Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
Published in 2020, this chronicle by @patwalls details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 394 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 130 comments
Side note, but why on earth is the body text set to 35 px?!
I need to zoom my browser down to 50% (a quarter of the pixel area) just to make it readable.
This trend of gargantuan body text in blogs has been going on for a while, but this is the worst I've ever seen.
When the size of each letter is something like six times the area of letters in my computer's menu bar, something is seriously wrong.
Is it unreasonable to expect body text on the web to be roughly the same size as the body text used in my computer's menus and dialogs? Obviously those should already be set to the ideal legible size, so what is with these blogs deciding to choose mega-sized letters instead??
``` Upwork (~$1000/month): Freelancers. I especially use Upwork because I don't have to think about all the billing stuff and time tracking, etc.
``` The same for me, and they take a cut both sides (3% or 50 USD / month + 3% fees USD/EUR on my side and 5 to 10% on the freelancer side). I was wondering if there was an alternative to upwork for those who only need it for its automatic billing system + time tracking + weekly summary + screenshots of work (don't need to research for new talents).
I guess time tracking tool could enter this market
If you feel trapped in Heroku or Netlify and you have a somewhat technical background I wrote an article recently on how to escape them using a DO droplet and Nginx. $200 a month seems high to me for what it is.
https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-configuring-a-digitalocean-droplet-to-host-server-side-rendered-web-applications-382fdce32ff
@patwalls a note regarding Sendgrid. As a user of their free tier (for a freelance job) I was recently bitten by a shared IP that was put on a block list, probably due to abuse by another Sendgrid user.
Support does not migrate accounts on the shared IP pool to another IP, basically leaving me unable to send email for days.
Might be worth upgrading to their Pro plan ($90/mo). This gets you your own dedicated IP so this won't bite you in the future.
Since you use Stripe you receive directly money from customers (100K USD annually according to https://patwalls.co/2019-going-full-time-as-a-founder ) without an intermediary to handle VAT / GST
how do you handle VAT / GST globally ? Are your customers restricted to some locations ? Do you file VAT / GST return only for a few states ?