Seems to be a lot of questions about how bootstrapped startups handle customer support.
I'm the cofounder of Eureka Surveys. We're bootstrapped, profitable, and just crossed 1M+ users. We've had an amazing experience hiring customer support in the Philippines. I have a thread about it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/t0mstah/status/1356296043009253382
The tl;dr is that you can hire cheap ($3.50/hr), high quality virtual assistants from the Philippines to handle customer support for you, all from day one. Having CS has really made a difference for us in our business and is one of our main differentiators as we've scaled up the CS team. DM me on Twitter and I can connect you to some excellent VAs looking for jobs!
I’ve been to the Philippines a couple times (out of my own curiosity; origin = USA), and let me tell you, customer service there is HUGE.
From an American perspective, a couple key points to know are 1. Filipinos are among the nicest people in the world, cultural-wise, and 2. English is taught starting in most elementary schools there.
But wait, there’s more!
From the Filipino perspective, you get to help enable a new means of living income in what is a competitive and resourced-limited economy. To add perspective, while it’s not in all locations, it’s not uncommon to see homeless children wandering hopelessly.
Can connect y'all directly with our source in the Philippines if you DM me on Twitter!
Better to go straight to the source in my opinion, rather than using something like Fiverr. Going direct is cheaper, allows you to interview around a bit more easily, and helps build a more direct, long-term connection with the VA as an employer instead of as a contractor.
What do you propose? Don't hire from cheap places or pay them the same rate as expensive places? If companies pays the same as expensive places, why would they hire from cheaper places?
See I'm actually interested in a good-faith discussion of this topic, not a screaming match. Does anyone who isn't going to scream have something to say about whether this is actually an exploitative practice?
We currently have a situation (we use cheaper labor in developing countries to make stuff more cheaply). Some take issue with this for various reasons like exploitation, depriving local labor force of work etc. I genuinely would like to hear some viable alternatives.
The common response is "just pay them more". But that doesn't work in most situations. So what do we do?
Hmm, interesting. I wonder if you could get creative with employment benefits Of course, if you're not actively applying geopolitical pressure to keep their labor cheap, and it's a mutually consentual agreement, maybe we can just say "it's not exploitative".
That certainly would be great, but is it realistic?
Manufacturing for example, is heavily outsourced to cheaper locations. We can certainly have all the tshirts we buy in the US made in the US. Hire locally, create jobs, pay a thriving wage etc.
Then the tshirts will cost more. You might be ok with that, but will the rest of the population? Or will they opt to buy the $10 tshirts made in China? Do we impose heavy duties on anything imported, so the domestic products are price competitive? What about export markets? Will Europe buy our $50 tshirts over the $10 Chinese made tshirts?
Paying local workers a thriving wage would be great, and we certainly do it for many sectors (tech for example). I just don't know if it's workable for a lot of things.
- Pay your local workers livable wages and dont fuck the local population. Where are most of the customers located?
- If you want to hire foreign workers pay them the same or a substantial fraction of your local workers. If they are good their nationality should not matter.
- Hire and pay directly not through intermediates, dont wash your hands off from all the regulations you need to comply with.
Here we have a company which is effectively paying 10-20% of what a local worker would get (Net Salaries+Taxes+Compliance Requirements,etc). Are they going to charge for their product 10% of the US price in the Philippines?
Many companies want the "good things" about globalization: Access to cheap, unregulated workforce, free-flow of capitals, lack of responsibility for any externality created (are they contributing to social security?) but complain about the other side: worldwide liability, open borders, different regulations.
How much is a substantial fraction and who determines that? Is it a simple fraction or does it depend on the market and competitive landscape? Is it something governments should regulate or should consumers vote with their wallets?
Companies should adhere to regulations though, no arguments there.
> How much is a substantial fraction and who determines that
I determine that and I say +80% , you dont get weasel out of this with useless semantic distinctions.
> Is it a simple fraction
As oppose to a "complex" one?
> Is it something governments should regulate or should consumers vote with their wallets?
The company owners should be ethical enough to pay that.
Do you use this kind of sophistry to justify your compensation or what you charge for your product or service? I highly suspect that is not the case. Easy peasy to play Aristotle when it is about poor working-people living money.
Do you not buy anything made overseas that pays workers less than 80% of some us based rate? You don’t own an iPhone I assume? You don’t own anything with an intel in it?
If you have to pay 80% of the local wages it's not worth outsourcing and the Philippine economy loses out. Additionally it would completely mess up the Philippine economy. Suddenly people would rather work in a call centre than, for example, become a doctor because the salaries would be high and barrier to entry low.
We do try and pay above market rate and provide benefits to our VAs. In general, our philosophy is to treat them like long-term employees, rather than as short-term contractors.
We have had 0% attrition rate and have been told by our VAs that working for us has been the best job they've ever had!
Many of the customers of my B2B SaaS are the type of company from the article.
We're small enough that I check out the website of every new company. I continue to be amazed at the sheer breadth of small-ish, profitable companies, often bootstrapped, that I would normally never encounter.
Also, a shameless plug for my podcast for people running bootstrapped software companies: https://bootstrapped.fm/
Shameless related plug, I run https://www.trypaper.io/ which helps SaaS companies find non-dilutive funding. I don't think Bootstrap needs to mean "no outside capital". There are capital sources out there that align with what most bootstrappers value (e.g. retaining control of their company, calm growth, etc.).
Speaking as someone that tried to be a founder from Brazil: I imagine that making it on Silicon Valley must be hard task on itself but making in an underdeveloped country makes odds stacked against you.
We compete with companies founded with people that have access to clients with way more purchasing power and better supply pipeline.
I'm a bit curious on how the team got overcame this issues, and would suggest you to repost this on a time that gets more traffic in americas, since is 3AM here.
We were a little bit lucky in this regard, because we had some authority in the niche (2 members of our original team had spoken at security conferences internationally for the previous 10 years).
I have lots of thoughts on this though. I think with a low enough burn rate, you can overcome this with a great product, and taking just one bite at a time. ie. one happy customer, then another. Actual customer happiness is so low, that you just have to do a little better to have people talk about you, and over time it compounds nicely.
I've previously pondered how we would have approached our early steps if we were completely unknown, and the best option i can think of is a kind of sincere, influencer marketing approach.
i.e. if you dont have the voice in the industry that people will listen to, find people who do, and get them to see your product. Most industry leaders are constantly looking to up their game, so you should be able to catch their eye, and if your product is awesome, they will say so
I think it would depend on how those experts roll.
