Bootstrapping a $30k profit/month company from our internship earnings (Part 3)
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @n9com details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $30k.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 153 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 36 comments
There's a real nugget of wisdom in listening to angry customers. So many customers will say something nice to not offend.
When someones passionate and says you've got it wrong and here's where - you should pay careful attention. Perhaps 20% are trolls you can safely ignore but the rest will tell you what people were thinking but were too polite to say.
So many fellow entrepreneurs tell me breathlessly about this person or other who liked their startup. I always ask did anyone say they didn't like it? Usually they say sure but I just ignored them - big mistake.
Thanks for sharing as well. Seems that you had a three pronged approach to success:
1. Create something that has a proven market, and do it well (Talking Tom Cat clone) 2. Viral marketing (Youtube videos and Facebook sharing) As well as cross app promotion 3. Create more apps with the same formula and framework already set up.
This should work for a lot of other devs as well, although they may not see the same level of success as these gentlemen.
I'm really enjoying these articles. Thanks for sharing.
Since iAd eCPM has dropped from 15$ to around 1-3$, from my personal experience, have you found that your revenues have also dropped 5-15x? Or has the volume, or other monetization techniques helped recoup the difference? In other words, did you find that period to be the peak income period for the Talking Gremlin app?
As a fellow indie dev with some success in the app store, I'm always happy to hear of other indies become successful. I think the App Store has really flipped traditional software sales on its head and made it possible for the likes of you and I to compete head to head with billion dollar companies. It's quite remarkable and I hope this is just the beginning.
Anirudh/Rishi,
Great story, I'm a long time lurker but created an account to comment/question. From what I could gather in the 3 posts, it looks like neither of you guys were technical at the very beginning. Did one of you eventually learn to code/design, or is that portion still hired out? What qualities did you look for when hiring coders?
Thanks!