Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch 

&quot;Instead of coding, the vast majority of your time is going to be spent marketing, selling, optimizing funnels, and providing support. Those are the things that get (and keep) customers. Those are the things that you do when you run a business. Not writing code.&quot;<p>This is the best part of this article for me. A lot of solo bootstrappers don&#x27;t get it. They struggle. But the fact is that you have to market and sell. Talk to customers and do the shittiest but most important thing: Support. No matter how much automation you create, clients will send you emails and say &quot;I cannot do anything. please help&quot; before even explaining what exactly is broken.<p>There is a lot of dirty work you have to do every day as a bootstrapper and you get no relief from it. You can surely add team members or &quot;outsource&quot; some of it, but you can never outsource talking to clients (both pre sales and post).

Hey everyone! Clifford here, the author of the article. Just thought I&#x27;d jump in and say thanks to everyone for all the awesome feedback - you&#x27;ve all seriously made my day (and probably even year for that matter)!

<i>&gt; Some of it may seem simple. Don’t be fooled. There is complexity in simple things.</i><p>I&#x27;ve interviewed 80+ founders (mostly bootstrapped) for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;IndieHackers.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;IndieHackers.com</a>, and people sometimes come away from reading an interview thinking, &quot;Well that person had it easy.&quot; We tend to underestimate the importance of the things we don&#x27;t -- the part of the iceberg that&#x27;s beneath the surface. In truth, the amount of work people are doing behind the scenes is often of staggering importance.<p>For example, Jason Grishkoff ran his popular music blog Indie Shuffle for 7 years before spinning off a successful SaaS app: SubmitHub. It&#x27;s easy to look at that and conclude that he had it easy because of his blog. But Jason spent a grueling 4 months sending 1000 hand-crafted emails to his target customers in order to get SubmitHub off the ground. That&#x27;s neither an easy nor an obvious path to take.<p>I see lots of people quit after a few weeks&#x2F;months of not finding a magic bullet, so it&#x27;s important to realize that there is no magic bullet for most companies.

&gt; If you want to feel good about yourself, go listen to one of the startup gurus out there that will be more than happy to spoon feed you some entreporn.<p>I love it. Hope this stays on the front page for a while. It&#x27;s both motivating as well as demotivating; that&#x27;s how you know it&#x27;s for real :)<p>Props to the author, fantastic read and echoes my startup experiences to a tee!

In Part 3 of the series[0] he hits home pretty hard. Often when I have an idea for something I also take that &quot;opportunity&quot; to learn something new or interesting, something I don&#x27;t do at my day job<p>&gt; Use Java&#x2F;.NET&#x2F;PHP&#x2F;Rails&#x2F;Perl&#x2F;VB in your day job? Then Java&#x2F;.NET&#x2F;PHP&#x2F;Rails&#x2F;Perl&#x2F;VB it is.<p>&gt; I don’t care if you don’t know ASP.NET MVC and only know WebForms. Just use WebForms. Does that suck? Yes, it does. But do it anyways.<p>&gt; Learn something else once you’re making money and you can afford to pay yourself the time to learn something else.<p>&gt; I once spent three months learning production-grade Scala for a project I thought it would be awesome for. That project never got off the ground, and now I make $0.00 a year from having learned Scala.<p>...<p>&gt; Take a lesson. Use whatever you know.<p>&gt; The same thing goes for architectural concerns.<p>&gt; Microservices? STOP.<p>&gt; Crazy ass front-end stuff with ReactJS or Angular2 with TypeScript? STOP.<p>&gt; How about some hot new NoSQL platform? STOP.<p>&gt; What about going cloud with AWS or Heroku? STOP.<p>I&#x27;ve learned a lot, made little, and most of my extracurricular activities&#x2F;skills have basically been funneled back into my day job.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-fun-and-profit-part-3-of-the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-be2b00f697c9#.cx9jfkf1d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-fun-...</a>

So much truth in this series. A lot of what he talks about I can back up with my own experience building and running SaaS apps. &quot;I want you to understand first hand that building a SaaS startup is mostly a marketing optimization problem — not something that you can just code your way out of.&quot;<p>Part 2 &amp; 3 can be found here<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@cliffordoravec&#x2F;the-no-bs-approach-to-building-your-saas-startups-launch-list-part-2-of-the-epic-guide-to-8cc371be772c#.ruedms8fs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@cliffordoravec&#x2F;the-no-bs-approach-to-bui...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-fun-and-profit-part-3-of-the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-be2b00f697c9#.umcnekiie" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-fun-...</a>

I especially appreciated this:<p>&quot;Think of building your SaaS app like a game of chess. You want to win the game with the least number of moves possible, but you have to think about how each of your moves potentially affects the overall game (and your chances of winning).&quot;<p>The analogy is even better with a one-person SaaS startup because you really can only make one move at a time (you can only do one thing at a time). The value in this series of articles is to get you to think strategically about those early moves and not to waste too much time thinking about the moves in the future that you currently have no visibility into.