For infosec for example, i think if your product did "X amazing thing", then you'd definitely get a seasoned experts attention if you tweeted "hey, we built a thing that does X amazing thing, give me 5 minutes and i'll show it to you"
I think theres a part of this that means your products has to convince them in the 5 minutes they give you (or at least has to convince them to give you 5 minutes more)
> We compete with companies founded with people that have access to clients with way more purchasing power and better supply pipeline.
Your wording flipped a bit in my head. That exact wording could be said of Europe. There's a whole show and dance to make it seem like it's not, but when everything is about government grants and consortiums, it is.
> Your wording flipped a bit in my head. That exact wording could be said of Europe. There's a whole show and dance to make it seem like it's not, but when everything is about government grants and consortiums, it is.
Hey, I'm originally from Australia. My take is that Australia is ever so slightly better off since you don't have all the EU state support regulations to comply with. It's unbelievable how good the EU is at wasting people's time. You're also slightly higher on the VC dollars per capita.
Even if you have a profitable SaaS business, it's common to use public funding to cover R&D, i.e. most of your software engineer salaries.
Usually this will involve identifying features, getting documentation from your customers they would use the features, inventing a story about how these features will save CO2 and create export oriented jobs, and magically forgetting that you have all the inhouse competencies needed while simultaneously identifying a knowledge partner (preferably in another EU country) who can provide you with the missing knowledge.
It's hard to believe it unless you've seen it. Many companies have full-time employees who do nothing but write and manage funding applications. And don't think it stops at startups. Consortiums mixing startups and established SMEs are a huge plus.
I mean I run a SaaS in the Netherlands. I know some such subsidies exist but they're also appallingly unattractive (except a general R&D salary tax cut). Shit like "get 25k if you do a project with 2 other companies in 2 other EU countries". I'd rather focus that energy on our product and our customers, thanks.
Your suggestion that "everything is about" getting these grants does not match my experience. Rather, I'd put it as, "there are some companies who'd rather hunt down grants than actually focus on their market, and they're seldomly successful". While I agree that these grants, by virtue of existing, actively discourage good entrepreneurship and thus hurt the market, I strongly disagree that you need them to succeed.
We are building waste management IoT devices that are deployed to the public, and making a sale easily takes 2 years and thousands of hours in compliance testing and validation.
Read about the success of Zoho. An Indian company with no funding that has bootstrapped to billions in revenue. And they are doing development in small towns in India. Talk about overcoming the obstacles of an underdeveloped country!
> over the past 2 years have managed to donate over a million dollars to local charities
I wish more companies were doing this. There are many already -- consider joining the Fouders Pledgehttps://founderspledge.com/ if you're thinking of doing the same.
I got a question for which I don't see the answer in the article.
What about employee compensation? Is it just a fixed salary or? Since I do not see any mention of going public in the article, so I'm curious what is the motivation for employees.
We do average to above average salaries, and all share a profit share bonus at the end of the year. Everyone gets a company credit card to buy books/tech needed to do their jobs. Everyone gets side benefits like an audible subscription, other mini stipends.
It's worth noting that we couldn't always do this (starting off we just went with "decent salaries and smart ppl to work with").
We try to keep doing this right so that we all do well as the company does.
The best part? Every penny of that $11M ARR is yours to spend however you wish. Nobody's going to question you if you take your company's money and spend it on a private helicopter or a summer beach home in Cyprus (all easily affordable for $11M). If you had accepted even a tiny pre-seed investment, you wouldn't have that freedom - the company's money is not yours, and although you could live comfortably on executive salary, bonuses, and stock sales, you can't avoid scrutiny until you've sold the company or IPO'ed.
The second best part about bootstrapping (specifically: solo bootstrapping)? The immense satisfaction of eating from the work of my own hands. I finally launched my side project last month, and it's making enough to pay for rent and food. I have no other source of income or savings, and the feeling is fantastic -- even though the amount I am earning right now is tiny, far less than what I earned as a private consultant or employee of a VC-backed firm before. I wouldn't trade this feeling of satisfaction for any other job in the world. The freedom of 100% ownership: earning, managing, and spending every dollar without having to answer to anyone is priceless.
Taking VC money is just a glorified type of employment with lottery returns.
The first one is only true for a solo founder. Given that they said "we", the company's money is still the company's money.
Also, it's not clear to me that avoiding accountability is really a plus for a startup. Basically the first thing I did when I was exploring a solo founder/bootstrapped thing was to hire a startup-focused coach to serve as an accountability partner.
He's brilliant, and he started Bootstrappers Breakfast, so he's very comfortable with bootstrapping and solo founders. He asked so many good questions.
In the US context, of the company is an LLC then you can't just spend its money like it's yours without "piercing the veil" and jeopardizing your LLC status.
But point taken! You don't have to answer to VC whose interests don't necessarily align with yours.
Shameless related plug: I run https://www.trypaper.io/ which helps SaaS companies find non-dilutive and non-VC funding. Bootstrap doesn't need to mean "no outside capital". There are capital sources out there that align with what most bootstrappers value (e.g. retaining control of their company, calm growth, etc.).
Yes -- we've been bootstrapping our diet tracker cronometer for the last 10 years. It's a much slower pace, but nice growing & operating on own terms. It took the first five years before I could quit my regular job -- but now hitting $3M ARR. Designed an awesome workplace in a ski town and have been slowly recruiting other ski-bum / devs to our way of life.
I run one of these companies.
USD 50M+ ARR, USD 20M+ profit. 3 people company.
Could grow 10x if we want to. But we are enjoying staying low and enjoying our family lives.
Excellent article by the Canary guys. They seem like really honest people.
We didn't raise any money. Only focus was how to do faster iterations. By the time 25 of my ideas didn't succeed, every iteration became very fast. Idea to launch in 3 months. Happy to answer any questions.
Looks like this is dead. Happy to answer any questions @dang
!
Once kids are in high school, maybe will try something bigger!
This is fascinating. Is your product b2b? How fast did you discard the 25 ideas? It sounde like you needed 3 month at least, so 8 years? What did you live on during that time? So in short:please tell me more
It's a consumer product. It is very draining. In today's world consumer don't want to pay for anything, unless they really want the product and they don't have a way to get it otherwise.
Many users would use the product and then file chargebacks. Many users will go to any extend to get out of paying coming up with either sad stories, lies or threats. When it's a low cost, high volume product (5m+ paying customers over time) - you deal with too many of these and sometimes it's very demoralizing.
I used to work for someone else in Saas and this wasn't such a big issue there. Next thing I do won't be in consumer.
Some ideas where tried end to end in a week, some were run for 2 years. Did a lot of mistakes along the way.
