Fellow bootstrapped founder for 8 years here, and I love and agree with your responses here.
Having previously existed in the VC-backed startup world, one thing I don't miss is the belief that its the _only_ rational way to run a business. In reality there are a lot of dangers to that approach, like you pointed out.
VCs _need_ promising businesses to join their portfolio, so they'll always be trying to convince you to raise money and have a tiny shot at making it big. If you fail, well, you're just one business in their portfolio, another one will pick up the loss. But it's the _only_ company you have, so you are doing the right thing by growing sustainably.
There's something extremely freeing about running a bootstrapped business and knowing you don't _need_ anyone to keep it running. Cheers to the next 10 years for you and your team.
BTW, I completely agree with this. VC economics create misalignment with founders as a matter of economics -- sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad, but it's incredibly important for a founder to understand. I usually tell younger investors and entrepreneurs that they should think long and hard on the research that says a seed stage fund needs ~50 portfolio companies to get past random bad luck; it has implications for how you manage a fund, and how you think about founding one of those 50 companies both.
I think it's more than unwilling, we're straight up unable. Not in principle, but because it's a coordination problem.
Think of how many parents now want their kids not to have a smartphone or social media. There's genuine, well researched evidence that this would be good. But there's also real harm to kids who see all their friends with iPhones and Instagram. It might sound silly to us but it's definitely real feeling to the kids.
A lot of the parents who let their kids use smartphones and social media probably could be easily convinced that it's a bad idea, they just don't know. Or they don't know how bad it is, and so something else, like displaying status via a nice phone, they value more highly.
But until we can reach critical mass, and fight the (not insignificant, and quite intentional) momentum to use social media, it will be hard.
The livelihoods of many come from social media, so this is a war not unlike regulating the tobacco industry (remember when we could smoke on planes? It was un-American to suggest banning people's right to do so.)
A recent HN thread examined [0] the NYC ban on smartphones for teens at school. We see positive results so far.
In my social and meetup circle, COVID coincided with all the organizers of my favorite meetups reaching the age where one generally starts to slow down, have kids, and possibly move out of the city for more space and calm.
At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore. So while keeping an existing meetup running pre-COVID was not exactly easy, it was doable and familiar.
But now, 5 years after COVID, all the longstanding meetups are long enough gone that people nearly have to start from scratch. It's starting to happen, but is a huge uphill battle. For the most part, I suspect it will be a new generation of organizers, but they'll be learning all the same lessons again, in a much less interesting and more hostile tech environment.
> At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore.
This is what turned me off of the local meetups: They had become a means to an end for career advancement. Both for the organizers and presenters.
The meetups I enjoyed the most in the past were full of people who enjoyed the subject matter. In the 2010s it turned into a career building and networking exercise.
Every time a new technology started to become popular it became a war of the meetups: Organizers would try to start a Next.js meetup when it became popular instead of discussing it at the JavaScript meetup. One started a Rust meetup, then jumped to trying to run a Zig meetup when that started rising in popularity.
Going to a meetup was a gamble. It was hard to know if you were going to get a good presentation with discussion, or a half-baked set of slides from someone who heard on LinkedIn that presenting at meetups is good for your resume.
Technology meetups are just going to inherently be about networking for jobs, IMO. The self-interest is just not alignable.
* Noob goes to event to learn and network.
* Journeyman goes for networking and hopefully learn a bit but mostly doesn't get much out of it.
* Expert learns nothing. Goes to network / advertise.
* Meetup is sponsored by local recruiting firm.
Meanwhile the local knitting group is
* Work on the project you'd've done alone on your couch
* Chat while you do it instead of alone on your couch
* When you get stuck, group encourages and guides in real time.
* Meetup is sponsored by the yarn and craft supply biz yer meeting in.
The latter group is entirely self-sufficient, self-sustaining, and self-managing. The former is a slow-burn tutorial that you can now do more efficiently via YouTube and chatbot.
* Come discuss problems you are having with your code
* Join in a Hackathon to see if the group can make progress on a predefined issue or project.
* Learn a new language, everyone pulls a language from a bucket and sees if they can make Game of Life. Limitations require that at least one person there that knows the language enough to help with getting someone going
We had one of those for about 6 months, and I loved it. However finding spaces that would host us was hard.
"Let's create something on the fly right now" events, just like the knitting group! Sounds like a winning plan. Just need to hook the local recruiting companies to fund the office space. :-)
Plenty of folks moved out for cost of living savings too, both organizers and attendees alike. With many roles having turned remote and rock bottom mortgage interest rates, mid-late pandemic was a rare window of opportunity and many recognized that.