The whole series is painfully accurate; glad to see someone telling it like it is.<p>That aside, article is actually not as anti-establishment as the author makes out -- unless your source of prevailing wisdom is from click-baity 4 Hour Work Weak style articles. But I doubt any serious founder puts any stock in that stuff. There&#x27;s a lot of valuable info to be learned from high quality sources like Steve Blank&#x27;s articles, or even a good MBA entrepreneurship class.

&gt; This might be going a little too far, but at the same time it’s probably not going far enough: Code is the least important thing about a SaaS business.<p>This is true about software businesses in general, not just SaaS businesses. Arguably more so for enterprise products where all that matters is smiling faces.<p>None of your customers care about your beautiful build-test-CI-deploy pipeline and unless it&#x27;s actually saving you time to add new features[1] it&#x27;s not worth it.<p>[1]: <i>Shocking twist: It does save time!</i>

&quot;Start Small, Stay Small&quot; is a great book that really goes into detail about this. Highly recommend it!<p>(No affiliation, just really like it)

Good article on the dangers of starting a business without actually knowing anything about how to do business. I&#x27;ve been reading &quot;The E-Myth Revisited&quot; and it&#x27;s been really incredibly helpful in showing all the common pitfalls that folks fall into when trying to start up their own business, usually using the same logic of &quot;These jokers don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing, I&#x27;m gonna start my own thing and do it the RIGHT way!&quot;<p>Highly recommend everyone check it out before starting a new business. I&#x27;ve been helping my father with his own small business, which is a bit of a total mess. Some of the advice in this book has been incredibly illuminating, regarding why so many small businesses are structured to fail, rather than aiming for success from day 1. Between that and a book like &quot;The Personal MBA&quot;, I think that would be a solid background before getting anything off the ground.<p>I don&#x27;t work for any of these folks or the authors, they&#x27;ve just made a big positive impact in the way I think about business.

&#x27;Startups for the Rest of Us&#x27; seem like a decent podcast in that area.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startupsfortherestofus.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startupsfortherestofus.com</a>

Most of your &quot;heck yes&quot; people will disappear or forget anything about having that conversation within a few days as well.<p>Also, discount anyone who has any reason to please you. Their responses are often biased and not helpful towards validation.

I chuckle as I read these comments. Seems like you guys just needed a Marketing Monkey! ;) I could replace the word &quot;marketer&quot; and insert &quot;developer&quot; and that would be my experience. I&#x27;ve been bootstrapping a startup and thought it would be easy to hire a developer - a code monkey - who could knock out some code. But I ran into a few BSers who took me for quite a bit of money - hard learned lessons. More than anything, I want to find a co-founder with complementary skills and who shares the same vision and passion. But then, if this was so easy, everyone could and would do it. Therein lies the rub. I see many amazing ideas generated from developers that fail due to a lack of skilled Business Monkeys. And, likewise, until I found a few good devs, I was not able to get my idea to the market. But now that we got our SaaS startup to market, I concur with the other comments here about how a majority of time is spent with customers, engaging in support functions. It sucks, but it&#x27;s very instructive. Those interactions add value to our business and make the product stronger. Keep up the great work and don&#x27;t give up the fight. Success won&#x27;t come quickly, but it will come to those who are persistent and who persevere.

Hey Clifford,<p>I just read your blog posts regarding real SaaS experience. I&#x27;m a fellow side project sole founder bootstrapper. I launched linkpeek.com 4 years ago to Hacker news and earned the number 1 position and had exactly 0 sign ups. The struggle is real.<p>I&#x27;m sort of intrigued about tamboo, and I want to see what I would get if I signed up. But the urgency of the 24 hours makes me afraid to sign up when I don&#x27;t have downtime to tinker with your tool.<p>What you should do for tamboo:<p><pre><code> * create a couple quick animated gifs of your UI and recordings. Put them on your homepage &#x2F; landing page. * create a couple youtube videos showing what the recordings look like, a prime example would be the video which helped you debug the sign up flow and then a follow up with the fix! </code></pre> I have some example UI&#x2F;UX gifs on remarkbox.com and I used licecap on the mac, but there are linux alternatives.<p>PS: you should remove this part - it smells like bullshit -<p>&quot;That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m giving you a free 24-hour pass to use Tamboo on your website - but only if you try it out today.&quot;<p>PSS:<p>Your contact form is busted and won&#x27;t post, and it takes like 1m for it to reply that &quot;something went wrong. please try again.&quot;

This article is spot on and just so timely for me. I just signed up for adwords after finding it tough to reach my target customer segment on FB. Never under-estimate the challenge of reaching your target market and convincing them to buy.