Think about how many non-basic need products that you know which consumers pay which is not some kind of exclusive or monopoly: Utilities, Cable, Cell phone, NetflixEtc, Uber*.
Today's consumer doesn't like to pay for anything, especially if it is a digital product. They will do whatever they can to get out of paying either by pirating or trying to get a refund/chargeback after using it.
Sometimes they will do an impulse buy. Which is what we were able to work for us, but then bad actors try to make your life as miserable as possible.
B2B is not rosy and has its own set of issues. But I would rather kick 50 ungrateful users from the platform to their face, rather than deal with 10k ungrateful consumers.
Biggest issue with customer support are: Getting customers and supporting them.
Solution to both of them is making a simple product which provides incredible value which is self serve. Word of mouth will take care of the rest. Eventually build a community driven forum which will help with support.
Thanks a lot. A few follow up question:so it is a physical product? Also are you located in the US? And last, since customer contact it is so draining, did you consider to spend one of the 20 M profit and outsoure customer service (or hire 10-20 people to take of that)?
We do have outsourced customer service. But still I have to be aware of what the customers are complaining about. In some cases people are filing frivolous complaints to government agencies which you have to respond to. With Saas, I would go after the bad actors. With consumers the number of bad actors is endless.
Congrats to you for finally succeeding!
Just that your way of climbing doesn't sound quite fun. Spending 7 years working 14 hours a day, full of stress, and fail 20 times straight? That sounds like a recipe for disaster. I wonder how many people are doing the same things you were doing and are still not successful...
I got a simple question, was it worth it and what would you change?
I love building products. The financial success was a side product.
I should have qualified my statement about failures better.
Current one: Financially successful for me.
Another one: Financially successful but got screwed over.
Another one: Was very successful with adoption, but timing got wrong and didn't become financially successful.
2 others: Moderate success but financially not successful.
It was really tough, but I enjoyed the process. I love building products. I have a few really good ideas, but don't have bandwidth for them right now. I would keep building products for my love of it.
My long term goal is to leave the world a better place. It took 10+ years to get to the point that I can work on anything I want to without worrying about bills.
I regret delaying having kids. I regret not spending enough time with family and friends. I wish I had taken better care of my health. But right now I get to spend more time with my kids than any of my friends.
Every individual is different with their situation and motivations. What worked for me might not work for others. The thing which helped me the most was my innate desire to build better products and making sure I keep learning more and more.
My life's driving principle is: If I can't look back at my self 2 years back and I don't think I was so stupid back then I am not learning fast enough.
Even though I have regrets, I would say it was worth it. Of course if I could I wish few things would have gone differently about my life - but who doesn't.
Thanks for all of your insights here, really great stuff. The 2y growth mindset is especially refreshing to hear.
Also if you are looking to expand into new ideas and want eng folks with more time on their hands I have a group that would be interested. Currently we are evaluating ideas to go off and build after coming to terms with the big tech corporate grind.
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. I'm early on the path, still unsuccessful. I'm 25, I had one failed product. for 3 years, followed by 2 years of limbo and 1 year back in the game thanks to the pandemic - I love it, I like it a lot and I want to keep pushing it.
I'm too early to yet have regrets about pursuing this path, but I feel like it will inevitably get to me too and I try to think of ways I could have the cake and eat it too ( to some minimal extent). I don't yet think about family, it's not on my priority list at the moment (I'm thinking about starting it in my 40s and I accept the drawbacks), but there are some things I would like to get out of my personal life - preferably while still in my 20s, rather than 30s that I care about.
I'm sorry because this is going to be a long post. Please feel free to ignore it. I hope it contributes something to the discussion in general.
I'm thinking about 3 scenarios I could play out:
A) Pursue a niche desktop app idea that is a spin-off from an earlier failed product. It's the scratch your own itch thing, I have a new vision for the product. It would take 1 year to ship and 2 years from now in total to evaluate. Potential 100k - 1M / year revenue after years in business. This could be the type of business I could work hard at now, and spend a healthy 50h/week later to be still able to enjoy my life and enjoy playing the game. It's also realistic given my current resources. If it fails, I "lose" 2 years.
B) Pursue another spin-off idea, but this one is not niche, it's big and I know I may come off as naive - but I'm certain this is something that people will want. The challenge here is more in execution and competition (there's no other product like this on the market, and the demand is there). I'm a little guy now, so I could get squashed by more experienced players however, I may still pocket a million before going out of business. To get started with it, I would have to get a full time job asap (I have a dead end freelancing gig now), work 1 year and then live off savings. So it wouldn't see the light of day until at least 2024. This plan would also require 5+ years working at intense startup, sacrificing a lot - all these personal goals I care so much about.
c) Focus on the big idea, but delay it by 2 years to get some things off my personal bucket list. So I get full-time job by the end of 2021, 2022 - 2024 I focus mostly on personal life, while working and making savings (I may have 10h/week to spend on building the prototype / v1 - which is very very little, but over 3 years is always better than nothing). Then 2025, quit job, work 70h/week full-time on preparing the business, launch it in 2026 or 2027. If it fails, I still should have enough savings to pursue another idea. Or if someone beats me to market and there's no point, I can pursue another idea straight away. Yes, it's 5 years, so there are big chances someone gets there first, but even if they get there first, they wouldn't get like a mainstream market adoption in 5 years, so there would still be place for competition and different variants of the idea. The real danger here is that these 3 years of focus on personal life may throw me off the path, I may not be able to come back once I lose momentum, but I like to think I would have the discipline to do come back.
Currently I'm most inclined towards option C - it has some certainity about it. The business may fail, but there's a lot of certainity I will have logistics to pursue another idea. I can also get personal goals to some extent (unless the pandemic restrictions last too long). So it's potentially big reward, less sacrifice and risk.
I put some work into option A however, so it's hard to not think about it. Maybe it could be really good opportunity at having a lightweight business, that's also achievable given my current resources and experience. But it can still fail - and it's a subset of the bigger idea (as I mentioned earlier, both projects are spin off ideas from my first failed product).And if it fails, I can't work on the next business right away.
I guess I self-answered myself here. I'm only torn because if I want to go for option C, I had this plan to release A as open source and use it for my resume, I think it would help the job hunt a lot and allow me to negotiate a better salary, as well as flex product-building muscles. The logic for this, is I want a remote job, and while there are full time remote jobs offerrings within the niche I'm freelancing in - I think it may take me some 6 months to get a job like this - so I think, I could take this time to release the app as open source to 10x my resume and not leaving the job thing to luck.
