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.
25 ideas and 3 months equals 6 years? So did you try that long to find a sticking idea?