Many people who moved moved somewhere in the orbit of a large city. Less true in the Bay Area but a 60-90 minute radius of a large city usually has some relatively attractive real estate pricing. And many offices are out that way anyway.
But it does make driving in for evening events less attractive. I used to do it more but, for the most part, really cut back on driving in after work for social events, etc.
Yep, this is what I did. I made a point of not going too far out for exactly that reason. I wasn’t able to save as much money as some did, but CoL was still halved which opened immense breathing room with little risk.
Similar to this: if you want to optimize your productivity*, do so on a timescale of at least weeks if not months or years.
Simple example: Can you get more done working 12 hours a day than 8? Sure, for the first day. Second day maybe. But after weeks, you're worse off in one way or another.
It's easy to chase imaginary gains like automating repetitive tasks that don't actually materialize, but some basics like sleep, nutrition, happiness, etc are 100% going to affect you going forward.
* I actually hate that word, and prefer saying "effectiveness". Productivity implies the only objective is more, more, more, endlessly. Effectiveness opens up the possibility that you achieve better results with less.
In Finland we have flex hours or "working hours bank", basically you can do extra work now and get free time later. You can also go into negatives.
Usually the recommended range is -20 to +40
Some People(tm) go into the negatives and think it's easy to "just" do an extra few hours every day. It's not.
What I do is work ~15 minutes more every day so I bank about a hour a week, sometimes a bit more. It's a LOT easier and more manageable. Just sit on my computer 15 minutes earlier or if I'm at the office I take the later train back home.
This way I tend to have a day or two of flex hours banked if I need to take some quick time off.
Finland is a "high trust" country, isn't it? I can't see this concept working working when > 10% of the population would game the system to get more "off-the-record" free time.
The flex hours are usually only for office workers where performance can be measured - sometimes it replaces overtime.
So the employer can "suggest" you work longer hours now when there's a ton of stuff to do (like end of year rush in accounting or payroll) and then you take days off when it slows down.
But yea, it's not something that's easy to police.
This is super cool. As part of the Pelias geocoder(https://pelias.io/) we use both OSM and SQLite heavily. Currently we've written our own pbf2json tool in Golang (https://github.com/pelias/pbf2json). But creating intermediate databases in SQLite could enable more powerful manipulation of OSM data before we eventually import it.
I play badminton, which has games that are about ten minutes long. I've noticed an uptick in the number of times I've had to stop and wait for someone I'm playing with to read a message on their smartwatch. I'm terminally online, but I can disconnect long enough for a game or a film - I seem to be increasingly in the minority.
Honestly I don't hang out with people like that. If you can't put down your Distractify 9000 to play a game with me, then clearly I am not very interesting to you and it's better for both of us to do more engaging activities with more engaging people.
People bristle at this sometimes- they'll ask why we don't hang out as much and I'll explain- and like, I get it, nobody likes feeling called out or criticized, and I don't even mean it as criticism, not really. Your behavior in reaching for your phone tells me that you have more important things to do, and I don't want to obstruct you from them. If those things aren't actually more important, well, then your priorities are clearly out of wack and you should sort that out for yourself.
Like just... stop responding to stimuli. Put things in the order in which they are meaningful to you, and then keep that. You're a conscious being, act like one.
I think there's a mismatch of expectations which is a solid reason to pursue friendships elsewhere. I think the other party in scenarios like this probably assumes (incorrectly of course) that youappreciate the break so you can check your phone too.
There's definitely something borked with our brains though. I have had multiple people express surprise when I tell them that I will not check any notifications when I'm driving even if I'm stopped at a traffic light for a minute or more. I just don't want to be distracted, and yeah it takes conscious effort sometimes, but it does get easier once you learn from experience that the world will not fall apart if you check your messages later.
I even internally reframe it as future candy, which makes me engage more positively with async interactions. But practicing delayed gratification is hard.
I think it's a similar thing in Ontario, Canada (where I live), you can be fined for checking on your phone even at red lights, though there are some caveats for "operating the car" related things (for example if you're using nav on your phone).
I will let android auto read text messages and/or dictate to me and do phone calls at times - but it has to be hands-free and traffic not too bad. I almost never do anything with my phone at a red light.
It's interesting that internet infrastructure is so interconnected that failures of what _should_ be separate systems seem to coincide.
Do we think it's possible the GCP outage caused the Cloudflare outage, or vice versa?