So because I work on product A day to day, it's challenging to not view it as a business. It will be even more challenging when I complete it and willingly not give it a try to sell it (though I know selling it is like 5x more effort than building it, but still).
It would be helpful to get an outside view on these plans. Maybe each plan is dumb either way. The plan I had 3 years ago didn't pass reality test. I suppose it could be similar this time. What would you do? Try to have a shot at the simpler product and accepting a 2 year delay if it doesn't work out, or follow the long term plan and have a go at a much more ambitious product with a backup savings plan?
I think you are a bit all over the place. I would suggest a few things:
Go through Naval's podcast "How to get rich". Listen it once a month for 4 months. Make notes and see how his suggestions apply to you. Focus on the things that you disagree with and understand why do you disagree with them.
Now on to my feedback:
You are worrying too much about big competitors getting you out of business or idea already launched. Unless your product has a very small market, there is always opportunities for new players. Looks at the instant messaging space over the time we have had IRC, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Slack and there will be a lot more.
If an idea doesn't work out, you don't lose 2 years. You would have learnt a lot through this time. You are investing in your learning and capabilities.
Think of startup as a series of sprints. You sprint, strategize, sprint, strategize.
So my high level suggestion would be:
Start building what you want to build right now. Don't wait.
Don't think about doing startup in binary terms. Figure out which product you want to build next and try to find whatever time to make progress on it. During this phase if you have to sort out personal things do that. If you need to take a job to support finances do it. These are things that you have to take care of along the way. There will always be news stuff when you have taken care of the personal and finance part. Don't lose focus on your startup and keep chugging along.
If you get a job, make sure you don't use company hardware to build it. Make sure that there are no clauses which make products developed on your personal time as company property.
Hi. Thank you very much for your time and feedback. I will check the podcast.
Yes pretty much I'm all over the place. It would be simpler if I had a single goal and be able to sacrifice everything else, but I can't. These personal goals are very important and spending even just 2 years on that would be one of the best investments I could make for myself, so I have been bending over backwards trying to figure out how I can carve out that time, while still being on the path towards having a product business.
> You are worrying too much about big competitors getting you out of business or idea already launched. Unless your product has a very small market, there is always opportunities for new players. Looks at the instant messaging space over the time we have had IRC, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Slack and there will be a lot more.
You are right. Even more so I shouldn't worry since I'm small and my criteria for success are relatively low and unlike a startup with vc funding I don't have to take over the world to be successful. So even if a large competitor would pop up, there may still be a place for a few million per year niche variant of the idea.
> Start building what you want to build right now. Don't wait.
> Don't think about doing startup in binary terms. Figure out which product you want to build next and try to find whatever time to make progress on it. During this phase if you have to sort out personal things do that. If you need to take a job to support finances do it.
The product I really want to build (the bigger product), I could ship this in 3 years if I completely sacrificed the personal goals, or I could ship it in 5-6 years if I didn't sacrifice. The latter would allow me to also have more runway savings in case things go wrong. I think there are great benefits to the latter path. I would like you said, spend whatever free time left I had on the idea - even if it's only 10h/week - it would keep me invested in the path, so when the time is due to quit the job, I 'm excited to quit the job and work on the business (instead of keeping the job and staying comfortable).
(I know these are long timelines, but the product is very complex to build, I have to work a full-time job for some of that time and I'm still a newbie so I'm moving slow)
> If you get a job, make sure you don't use company hardware to build it. Make sure that there are no clauses which make products developed on your personal time as company property.
For these reasons I'm specifically looking for a job at a small company (not a startup though) - up to 20 people, targeted around one product (which there are plenty of in my niche), this is why I assume it will take me a while to get a job - because they are usually looking for one person at a time. This is also why I had this idea to spend next 6 months building an open source product related to my niche, to have a near certainity I can get hired by one of these companies. I could have instead get the job in a large corp and I think there are high chances I would get it soon, because they hire a lot of people - but I consider it dangerous, because this is the kind of company that is all over the place, any digital product would be considered a competition with them and they would have the resources to bring me down if they wanted to - and from what I have heard, they do have a requirement to sign these kind of ugly IP clauses. While a small company, they don't have either money or inclination to chasing ex-employee over IP completely unrelated to their business he built in his spare time, and are small enough that probably even if they did require clauses, I could negotiate with them to not sign it.
I think my biggest weakpoint may be is I don't know any potential business partners. I have dropped out of university very soon and then I have been freelancing, so I never acquired any contacts I have been working together with. But what could I do? Looking for a partner could take a long time and there are big chances the partnership could go wrong obviously. I'm comfortable working solo and I think I can handle the psychology of it - but I have only one mind and one pair of hands. What would you say about having a co-founder vs. going solo in bootstrapped businesses?
I don't spend the money I already make. Not sure what I would do with 10x money.
1% ungrateful complaining consumer out of 1 million users are 10k users. I don't like dealing with them. At 10x the business they might become 100k or more. I would rather have 10k high paying Saas customers and weed out the ungrateful ones there but to their face.
Currently we are working above the board with no dark patterns. We have one of the best customer service and refund policies across possibly all consumer internet companies. Our competitors have lot of dark patterns. To grow 10k, we might need to do shittier things which I don't want to.
I know there are lot of founders and executives out there who would be fine doing dark patterns for growth. But I am not and maybe that is my shortcoming and which is why I didn't want to grow in the Corporate ladder. If I own the company, I can have final say on these things.
Can I ask how you're handling customer service? I'm a one-man company and it's the most draining part of my business. It's so tempting to outsource first line support but I also feel there's some value in answering all the emails yourself because you know your customers' needs.
And I'm not sure how to even outsource support. Do I just hire someone part-time from some gig website and pay them for X hours/week? I think one dedicated customer support person would do wonders for my business but it would require about ~5-10 hours of work per week. And customer support is something you get better at the longer you do it, so I don't want to constantly hire replacements, especially if it's going to be just one person doing support.
Do you have an FAQ that is part of your first auto-reply when somebody contacts support?
Do you have helpdesk software?
Are you using an answering service/receptionist to answer calls and then send the support issue to your support email or software?
Make as much as you can self-service for your users.
Have brief videos explaining your solution, so you can easily reply with a link to the video and ask them to follow up with you if they have more questions.
Keep track of both issue count and resolution time.
You may find it better to automate something you only do 4 times a month, but takes 8 hours, versus something you do 8 times per day, but only takes 5 seconds.
Finally, keep track of support issues by type, so you can see emerging trends and find your biggest pain points (# of tickets with a particular issue * median resolution time of particular issue).
