Founders share the challenges of running a tech business

enjoy how there's perspective given from the responders with their current MRR as well. as a founder of a bootstrapped tech-enabled service startup with $135k+ MRR is cash flow. Accounts Receivable is a PITA and it still hasn't been solved (even with the likes of bill.com, harvest, stripe, paypal, qbo, etc...) - i'd almost pay for a company to outsource our AR to completely to represent us on initial AR, 30-90 day AR, collections, demand letters, and ultimately lawsuits if needed. bleh.

wow, love the honesty of some of these, killer compilation<p>really liked this --&gt; &quot;From the start, I was aware that I was taking on a huge project that other companies have devoted entire teams to, but I chose to look at it as more of a mental challenge than a technical one. I knew I had the skillset to pull it off, I just had to keep myself motivated and on track.&quot;

&gt; The biggest challenge was a very naive understanding of how the modern internet economy works. The idea that good software is easy to promote is just as silly as the &quot;good software sells itself&quot; myth. I would definitely spend more time learning marketing.<p>This resonates for me as a bootstrapped founder in the early stages with my company. Cutting through the noise and getting the attention of my leads is hard work. Way harder than coding.

I’m running into these challenges right now. After my last job, I’m finally trying to turn a 10yr+ project into a product.<p>I’m currently serving a bit over 2 million requests per day for the free service I’ve run for years.<p>Now that I’m focusing on turning it into something more I’m realizing how slow it is to build a product by yourself.<p>For example, I’ve been working on transitioning to a much more scalable k8s architecture for the last few weeks. While I’ve had some experience over last few years as a developer, I’ve never had to set the whole thing up from scratch. It’s been tedious and draining but I am making progress.<p>The biggest issue is not having anyone to talk to on a peer basis.<p>In January I completely revamped the product website from being a crap page running on Launchrock to a self-hosted site with a new design and incorporating Mailgun to handle email.<p>The issue with that is I get people every day submitting their email addresses to sign up, but to date no one has clicked the confirmation link in the emails being sent to them to confirm the signup.<p>I researched this heavily before writing code and the consensus is that double opt-in is the correct way to go. So I did that, but no one is following up with the confirmation part.<p>Last week I found a minor bug that was preventing confirmation signups and I fixed it asap and manually sent emails to the 3 people that I would manually add them to the confirm list and remove them if they wanted. But I’ve had more signups after that who also did not complete the signup process. I’ve tested the flow heavily and it works.<p>But since I don’t really have a coworker environment anymore, I don’t have anyone to do peer review right now. Very frustrating.<p>I guess overall I’m used to building services very rapidly but being responsible for the entire thing is someone time consuming. I’m still adjusting to the process.

With respect to each company, what do the numbers in the parentheses mean? Is that profit, revenue or something else per month?

Is IndieHackers completely fucked for anyone else right now in Chrome 80.0.3987.106 on MacOS? The js and CSS static assets are getting blocked for some reason, even after disabling all my extensions and refreshing the page in incognito and without cached assets.<p>edit: Works fine in Safari, but the same thing is happening in Firefox.

I&#x27;d add the struggle &#x2F; time it took to really deeply comprehend what &#x27;build, measure, learn&#x27; means in practice. And realizing that there is a more scientific approach to building good products. For example by using Hypothesis-Driven Development [1]. We wasted lots of time (and money) at the beginning with our own stupid assumptions.<p>[1] Hypothesis-driven development (HDD) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teamsuccess.io&#x2F;hdd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teamsuccess.io&#x2F;hdd</a>

Wow, a coffee company is now a tech company. I didn&#x27;t bother with the rest of the list.

All of those could be applied to non-tech businesses with very minor modifications.

The site is not working&#x2F;rendering properly in both Chrome and Firefox.

love the honesty

This site is top notch, thumbs up

Never trust anything that comes from indiehackers, this is a community of professional indie astroturfers and manipulators of everything from renaming the same product and launching it every couple months on ProductHunt and buying upvotes, to baiting HNers with &quot;How I made $X by doing Y&quot;. It&#x27;s a pump and dump scheme on sub-million dollar levels.