Bootstrapping a $30k profit/month company from our internship earnings (Part 2)
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @n9com details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $30k.
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 Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 166 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 17 comments
"[..] we were really feeling the pressure to start making money, particularly since all our friends had found jobs and were earning a good income. The social stigma surrounding being 'unemployed' really sucked [...]"
Their motivation to make money was social? Their friends had jobs so they felt inadequate?
I've never heard that one before.
I guess it's been a LONG time since I first forged out on my own, but every year I take on new risks and search for new opportunities, and never do I think, gosh, what will my friends think?
I'm not sure if this is somewhat off topic, or if I'm asking if this is a common way of thinking, but I'm a little shocked that one entrepreneur's drive to make money was only because their friends were earning good salaries.
The story with Barclays † is the kind of pernicious theft of IP that unfortunately small businesses always face when dealing with big businesses, and is what always makes me laugh when patents are suggested as a good way to encourage innovation. A patent is worthless if you can't sue, and a small company can't sue a big one.
Congratulations to the team for remaining philosophical though, and winning on quality and timing. They truly are real artists.
† They were negotiating to sponsor the app, the developers sent them a roadmap of their plans, all went quiet and then, a year later, Barclays released their own app.
``` Barclays ... develop[ed] their own app ... even went so far as to add ‘fiplab’ as a keyword in their app description!
``` Can you takedown the Barclays version of the app claiming some sort of infringement on the name "Fiplab"? I frequently hear about that happening to little devs. It would be a nice turnabout to have it happen to someone big. (Bonus points if they don't get told why they got yanked... as seems to happen so often to other small developers)
In the last thread someone mentioned they disliked posts being broken up into parts. I'd like to see a Part 1 of X or Part 2 of X so I know when the series is complete and I can read them all at that point.
Thanks for writing out Part 2 this quickly though now I want to read Part 3 where what I expected to read in Part 2 is presumed to be after discovering I was on a multi-part post when I read Part 1 and was disappointed I had to wait to finish the story.
The Sponsors of the Dublin bike scheme (JC Decaux) were worse than Barcleys, shutting down an independent app in 2009: http://www.lecraic.com/2009/09/22/dublin-bikes-app-pulled-due-to-threat-of-legal-action-by-jc-decaux/