If you still can't manage and need human support, hire someone in India/Philippines part time, treat them like a valued employee, build a relationship.
> We delayed having kids because of this and that is my biggest regret.
Don't answer if this is too personal - but why the regret? It sounds like you have had kids, so perhaps it got harder? Or you had fewer than you wanted. Why do you regret it?
Hey man, if it's any consolation, my folks had me when they were very young, and I barely spent any time with them whilst growing up. As immigrants we had it pretty tough financially, and they were always working long hours (always for someone else) to try make ends meet. They harbour significant regret about not being more present in my childhood.
These days they're of course much older, and I am in the lucky position to be able to look after them financially, but they're also filled with added regret about depending on me - they feel like failures because rely on me to cover all their expenses - despite my best efforts to assure them that it's ok.
So to your point, whilst having kids younger means you can spend more time with them when you're older, it's not necessarily the better solution if it requires a trade-off in terms of first establishing yourself financially - and from reading your other comments - it sounds like you and I both started off in life with relatively little, so I think the choice to first secure ourselves financially before having kids makes more sense.
I delayed having kids with my wife until relatively late (I was 37 she was 33), and whilst I know this will probably reduce the amount of time I'll get to spend with my children when I'm much older, the peace of mind that has come with having first established my SaaS before starting a family is immense.
In fact one could argue that the reduced stress alone will probably add 10 years on to my life :-)
Thanks for sharing your inspirational comments above and below. Enjoyed reading all of them. And congratulations on the success - I'm sure it is well deserved.
In my case my big mistake was moving to US mid way in career. It disrupted by established life and I had to start over from scratch. If I had stayed in my native country, I would have been able to have kids earlier.
Don’t get too hung up on it. While it’s cool to be a great grandparent, a great grandparent has tons of grand kids, and a lot of them don’t really give that much of a shit about you at the end of the day unless you’re some kind of interesting person. No descendants will care about you as much as your immediate children. I love my grandparents, but barely see them or talk to them even knowing the time is short.
Think of the advantage of having kids later: Your kids get to be born into a deeper and better future, and may some day enter the 22nd century, lucid and able.
Well, what's life but not a sequence of "pick your own adventure" choices.
But live for yourself and what you think is good. It's always a tradeoff. Having your grandparents at your wedding is nice, sure, but you can't optimize for everything.
Is it? Every study on arranged marriages I've seen points to lower divorce rates and higher general happiness. Assuming your parents aren't assholes they'll try and do right by their kids. And the nice thing about an arranged marriage is that it's two people not following some illusions of effortless love and happiness, but two people coming together to collaboratively build that love and happiness.
One of my great grandmothers was in an actual arranged marriage at age 14 to a man who was like 60 years old. She managed to get out of that one, but had to marry another man (my great grandfather, who I never met) to do it.
It was a different world back then, but compressing generations to the point where you are able to know your great grandparents usually requires some creative accounting that wouldn't fly for most people today.
Perhaps, but possibly not - once she was "married off" she was no longer her parents' responsibility and had to marry again at a young age in order to survive.
My point is that multiple generations of people need to have children at very young ages - often under conditions where they lack agency - for you to know your great-grandparents. It was a great experience for me, but every generation before me had a hard life.
If three generations have kids at average age 22 then you need to be 88 to be at your great grand-child's wedding (if they get married at 22). It's younger than most of us do this these days - I got married at 31 - but there's no need for child brides. Your (very sad) example doesn't seem quite relevant, to my mind.
Having kids at 22 is a significant setback for most people, at least in America. Yes, not as bad as child brides, but it's certainly not the "easy path."
I'm looking at folks that are having kids when they are older than i was and they seem to have their shit together so much more. In looking back I feel like I squandered some of the time I had with my children by not really understanding how fast the years go by and focusing too much on being a provider vs. being present. My youngest is ready to leave the home and I still have these flickering day dreams of these things I'm going to do with my kids and I still see them as kids.
How did you have time to raise kids while working at your startup? It seems thats what corporate jobs are great for because you spend less time at work.
Oh man. Wow. Incredible. I am really really glad it worked out well for you. I am in the same position like you were. I never want to go back to corporate hell, so my ideas have to work :D
What was your biggest lesson? Is there one thing you would do differently now if you could?
If you love what you are doing, it will give you the drive to keep doing it.
Listen to Naval's podcast about "How to get rich". He knows how to put ideas much better than me.
There are no shortcuts and if I tell you my winning lottery number after claiming the prize, it's not worth anything. Discover how you can provide value in your own unique way.
I agree with your premise that everyone has to provide value in their own unique way. However, what skills primed you for success? You mentioned knowing the equation between CLV and CAC. Any similar knowledge? What about on the software side? I imagine marketing (PPC,SEO) is more important than tech stack.
As I mentioned in other posts, I focussed on learning and pace.
I first went moderately deep on technology skills. Then on a need basis, I kind of did a BFS on all skills needs to build and run a startup.
Eventually all the skills are important.
One other thing I really put a lot of effort in is trying to put me in the shoes of other parties. E.g. if I am trying to launch an idea I try to get in the shoes of engineer, pm, design, marketing, analytics and end user. Given that I have played all of these roles to some extent, it helps me make better decisions.
All the questions you are asking are coming from your head and not your heart!
With wife and kids you want to follow your heart as long as your head (life situation) can support it.
If you would want to love your kids and be there for them, have them whenever you can. Nothing is guaranteed for anyone. Make your best case effort and love them from the bottom of your heart.
Don't seek out wife like an agenda. That is a receipt for disaster. I married my wife because that was the first person I met where my thought process was: "How can I make her happy" not "How does this person fulfill my image and needs from a life partner".
Your expectations from your life partner might change with time. If you start with a baseline and it doesn't hold anymore, it would likely lead to discontent and possibly separation. Expectation is the bane of all relationship.
For immediate family just focus on what you can give and don't expect anything back.
How did you stumble on all the ideas to try? I am at a point that I want to try literally anything, but its is exceptionally hard to judge success chances if the target niche is absolutely outside your domain/experience. How did you find all these 20 ideas?
Don't over think. Just start building anything that you feel could be useful to someone.
Don't fall in love with the idea. The idea you start with will never be the idea when you are successful. It will evolve or likely you will pivot to another related idea. Facebook today isn't what it started with. Flickr and Slack started as gaming companies. Google today is very different from what they started with.
It would help if you pick a good space. Ideally something which you know about, is big enough that there would be enough users.
And make sure you enjoy the process of going for it. If you set out with a sole goal to get rich and get famous, it can be very demotivating when things are not going your way.
