Bootstrapping Calculator: Do you have enough savings to fund your business?

Love the calculator, it’s very useful. In my view it has never been easier to build a technology business than today. The public cloud makes it so you can start small or free and scale as needed and almost everything has been open sourced. All you need is the idea and the will power.

My only beef with the calculator is that I’d like to recommend another approach, that is you don’t actually need to quit your job to make, that is the end goal shouldn’t just be to quit. The costs of starting tech business have never been so low to get a an idea off the ground you can benefit from both a job and the other thing your working on. Steph Smith has a great post on this

https://blog.stephsmith.io/you-dont-need-to-quit-your-job-to-make/

I tried the calculator and actually my savings would last well over 10 years (probably more like 20-25 years even if you account for inflation).

I spend around $1.000/month and that includes a new car (paid off), rent for 2 bed-room with a garden, eating out regularly. It doesn't include extensive traveling (which I have been doing in the last couple years).

I think the two key points here:

1. Having a family is expensive. If you are considering this track, you may want to postpone having a family/kids.

2. Living in cheaper cities can save you a whole lot of money. Obviously, I would not recommend doing that with a family or if you need extensive networking. But if you want to do 3-4 years of discovery without burning a whole in your savings, then there is countless countries to pick from.

I've read your blog post. A million is a nice nest egg for bootstrapping.

Just a thought: You can generate $15k of monthly passive income directly with $300-350k investment. If the bootstrapped business fails to make money fast, there's always this option with your amount of money.

Developers often miss those obvious ways to make money because these ways aren't technically intricate.

Source: I do affiliate marketing. This are the usual ROIs.

Good luck on your journey!

edit: wrt. the downvotes - that's one of the reasons I don't want to talk about this in public. I agree that it sounds unbelievable, but most people also don't believe in $500k salaries. Many people dismiss those opportunities because they don't believe it's possible.

Nice work, I’m going to play with it a bit.

One thing I would recommend to everyone is adding a multiple to your expenses. Essentially, *

I manage my personal expenses down to the dollar and have managed seven figure budgets. One thing that always occurs is unexpected expenses. My go-to rule is assuming my expenses are going to be 25% higher than expected, per year I go out. I personally track my error between expected and actual to develop a hard number for my margin of error. However, between 25% and 50% larger than expected expenses is a good estimate to give you breathing room.

This method ensures you can be hospitalized for a week or so and it’ll kind of “be in the plan” so to speak.

Nice work. Since you can't easily pull request an excel sheet, I'll propose a change here:

After the text "If you include retirement funds, also subtract early withdrawal fees." I'd add something like "Most experts suggest not using retirement funds for anything other than retirement." or similar discouraging of that action.

(Those people who really ought to use retirement funds to bootstrap something will find a way to blow through whatever caution you put there; most people shouldn't, and I'd rather they at least see/feel the small speed bump...)