<i>I’ll get to spend all of my time writing code that I could finally be proud of. I’ll get to code things the right way — not the jank ass way these ass clowns do things. I’ll have a build server for continuous integration and have automated unit tests for everything and I’ll use that cool new framework I just saw the other day on HackerNews</i><p>You caught me.

This is very similar to what Jonathan Blow is telling about programming games as Independent devs <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM</a>

This is a good read, but I&#x27;m a bit concerned by his product Tamboo[1], which lets site owners track exactly what their users do on their sites. I was looking at competitors and found Smartlook[2], whose website asks &quot;Is this super-awesome service even legal?&quot; A better question might be, &quot;is it ethical?&quot; and generally when you&#x27;re asking is it legal the answer to <i>that</i> question is no.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gettamboo.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gettamboo.com&#x2F;</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smartlook.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smartlook.com&#x2F;</a>

Right in the beginning:<p><i>The stone cold truth of the matter is that most of the people pandering this advice are only doing so to build up their “guru” status ... They do this so that look up to them. They do this so that you talk about them (getting you to help them grow their audience). They do this so that you’ll feel like you’re somehow less than they are ... I promise I’m not going to do any of that to you.</i><p>Really? Just a couple of paragraphs down:<p><i>First off, you should know that your idea probably sucks ... It doesn’t matter what you think ... we’re not going to refer to your precious game-changing idea as “your idea” anymore. We’re going to refer to it as “your guess”.</i><p>Ok, so first he&#x27;s telling you that he&#x27;s the honest guy who would never bullshit you and really would never try to make you feel less than him. Then goes on to do exactly that.<p>To me that&#x27;s an immediate red flag. I don&#x27;t know the author personally and can&#x27;t tell what his intentions were when he wrote his essay but I&#x27;ve had the past displeasure of dealing with sociopaths who showed the same kind of behavior.<p>(Edited for less drastic choice of words)

This is sharp written, voice of truth and reality. I know of on my own, running Reblaze for the last five and a half years.<p>Almost nothing comes in easily, and you end up every day with more open tasks that you have started with.<p>Teams, Dev, Ops, BusDev, partners, legal, HR, taxes, you name it. And all in all, you got to keep the product and production in their path, keep your customers and employees extremely happy, and the cash flow!<p>As we all know:<p><pre><code> Cash-flow does not matter, until it is matters, and when it is matter, it is the only thing that matters! </code></pre> I guess we could have take Reblaze to the VC path at start, but hey! Would they ever let keep the product the way we believe it should [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reblaze.com&#x2F;using-the-cloud-for-web-security-what-you-need-to-know&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reblaze.com&#x2F;using-the-cloud-for-web-security-wha...</a>

What a refreshing read, it came across as authentic advice with actionable points - I feel that the &quot;value your own time above all else&quot; and &quot;prepare to be wrong&quot; are all too often missed in the more glitzy &amp; glamorous &quot;I make n$$$ per month&quot; posts.

If you like that, then check out his Expect Everything to be Unexpected write-up. My favorite reality check. I posted it in its own thread:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13217086" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13217086</a>

Thanks for inspiration, I&#x27;m in! Will try and put something out by 8 Jan!!

There&#x27;s lots of good stuff here, but while your code might not be the most important aspect of your SaaS startup, your code can&#x27;t be garbage either. I&#x27;ve seen lots of startups and early-stage businesses rot from the inside because of bad coding practices and not being able to deliver features in a timely manner or what they do deliver is broken and buggy, driving customers away.<p>If you can&#x27;t deliver the features your customers need because of shit code, that really does matter.

His &quot;interlude&quot; article on the same topic is epic:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@cliffordoravec&#x2F;expect-everything-to-be-unexpected-883642c0d7c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@cliffordoravec&#x2F;expect-everything-to-be-u...</a>

I agree with almost everything except advertising on FB and Twitter. I have worked at several startups that had ZERO return on thousands of advertising on FB. Our Google ads cost more but had an actual return. There is a reason that they cost more.

Just curious, how many new visitors&#x2F;sign-ups author received for his service using this content marketing? ;-) (Totally no offence.)

Nice write-up! Note to the author: Your website is really slow! Try to use live text instead of images, also use progressive images.

Shameless plug, I want to share an online course I&#x27;ll be teaching mid-Jan 2017: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiradikusuma.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiradikusuma.com&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s more like &quot;an opinionated step-by-step guide to bootstrapping a startup, so i can use it myself&quot;, with &quot;study case&quot; of actually building one (as the course progresses).

This is a really good read for anyone interested in starting a business or side gig.

And <i>this is why</i>, mom and dad, I don&#x27;t start a company just because I know how to code. None of this stuff interests me.

If you&#x27;re interested in bootstrapped SaaS writing, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;startingandsustaining.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;startingandsustaining.com&#x2F;</a> from Garrett Dimon is really good as well.

I feel like a legitimate &quot;disruption&quot; of SaaS would be a company that has an easily adaptable, well tested, and smartly engineered code base...