I've seen people take the advice of "build something that could be useful to someone" the wrong way so many times.
That "someone" shouldn't be an abstract, hypothetical customer but a group of people that contains someone you intimately know, such as a close friend, partner or yourself.
I think "build something that would be useful to someone that you personally know, and many others like them" is a much more concrete way to think about the problem, and will enable you to achieve success with high probability.
(Just as a disclaimer, I started earning enough income from side projects for both my wife and myself to quit our full-time jobs about a year ago and start a family, but we're nowhere near the multi-millions in yearly profit that OP or bootstrapper10x are.)
This is excellent advice. You should know and understand who your customer are. Otherwise you won't even know what to build. Or you will build the wrong product and won't get any feedback.
Congrats on your journey and best of luck for the future!
Personally I have at least one business idea every day, probably due to some neuro-divergence issues. The problem is determining which are worth pursuing.
By their own admission, OP's 20+ ideas didn't work.
You only need one, it just has to be the right one :)
Snark aside, I guess receptivity to novelty is critical when pivoting. At that point, though, the pivot should be based on data. Creativity is still required, constrained by the data. I believe that's more amenable to being 'engineered' rather than just waiting for the muse to arrive.
I have a friend who made a project out of brainstorming 5 project ideas every day. They had to be stuff he could realistically build (physically or with code). Sometimes he would riff off a single idea - some problem he wanted solved. Other times he just sort of free associated.
He said it was hard at first, but it got easier over time. His ideas didn’t dry up. They multiplied.
A couple of years ago I started writing down ideas whenever they popped into my head. Didn't really make a conscious effort to brainstorm them or anything, but after a while they start becoming a frequent thing. I probably get a couple a week and now have a really long list of things. Some are obviously bad, others require too much outside knowledge or equipment I don't have, but maybe 10-20% are promising and doable by me.
Honestly the hardest thing is picking one thing to focus on for an extended amount of time. It's tempting to prototype something and then get excited by the next idea and never fully finish what you were working on. I think this is just part of how humans are. I know a guy who worked on rockets and says it got boring after a couple of years.
Nothing beats just getting down and building something end to end. As you do it more and more, you get better and faster.
I just came up with an analogy of trying to be successful at startup:
Imagine someone who is just born in prehistoric rugged terrain who wants to reach some magical place. You don't know even how to crawl. There is some food and clues all over the place about how to reach the magical place. You have a magic button which can take you to slave house (corporate life). You could potentially come back from Corporate life to the startup life, but you would be bruised and would have picked bad skills which you know needs to forget.
You immediate focus should be gaining skills and pace. You will start by learning to crawl, walk, jump, climb, track your path, get better instincts, find food, look for clues, follow clues.
With more tries, you will get better at these. You will be better at navigating the terrain. You will get better heuristics which will determine your success.
Many time either people looking for a magic solution. This is equivalent to someone in this situation thinking if they can roll downhill and hope to be within crawling space of the magical space. It doesn't work that way. Some people do get lucky but most don't.
Any many times people are procrastinating. Which is like someone waiting at the edge of this magical world figuring out whether to make a plunge.
Just get started. You will figure out along the way. Make sure you have a good plan on health and finances!
> You immediate focus should be gaining skills and pace. You will start by learning to crawl, walk, jump, climb, track your path, get better instincts, find food, look for clues, follow clues.
RE my earlier question I’d really appreciate it if you could provide more insight into this.
So far I’ve been building MVPs in Django ( quick and easy) CRUD mainly, trying to improve copy writing, building better communication skills ( being more succinct), learning about SEO ( evergreen for marketing) and building paid marketing campaigns through FB. What else would you suggest?
I feel that it's better to learn skills as a part of getting traction vs try to acquire skills in vacuum.
So have a razor sharp focus on building and adoption. If things are going great then cool. If not, introspect and seek advice till you figure out how to make progress. You will acquire skills along the way.
There is no magic bullet. Naval said that for success you need Product, Market, Founder fit. I would suggest go through his podcast "How to get rich".
I spent years and years in the "I just need a good idea" rut. In reality they are everywhere. Every spreadsheet sitting on a company computer, doing some work no other system will do, is a potential SaaS niche.
It does help to elevate your exposure to industries and companies. Go to trade shows for your hobbies, learn their pain points. Consider switching jobs more frequently, or find some work at a consulting firm which can get you on a different contract every few months. Seeing the inside of more companies will give you more exposure and will help you see where they struggle.
Working on an idea (even a bad one!), doing the deep dive, will result in logical branches out to other ideas. You need to work on your execution anyway, because the best idea in the world won't take you far if you fail to deliver.
Since I started trying to build my ideas, I find that I have far more than I could possibly build myself.
You sound like you might think ideas have to be innovative but go look at how many CRM solutions are out there. CMS. Email marketing automation. Etc.
None of them are perfect. None of them can satisfy every single potential customer. You can build yet another one to satisfy some small unhappy segment of the huge market.
My other account (bootstrapper101) got throttled. Maybe @dang can help merge this tomorrow.
I could maybe spend 5000 words and still not be able to say all I want to say about this.
The ideas were all over the place: Social, Enterprise, Consumer, Saas.
I learnt over time that once you have failed so many times, you start avoiding obvious mistakes. Mistakes like polishing your app before launch, wasting time on PR, building too many features, not spending enough time qualifying your users.
Once you build enough products you start knowing the impact of things like:
1. Marketplace products: supplier and consumer chicken and egg problem)
2. Single player mode: you don't need your friends to be on the app and you can get immediate value as soon as you start.
3. Social products: Where degree matters. Most IM products can provide a lot of value of if 1-3 of your close friends are on it. But products like Facebook needs 50+ friends, Twitter needs strangers.
4. See if you LTV (life time value) > CAC (customer acquisition cost) + Operation cost + Development cost
There are so many other small things. These concepts are like different lego pieces and over time you find which one works better for your product and you use the right pieces.
Biggest takeaway was how to do faster iteration, brutally prioritize and automate everything. Everything else is learning along the way!
I don't know employee strength of many companies. Some companies which feel relatively small that I like are:
1Password (agilebits), Protonmail, Little Snitch (Objective Development).
PS: I am getting throttled by HN algorithms. If someone can help get me unthrottled I will get around to answering all the questions.
How did you get to the decision makers to pitch your idea? Unless you were already well connected, I presume it wasn't easy to get attention from the right people.
I pitched my ideas just twice and got some funding for them.
