codegeek

The moment I see scroll-jacking on a website, I bounce. I don't even think twice.

It is bad because you are deciding something for ME, the user. That's bad UX because I want to decide my own experience and scroll jacking is the worst thing you can do for UX. Stop doing this.

I run a bootstrapped B2B SAAS (12+ years now) and I have seen it all, made all the mistakes possible and had enough wins over the years to keep going.

The first thing to understand is that there is no one size fits all. You have to start somewhere keep iterating. Ok you probably already knew that but wanted to preface anyway to set expectations.

Overall, You have to start with the WHO. Who is this product really for ? If your answer is generic or covers various horizontal segments, you are going to struggle a lot more. NO one builds a product that covers various horizontal segments on Day 1 and succeeds generally. You have to go really really niche and specific. The problem is that this scares new founders who think that if they don't think or aim big (translates to trying to sell to too many segments), they will fail or not make enough money to make it a real business. This is totally false thinking. Take it from a guy who has done it for 12+ years and still fails.

Once you have defined the "Who" (note that this may change with time but you have to start somewhere based on your best assumption as of now), you should have it written down very specifically. For example, don't say "I have a CRM". Instead say "I have a CRM that helps B2B SAAS founders in this specific way".

Also, 100 customers is too ambitious and unrealistic in early days. Start with getting first 5-10. Get them in first. Condition your mind that it is ok to have a really small set of customers who hopefully love your product. With that, you now have to go hunting also known as "outbound" in salesy terms. Sorry no magic wand here if you were expecting a different answer. You of course can do the usual like submitting to directories,writing blog posts etc and you must do all those as well on the side as everything adds up.But the most important thing is manually reaching out to prospective customers.

So now the question is: how do I find those prospective customers ? This will again depend on the "WHO". But more importantly, where do they typically hang out ? I don't mean necessarily in person (that of course helps a lot) but also online.

One tip is to look for customers in your niche already who may be using a competitor product. Websites like builtwith etc can give you a decent list of those customers (not 1005 accurate but they are reasonably accurate).

Bottomline is that you have to do manual outreach every day (minimum to 50 people if you can). Don't sell them the product. Start asking them for a conversation.

All the best. Happy to help if you have more questions.

what is your objective ? Are you trying to learn how startups work and hence wanting to work at one ? Or are you trying to work at a startup and hopefully build wealth with equity (very unlikely).

Then, The question is : how much equity vs salary ? Lot of startups have roles like "founding engineer" etc but the equity won't be more than 1%-3% (or even less). Granted, some of these are funded and offer almost market salary.

Or are you looking for significant equity (say > 5-10% or more) ? In that case, you will almost be like a co-founder and that changes the game and requirements.

They are not just some random 3 have decades of real db experience behind them. They also just got funded which gives them the ability to expand and stay longer in the game.

"Why Us" => "I ran Postgres at Instacart, where we scaled the company 5x in April of 2020. The biggest problem we had was making Postgres serve 100,000s of grocery delivery orders per minute"

Couldn't be a better why us :)

Not the same comparison. Alphabet/Google has a solid 25+ year history. It's not 100% AI or not. It's about a Healthy and proven business model.

Agreed. S&P 500 needs to be seriously gatekeeped. We need safer boring companies in there thatbhave been peoven over a long period of time. Nothing against these companies but they are not proven and ready for S&P 500.

To be fair, it is done exactly to protect against accounts like yours. HN quality needs to be gate-keeped and new accounts absolutely need to be throttled. You may have meant well and be genuine but the bar is high now especially due to AI bots.

Sure but thats a very cynical way of seeing things. A company cannot exist without making a profit but there are plenty of companies that try and take care of their people. At least the ones that don't have investor or board pressure (smaller private companies).

Because of these shitty corporate companies that don't give a shit about their employees, the well is now poisoned for companies that do care especially smaller ones. Employees don't want to give their best anymore because they are burnt elsewhere and they become unemployable at smaller companies. It is a sad state of affairs.

I wish all platforms did this specially reddit, twitter etc. I don't use AI to write comments on any platform and always wondering if I am replying to an AI comment.

In my experience, any meetup > 10 people becomes useless because you cannot really make meaningful connections and large meetups usually have a fixed agenda where everyone is out there selling their own stuff.

I now will not attend a meetup unless it is extremely small group (<10 people). Those are hard to sustain though.

Exactly. I hired someone who was a good developer but he was charging hourly and extremely slow for what we needed. I am a software engineer (and a founder) myself so I get what it takes to write good code but I am no longer waiting for a dev to turn something around in 20 hours when I can use LLM to write it in 1 or less.

Going forward, I am no longer hiring hourly rate devs. Either fixed rate project or full time as needed. No hourly.

This is bad. Even their own website is down at railway.com. Looks like total dependency on google cloud. Surprising for a company of their scale with all this VC money.

I know a solo founder who got SOC2 certified. He is literally the only person running the product/company and is SOC2 certified. I found that hilarious to be honest. But he is trying to play the "win enterprise deals" game but not sure how that helps when you are literally 1 person.

It depends on your target market. If you only sell to enterprise/large companies, you may need SOC2 sooner than later. If you sell to SMBs or startups, this advice works (I sell in this space mostly).

I will add a few more things to this:

- Document your data and security and share that with customers instead. You can say "We don't have SOC2 at the moment but here is all our security and data policy". It works 99% of the time for me.

