquire users.

Guvante• 3 years ago

There are no exceptions.

Google the search engine was paid for by Google Ads past the initial period and those are certainly marketing and sales.

Amazon certainly focused on sales stuff early on. And while AWS is a technical marvel the pricing scheme of hiding costs behind outbound data costs was brilliant. Evil but brilliant.

Having a good product is the goal of Engineering and that is the bare minimum.

dinvlad• 3 years ago

For indies, the making is the marketing. They don't need separate marketing because they build 100 MVPs openly in public, with an extremely fast feedback cycle (days), and see what to focus on next. So the secret is not knowing what to build, but just building it quickly and seeing what "sticks".

braza• 3 years ago

How you deal as a co-owner with the fact that some mid-cap company can go after your product and make it a feature?

Animats• 3 years ago

Autodesk (ADSK, market cap US$45 billion, founded 1982) is a bootstrapped company founded by software engineers with their own money. Mostly mainframe UNIVAC systems programmers in their 30s. No VC funding; the IPO came well after profitability.

phonon• 3 years ago

This was the VC term sheet they rejected, for reference...it's pretty bad! :-)

https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_32.html

thenobsta• 3 years ago

"Frank Chambers chose to forgo an investment of $500,000 which, if held until the stock price hit its 1987 high, would have appreciated to more than $37 million."

Oi, hindsight is great. The '87 high was about $3.50. ADSK is sitting at $210 today or $2.2B for that 500k investment.

marcus_holmes• 3 years ago

Again, not much value without also interviewing bootstrapped founders who failed. I'll bet good money that there are plenty of founders who followed every single one of those lessons and failed because of some other reason.

Lessons from bootstrapped companies founded by software engineers

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