However either my approach was wrong or I wasn't working with the right people. I felt that funding was too big of a waste of time. Without traction, everything I did was being second guessed. And too much time was being wasted pitching.
I haven't raised any money for 20+ of my ideas including the current one. But I can imagine it would be easier for me to raise money on better terms in future!
I use the nanny vs parent analogy for involvement with a product.
When you are working for someone else, you are a nanny. The product isn't your baby. Be careful how much you get invested. If you get sentimental and attached you will end up hurting yourself.
If you own your company, it's like being the parent. You have sole responsibility but except government no one else can interfere.
VC funded business can be like a wild ride. You may start as a parent, but you will eventually end up as a nanny. In some rare cases you can have majority voting rights till the end. Only famous case for that I know is Facebook.
How do you handle support with just 3 people? I imagine at that scale you either have a lot of customers, or small number of customers with very specific needs.
I will try to answer multiple questions here because I am being throttled:
> How do you handle support with just 3 people? I imagine at that scale you either have a lot of customers, or small number of customers with very specific needs.
We are highly automated. Very very few queries get through and they are contracted out.
> what is the skillset of 3 people? 1 product, 1 sale/market, 1 developer or something else? how complex is the product in terms of technology?
2 developers (I am 1 of them) and 1 person for everything else.
> Are you in a large market with competitors but still plenty of room, or have you more or less cornered a smaller one?
It's a large market with 20+ competitors. Because our operational costs are so low and we are highly automated we could take over big chunk of business from our competitors. Essentially the dynamic is like Altavista vs Google.
Our competitors sometimes do some really dark patterns. I am realizing that almost all companies do that (Google incognito tracking, Facebook charging kids in games etc). Somehow I can't get myself to do that. So I am thinking of moving to Saas so that I can deal with mature customers and ideally provide them value.
> What are your skillsets? How did you get there?
I am a programmer as my core skill. But I have also played product, marketing, sales, hiring through my career. To get good a these, I worked in my jobs as if I was the owner. That helped get me experience faster.
If people want to do a startup, best advice for them would be join a startup with good team at an early stage. Bonus points if that startup is in a space you like. Learn, make good friends and then then do your own startup.
I really recommend Naval's "How to get rich" podcast. It's as if he is talking about my life. He decided to move to more investing, but I still like building stuff myself.
> What distinguished the successful attempts from the unsuccessful ones?
> How did you know when it was time to move on?
If I don't know how to keep growing the business, it's a dead-end and time to move on.
Am I the only one reading a significant amount of ego and humblebrag from this post? It's pretty off-putting and distracting from where there could be value.
I am really sorry it came that way. It's been a long day.
Thought this was a good opportunity to share my learnings and answer any questions. If there is any way I could help answer any question, I would love to!
I don't think that I can guarantee success. There was some angle of luck involved. However over time, because I am getting faster, I am getting more shots at the game. Earlier I could play one game over 2 years and make many mistake (which now look obvious to me) along the way. Now I can play multiple games every year. So that helps you build your own luck to some extent.
> Q1. What was the prerequisite for your success (product/service, team, market)?
Drive and desire of learn would probably be biggest. No task is good or bad: If something has to be done it has to be done.
Acquiring more skills apart from programming: devops, product, hiring, management, sales, marketing, legal, accounting. This help you develop holistic view of your product and company.
> Q2 What technology space are you in? (Digital/brand vs high-tech)?
Product for end consumer. The end product itself is not very high tech. I don't know a humble way to say it - but the tech powering the company is really well architected and managed.
> Q3 What weré your difficultis when iterating over your product concepts, and what was the iteration frequency?
This could be a 5000 word reply. In the end difficulties don't matter. Brutally prioritize and keep at it till you overcome it. Know when to cut your losses and move on.
> Q4 How long did it take to take off?
I had 3 products which saw good adoption. Only the current one is financially successful. Each of those took 1-2 months to build and we knew within a week that it was going to be successful.
it's a combination of it being a brand new (potentially throwaway) account, me potentially misunderstanding what is meant by claiming 20m annual profit for 3 people is "staying low", and the limits of text communication
Silicon Valley is a blind search algorithm for novel scaling advantages from digitisation.
These advantages exist for mass retail. The medium-sized businesses who tried to compete with Walmart and Amazon had to adapt fast or fail. These advantages do not (EDIT: have not been shown to) exist for commercial real estate; WeWork was a dud. Most American commerce is, and should be, in the hands of these medium-sized businesses, if for nothing else than resilience and local optimisation.
My worry is the advantage of centralising customer data is too general. That lets a single entity exert broad scaling advantage, which is scary and inefficient. I increasingly think this should be a measure for antitrust enforcement: does a company possess an edge that gives it a competitive advantage in almost any market it tries to compete in. If so, it’s an economic nerve bundle and at the very least needs to be regulated.
Softbank raised a lot of money off early WeWork hype. The management fees on that cash alone will offset any loss WeWork can ever make. And it looks like WeWork will now turn around with spac $ and restructuring. They played the long game and did it well.
>5. Do their thing very quietly without anyone really knowing.
6. You've never heard about.
I love going to industrial estates and checking out what is going on in there for this exact reason. CNC machine, 3D printing, endless engineering all of which will never be appreciated or create a fan boy cult but they will keep many, many other businesses operational and growing.
These places actually build things too, real tangible things that have requirements and so forth.
The SV startup business model is basically: "I've identified a profitable industry which seems 'unoptimized' ... if I used VC funding to outflank every traditional player in this industry would there be room for one billionaire? And could that billionaire be me?"
At least for software, the vast majority are in some sort of niche you've either never heard of or thought about. Software for managing operating theater procedures, software for managing doctors/dentists, software for managing money exchanges, software for managing legal conveyancing, software for managing schools, etc. Those are examples from places that I've worked that were purely software shops, add to that just about any sizeable company in any industry that have software developers, everything from you pet food brand to your toothbrush manufacturer likely started outside of silicon valley, most without little to no venture capital.
They used to be called micro independent software vendors (mISV) and before the silicon valley gold rush this was the dream of young entrepreneurs.
Those are absolutely terrible companies for software developers to work for though. I have several family members that work for them. If you want average pay and the owners to take all the profits, go for it. Otherwise, work for FAANG, a great startup or a finance company (hedge fund or investment bank).
Nit: With some companies paying below average, too, by the very definition of the term 'average', and also because the sizeable handful of FAANG companies skews the average even higher.
I think that is sort of the point, though. If you are able to work/succeed at FAANG, you could build software in these niches quite profitably, because the competition is likely not all that good.