For DownDetector, I know it's not exactly foolproof. I imagine a lot of sites use something like CloudFlare in front of AWS infra, which could easily be automatically flagged as an outage for both in their system.
Another vote to confirm that AWS appears to be working fine. At least EC2 and S3 which is basically all we use (highly recommend this simple setup using base primitives, as some of their higher level services have significantly lower reliability)
It would suck to build a massive solar panel array only for it to break after an earthquake. Hopefully they are seismic proofed like many buildings there.
Solar PV arrays are not really contiguous structures like buildings. A major earthquake could certainly cause some damage, but the fundamental design of the arrays makes them much less sensitive to seismic activity than any building.
Like many, I also had an experience like this in my younger days: obviously unfit product, early prototype made by bottom-of-the-barrel contractors, co-founders who can't code, no salary, no users.
I got lucky, and spent only a few months while not working that hard.
But at the same time, this quote hits home:
>I was doing a startup. I was executing, and for the first time in my professional life I wasn’t insulated from the results. I didn’t achieve my destiny of great things, but I’d built something.
Right? I literally can't even call it a proper warning because of how much I took out of it.
My whole career was jumpstarted by my second startup (we only got to preseed but it was a great two years) and there's no way I'd have been as good a fit without this experience
>> I hope that by reading this story, I can protect some of you from 11 months of pain.
That's not how experience works. What you really did was get an 11 month business education. And again, you can tell your story, but you can't pass on that education.
I'm glad you moved on to better things. And I think you're saying that this experience prepared you for that, and you were a better overall entrepreneur because of it.
But maybe he can compress someone else's terrible experience down to 6 or 3 months, or stop them from sinking their own money (or that of family/friends) into an obvious faliure. There's another failures to go around; we don't all need to life every one of them.
It would be nice if it did, but that's not how experience works.
Which is to say that yes, we can learn from the mistakes of powers, and the story is worth telling.
For 99% of people, who want safety and security, they'll just ho get a job anyway. For the 1% who want to start something new, well 4 in 5 will fail either 5 years. Those failures are the experience needed to find success. Some get there quicker, some abandon good ideas too quickly or bad ideas too slowly.
That's how we learn along the way, and yes, absorb the lessons of others.
Yeah honestly I’m not sure what someone is meant to take out of this. The experience is really useful. But if me and Gus worked this out after 3 months, we could have cofounded our own thing!
Yes, and no. Sure you might have figured it out sooner. But there's a lot you learned in the other 8 months which you shouldn't negate.
You could have taken Gus' dad's advice - and you'd have saved some lot of time, but equally missed out on so much learning.
Look, most opportunities are bad, or at the very least risky. But if you wanted safe and secure you can just go get a job. Some risks are worth taking on, even if they look risky, and even if they fail.
Experience helps you at least identify the risk. Both in product and in people. Some products will just never work (), some people aren't worth working with.
() your mechanic program was likely doomed because "that's not how cars work". I was never going to be a customer because I have a mechanic who's been looking after my cars for 30 years. He always seems to have cars to work on, do I guess he's not a customer either. If I buy a car new it comes with a service plan, so I'm out that loop.
In other words I suspect your app solved a problem that's only a problem to fresh grads with their first car. And they just ask their mates, or their dad.
As you discovered you can't feature your way out of the "no market" problem. You discovered that finding a market is more important than building a product. All excellent lessons.
Absolutely - I mention this at the end. This experience was a springboard into my first “real” startup, and I’ve been working my way up fast since then!
I had a similar wake-up call when I joined a startup. I had over a decade experience working in stable companies, but I learned so much in a short time.
What surprised me the most, was that I did not improve much technically, as we chose well known technologies to get the job done. Focusing on product over tech was one of the best decisions we made.I also learned to make compromises and accept some technical debt in order to get the product out in time. You get a much deeper view of the business needs when you work in a smaller group.
Having previously existed in the VC-backed startup world, one thing I don't miss is the belief that its the _only_ rational way to run a business. In reality there are a lot of dangers to that approach, like you pointed out.
VCs _need_ promising businesses to join their portfolio, so they'll always be trying to convince you to raise money and have a tiny shot at making it big. If you fail, well, you're just one business in their portfolio, another one will pick up the loss. But it's the _only_ company you have, so you are doing the right thing by growing sustainably.
There's something extremely freeing about running a bootstrapped business and knowing you don't _need_ anyone to keep it running. Cheers to the next 10 years for you and your team.
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