Welcome to our fourth issue where I will share the news that you don’t want to miss about SaaS bootstrappers.
Last Sunday, I shared the interview of Lukas Hermann and got great engagements. And this Sunday I will share a story of a bootstrapper who accepted a VC money later on.
Before sharing the links and my comments on each, I would like to give some details about how the SaaS Bootstrappers newsletter is going:
We have 125 subscribers at the moment. 🤗
I have scheduled 10+ interviews and recorded a session with 5 of them.
I am thinking about preparing an e-book for a new year gift.
1- Mac Martine is the operator of thesaasbootstrapper.co and he is also running a business named Aware. On his latest post, he shared the list of marketplaces that SaaS bootstrappers can build a product.
My View:
Building a product for a specific marketplace can help you to grow faster than you expected as they have an audience that is ready to test something new.
2- Marc Lou is an active guy on Twitter and he shared how he made $63K Revenue in 60 Days on Indie Hackers with his project named shipfa.st.
My View:
He used ProductHunt, Reddit and Twitter to leverage the product. And the metrics seem attractive. However, we should also learn the active level of subscribers. For instance, if shipfa.st has 1.000 subscribers I should know;
How many of them using the product actively?
How many of them paid for the product but didn’t use it yet?
How many of them are potential churns.
Honestly, that kind of posts just shows the numbers that can grab the attention of exciting bootstrappers but it doesn’t make sense to me. This is the same for most of the catchy products at Indie Hackers as well. Net Retention Revenue is more valuable than those metrics and we should get more details about customers. I have written an article related to this on LinkedIn and you may want to check it out.
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3- Hanna Larsson published an interview on her newsletter on LinkedIn including Melissa Kwan and Philipp Baaske, both are bootstrapping their businesses.
My View:
Last week I also shared the post of Melissa Kwan and I like the term she mentioned “purple ocean”. Which means, focusing on a specific niche in a huge market.
Regarding Philipp Baaske, he suggests everyone to sell the product instead of developing new features. This might be challenging for developer background founders. I totally agree with Dustin in this case.
Dear Indie Hackers who code,
What is stopping you from partnering with someone that does marketing?
This is the way.
Love,
Dustin— Dustin McCaffree 😈 (@terribledustin)
3:36 PM • Nov 7, 2023
4- Levels.io’s latest tweet about comparing bootstrapped vs. VC-backed founders became popular on Twitter.
He shared becoming a wealthy person with VC money is much more challenging compared to bootstrapped founders and this is more stressful.
And no one shares bootstrappers’ life as it’s not sexy - except Twitter accounts.
Re: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381128…
Crazy to see how poor most of my VC funded friends are, literally scraping by
Meanwhile my bootstrapped friends are entering HNWI and UHNWI category now buying luxury yachts and mansions (not my thing but good for them)
10 years ago all of them were… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— @levelsio (@levelsio)
11:56 AM • Nov 4, 2023
My View:
I totally agree that we should see more news and insights about bootstrappers. I don’t think their numbers are less compared to VC funding startups and they should take place on well-known blogs like TechCrunch. Bootstrappers.com and starters.story are the popular channels but the former one hasn’t been updating the content for a while.
There is not only one way of building a tech company. You can use your savings, get a loan, work for your day job while building your product and take a government grant. So, people can also consider those while building a product.
And this tweet also supports what levels.io shared.
I see bad signs from startup ecosystem.
More than 50% of my network are VC backed founders, many of whom raised seed and some series A 2-3 years ago.
Every week I get few messages from them that they shut down their startup because they run out of money and couldn’t get more… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— John Rush (@johnrushx)
11:17 PM • Nov 4, 2023
5- Greg Head is leading Practical Founders podcast and is also a veteran consultant for saas bootstrapping companies. He shared an e-book for bootstrappers where he included 7 success paths with examples from his podcast episodes. Totally recommend you to check.
Bonus:
Erwin has been organizing live sessions on Twitter Space where he hosts bootstrappers. Here is the link.
Ben Tossell launched a platform where indie businesses can find micro-investments for their businesses.
See you on Sunday for the interview of Onur Geneş who is the founder of Nureply.
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