This is why I've been putting more energy into networking and finding the right partners - people who understand these niche problems, have an existing network to sell the solutions to and just need the technical team to build and iterate on the product.
Brainstorming is still important to me, but I'd rather brainstorm with a specialist. If any HNers fit the bill, please do send an email.
It is. And there is always a reason private companies post their numbers. Unless there’s a strong reason to do it, it is a better strategic move to keep them private.
Frankly, minding the existing solutions on the market, the product idea sounds extremely useful. No wonder you were able to acquire customers and grow quickly!
One thing I don't understand is this notion that any startup can happen only in the valley,or if someone starts there, it's 100 times easier. The main benefit,which the US startups take for granted is the market size. You don't need to learn German, French ,or Spanish just to sell to your neighbors.
When I was coming up there was a huge brain drain going on from the midwest. A lot of those people ended up in Seattle, because of Seattle, NYC and SF, Seattle seems the smallest culture change (that is of course debatable, especially with the Seattle Freeze). Since then Chicago has become eminent in fintech, so I expect some people end up there, but that's not everybody's speed either.
Saint Louis is also pretty centrally located from an Internet infrastructure standpoint and as far as I'm aware they've not amounted to much of anything from an IT standpoint since ftp.wustl.edu. It looks like Boeing, Square, and a bunch of banks have offices there.
That may have to do with secondary issues like the quality of education in Missouri. Undergrads might not give a damn but founders and VCs might care quite a bit.
From friends I've talked with, the benefits of the valley are real, but diminishing. At the same time downsides are increasing: cost of living, homelessness, real estate prices (though I read these are coming down a bit). I've been told the benefit has been the ease of networking, and likely will always be so. As startup hubs grow around the country this networking benefit will start to be there. It is already there in some places such as Austin and Boston.
There are a number of hubs in the country now, with most outside the valley focusing on one or more niches. Some of these are:
- Nanotechnology in Boston and Middlesex-essex, MA
- Healthcare Boston, New York City, and the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Big investments though are being made in Kansas, Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania
People have been saying this for a very long time. I did a startup in Pittsburgh back in ~2009, and this was exactly what everyone was saying. My cofounder is still doing startups in the same space(ish), but in the Bay Area now.
That doesn't mean it won't ever come to pass, but I am still skeptical. (And I live in Austin now... but the startup I work for is still fundamentally based in the Bay.)
This is a strong argument: people have been talking about the distribution of work with every new invention (phone call, fax, email, and now video conferencing). And they don't just mean moving from San Fran to Austin (where people speak the same language, and you can hire citizens, and the currency is the same and you drive on the same side of the street), but to India and China.
And yet, and yet, and yet the same centers of industry persist. Movies in LA, Oil in Houston, Finance in NYC and tech in San Fran.
I am sure the arguments for the persistence are well rehearsed and can be looked up but I just want to underscore one feature: winner take all.
Whichever argument you find compelling as to why these industries congregate, (networking is easier, money is easier to get, you have everything you need in one place, ambitious people go there and so on) it has to be such that the #1 place has an enormous advantage over the #2 place. If your argument does not have that structure, it doesn't really explain why everyone congregates.
And if your argument does have that property (some winner-take-all mechanism), then after covid and zoom force a redistribution, so long as that small advantage maintains, the dominant city will re-assert itself.
Things have been changing. Hollywood makes fewer movies than ever before and most of the work has moved elsewhere. Tv shows for networks are still made there but with so many additional channels more shows are being made elsewhere.
Pittsburgh,Detriot were never in a position to overtake the valley. California offers too much and the valley is not moving to another citt. But less companies feel the need to be in the valley because the internet provides a virtual space.
Oil is being replaced with renewable power so that shift won't affect who the oil capital is but it will reduce it's imporance.
Finance and New York fit culturally well together like California dreams and high tech startups.
Is “SaaS” traditionally considered a niche like the others? The concept seems very broad as opposed to others like Fintech or Healthcare. I would consider a category like “APIs” to be overbroad, and SaaS seems to be similar. I’m very open to being wrong though.
Plus, SaaS is more like a horizontal niche (though I would really call it a layer, with, e.g. shrink-wrapped software being another horizontal layer), while fintech, healthcare etc. are vertical layers[1]. In fact, the industry jargon term (outside of the narrow world of tech, at least), is "verticals". Ask any marketing guy. Verticals are usually defined by the business domain they apply to.
[1] E.g.: you can have a fintech SaaS and a healthcare shrinkwrapped app, and vice versa, and so on.
The other benefit of locating in Silicon Valley is convenient access to multiple first and second tier universities. Many startups are founded to commercialize research done in those schools. Only a few other areas have a similar concentration of top schools.
Harvard isn't just pretty close to Boston. It's right across the river. If you stand on the campus of Boston University you can look across the Charles river and see the campus of both Harvard and MIT. That's 3 top 50 schools within sight of each other. BC, Northeastern, and Tufts are just a few miles away from BU. That's 6 top tier universities all within a few miles of each other.
I thought this was something I'd like to hear the wisdom of the HN crowd on, so I submitted "Ask HN: What do you see as the current non-valley startup hubs?"
Also, Chicago is a major hub for Logistics Tech. I work for a startup that recently moved their head-quarters from NYC to Chicago, due to the talent there.
Northern Virginia for any sort of federal work, though it's not the same situation since the clearance requirements disqualify most non-citizens, people of foreign birth, or just most people at all since most people don't have security clearances. Still fertile ground for people who meet the requirements, though.
Agreed. I think defense startups are different animals though, based on my experience as a contractor in startup size defense contracting firms in the past. I could see different networking circles, different hiring requirements (you mentioned clearances), different software setups (I've worked on teams where using git over ssh not allowed on government networks). I plan the curate the results from this ask into https://github.com/BillBarnhill/AwesomeStartupHubs, and will include defense hubs there too.
>>> real estate prices (though I read these are coming down a bit)
That's not really the case. It's people moving out of SF. The Bay Area (and surrounding suburbs) real estate market is hotter than ever. Just had a friend move there and finding a place to buy is basically you willing to bid over asking price.
This is happening in Seattle. You can maybe buy a small condo downtown or on Capitol Hill for a deal right now. But as Seattle is a city of neighborhoods, if you want a house, you're paying 200k over asking price against 10-20 offers right now.
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The tl;dr is that you can hire cheap ($3.50/hr), high quality virtual assistants from the Philippines to handle customer support for you, all from day one. Having CS has really made a difference for us in our business and is one of our main differentiators as we've scaled up the CS team. DM me on Twitter and I can connect you to some excellent VAs looking for jobs!