- Very few companies truly have policy to reject a vendor if they don't have SOC2. Those are usually large enterprise or companies in sensitive areas such as Finance/Healthcare etc. Even then, SOC2 can be waived if you can demonstrate everything else.

Disclaimer: I run a bootstrapped SAAS with low 7 figures in ARR and even though we have ISO27001, we don't have SOC2 yet. However, we take our security/data etc very seriously and have tons of documentation and best practices that we always shafre with a customer who asks. Honestly, we will get SOC2 at some point just for the checklist as I don't really care too much about them otherwise.

I love Go. But I prefer .NET for web development that also compiles to a binary and has a great ecosystem of libraries and packages. Go is great if standard library works (and it can for many cases) but when you need to start looking into non standard libraries, Go can hit limitations.

For example, to build a full production web application with database in Go, there is no great out of the box migration tool. There are some good 3rd party libraries of course but compared to something like EFCore in .NET, they don't come as close.

For me, it is now .NET and then Go. Of course, I use Go when just doing a lot of non web stuff as well.

I hear you. I also don't buy clothes unless really really needed. But I am hoping that if I do buy a Robot like that, it will do other things as well and not just folding laundry :)

Some companies are building Robots for this already. for example https://figure.ai

I probably used the wrong word. I meant more about managing volume property so we dont have data loss, backups, replication etc etc. I assume going managed is easier if you can pay for it (e.g. RDS)

Do you prefer self hosting DB with container OR using a managed service liek RDS ? I guess both can work depending on your level of comfort and even though I am a big self host guy, db hosting is something that makes me nervous and I end up just leaving it to RDS etc.

Yes thats why I also added SOC 2. I have gone through an ISO audit for our company so I know the process. The point is that these certifications are mostly a joke but you have to play the game to win "enterprise" deals.

Really liked reading your blog. Bookmarked for future. One question: for databases, do you recommend using containers as well because in development, I love the ease of using databases in docker compose as well but I always worry about production in terms of resilience. Thoughts ?

"There was no meaningful organization scoping, no tenant isolation, and no permission check preventing a low-privilege user from accessing other organizations' records."

Let me guess though. They are SOC2 and ISO compliant right ?

sloth, cockroach, duck. Is there some sort of naming pact b/w these database products ?

Yea also there are places like r/overemployed where they actively encourage how to cheat your employer by working multiple remote full time jobs.

The trust is broken and even though there are plenty of great wfh people, employers wre not having it anymore.

"It is more like 90% less quality."

Depends on who is doing the work. If you are a junior who doesn't have any fundamentals and/or started career after 2022+, I wouldn't trust the AI code. However, if you were already a senior/experienced architect, AI is superpower.

Yes, first you have to accept that it doesn't take 7 months but rather years. It is really really really hard to build a business with real revenue (did I stress on the word really?). It is even harder to build it solo.

Most of the solo success story you hear either had expertise in their fields OR built something to truly solve their own problem first and then expanded to others and it usually takes 18-24 months or higher to hit some sort of escape velocity. Most people think that magic will happen in 2-3 months and then give up after that and you have to go longer than that. The risk is high but that is what it takes.

Now with AI and vibe coding, more products will be built but the hard part remains: how to find customers, sustainably support them and keep growing. There is no shortcut to it.

My suggestion:

1. Pick a very niche problem that you have some familiarity or can relate to. You don't need to be an expert in it but you have to feel that you truly want to work on it to make a sustainably living.

2. Build an MVP in 30 days max. With AI, this shouldn't be an issue. If going beyond 30 days, you are doing too much coding.

3. You have to find where your potential customers are and you have to do it MANUALLY. no automation bs. no ads (you don't have money and unsure if you know your target audience yet). So right now, you are trying to figure out who your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) may be. You don't know yet. This can take months or even a couple of years (the scary part). But you have to do this manually. Go on Linkedin or use services like builtwith etc to figure out who may be using a similar product or a potential competitor. Then you have to email/call them directly.

4. You must have a social media profile. Look at the successful solo ones. they talk about EVERYGTHING online, I mean EVERYTHING. That helps build a personal brand which helps as a solo business owner.

5. Content Marketing. Sorry you are the marketer for your company. You cannot hire someone else to do that for you. YOU have to write the blog posts, YOU have to post the social media posts, YOU have to make those videos. And you gotta do it all if you want any chance of succeeding in 2026.

6. You have to go hard and specific for at least 12-18 months. This is the hardest part. Most people want quick results and if they don't see anything in 3-4 months, they give up. The goal is to see if you got at least 1 customer in say first 3 months. If you did, keep going and get the 2nd then 3rd. Note that your first few customers MAY NOT be your ICP but they will teach you what you need to know to build a successful product.

7. One tip: Being completely solo is overrated. I am not talking about co-founders. I am not talking about being solo founder but with a small team. That gives you a lot more mileage than just being by yourself. Yes it is hard to build a small team especially early on with no money but don't overthink the solo stuff and find 2-3 google people to work with if you can. Not necessarily as founders but freelancers/employees who can work in a small setup.

Source: Even though I am not solo by myself, I am a solo bootstrapped founder with a very small team that built a reasonably successful B2B SAAS business doing single digit million ARR. Not impressive by an VC standard but has given me everything for 10+ years and I love it.