Bootstrapped, developer owned businesses, how do you grow?
I'm a developer at heart and have been bootstrapping our business for the past year.
Just from seo, we (team of 5 including me) have managed to get initial traction. However, when it comes to scaling from here - I'm kinda lost.
When I speak with other founders, I've seen almost everybody has raised millions of dollars spending on ads, pairing up with influencers, hired extensive sales teams and setup long processes. Other engineering products focused on either developers, operations, etc have tons of funding.
We are bootstraped. And it seems difficult to scale without money these days.
It just costs a lot lot more to market than I initially anticipated. We did a show HN to show this community our simple product but didn't see any interest.
Nothing is free and that's fine but nothing is really affordable either.
Things we tried - sponsoring GitHub contributors, ads (Google ads and developer based ethical ads), seo, social (not so much)
At this time, our strength is building good software but continuing to improve and build more doesn't translate into growth in revenue per se.
Money would help and raising is an option. No other way from here??
For reference - I built https://Spike.sh - a simple incident management platform (think pagerduty)
Published in 2022, this chronicle by @kaushikt details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
Your problem is product / market fit. Software tools for software folk and software tools for tech-enabled business are an entirely different ball game.
Developing for developers means focusing on the extreme end of things where you do 99% of your things right and 1% better than whomever.
Developing for business means helping them do 99% of what theyre currently doing with mixed results easier while making them dependent on your platform with that 1% piece you do to excellence.
You are advertising and developing for the wrong folks imo. How would a administrative assistant type at a nonprofit, edu center, or healthcare system look at what you have? A c-level executive w a c.s. degree but no practiced experience in actual development?
Normies want their tools to do more for them than they should because they dont know better.
Look at something like tallify and imagine where you could fit in providing executive (industry specific) solutions. Helping teams on the IT compliance/regulation side of things is just 1/2 of the picture for people already paying out the ass for stuff like saleforce they dont understand.
Bootstrap harder (some people raise from their families. Caution.),
accelerators and/or angel investor(s), perhaps local,
bigger firms like YC.