Ask HN: What is the worst part of bootstrapping your side project?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2020 where @samcgraw convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 10 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 7 comments
Not a side project for us[0], but lack of community beforehand/notoriety. Some companies with backing or from an accelerator/incubator are built around what is basically one feature in our product, but they have more engagement/notoriety because they're branded. It's interesting to see that dynamic, especially given the fact they don't have a background in the problem/domain and we think the problem they're solving is not what actually matters.
However: given the nature of our activity [we build ML products for enterprise] and have been profitable for the get go with this activity [no need for VC money], we're building the product for ourselves.
We made a decision to develop that platform as if it were a normal SaaS to put positive pressure on ourselves and round off rough edges. For example, early users of the platform were important in that they helped us focus on common/irritating quirks we were aware of, and expose problems we were not aware of.
One issue we were aware of is the "tragedy of the commons". Users were training models and competing with each other for resources. We then quickly made users able to schedule notebooks because we were hitting that problem often and it was really annoying.
Another problem is troubleshooting code for users. We added near real-time notebook editing. Around thirty early users were students of one of our colleagues who used our platform in their machine learning final year project, and given COVID and financial resources, being unable to set up compute environments, we onboarded them and fixed whatever they were complaining about.
- [0]: https://iko.ai
Lack of time. Assuming you work a day job to pay the bills, there's a fixed amount of time left over to work on the side project. And that limits how much "stuff" you can get done in a given calendar period.
And that can be very frustrating mentally, when you see other people working on the same (or similar) ideas, and they can move faster because they're funded and have full-time people working on it.
OTOH, there's another sense in which you can move faster than competitors, in that you have less inertia involved. If it's just you (or you and maybe one or two other people) you can potentially switch gears and change directions much more quickly than larger companies with more people involved.
I am developing QuestionOf. I had to create a new parse of markdown (.md) and it was difficult to think in each detail.
Sample: https://questionsof.com/enem/to-protect-you-and-your-fellow-passengers-the-transportation-security-administration-tsa-is-required-by-law-to
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alexandregiordanelli/enem/master/149/149.md
Slow iteration speed and pace of learning, I think. If I were going full-time on my side projects I'd make mistakes (and learn from them) much more quickly.
As it is, any mistake takes a while to be realized and cuts into my momentum and energy significantly, because I get more emotionally attached the longer I stay with a project.
Definitely marketing what I built. It's hard to get the word out.