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Code For Cash – Month 10 Report
By
Zack Burt
October 19, 2017
Code For Cash – Month 10 Report
Discuss this article or ask me any questions you may have.
Thanks for sharing, just upvoted it.
In your spreadsheet, how do you calculate 'Visitor-to-prospect rate:'?
Is that just based off the demographics in Google Analytics?
I have a widget on the homepage where you can see quickly how many gigs we would be able to find you, given your skillset and preferences in terms of time availability. I save all the queries to the database, so I count anyone who fills out that widget as a prospect.
Visits: unique visitors in Google Analytics
Prospects: Prospect records in our internal database
It's not 100% accurate because I don't save prospect IP addresses currently (so no way to unique), but it's a helpful measurement
This is awesome, thanks for sharing it.!
Daniel,
You are absolutely welcome
Thanks for sharing. One more growth VC for you to consider is the one Courtland interviewed in one of the early podcast episodes: Indie VC. The also have a sensible funding model for bootstrapped companies.
I hit them up in July
Subject: Thank you for applying to Indie.vcNima Elyassi-Rad <[email address redacted]> – Jul 31Polite enough rejection email and I appreciate the bridge to keep in touch via social media.
However, at this time I actually don't want growth capital.
I recently changed the funnel to not require a signup on homepage and the visitor-to-signup ratio has actually climbed to 5%+ (a 15+x jump). But just measured the data on Friday and none of the new signups have converted yet(⚠⚠⚠⚠⚠)– that's an urgent problem that must be resolved before spending additional money on marketing, as this must be fixed and the funnel re-measured.
Anyway once this is fixed I am going to start pouring money into growth, and I will evaluate Indie VC's terms vs. credit card debt. I will post up my analysis on Indie Hackers for everyone's feedback. My gut feeling is that if we could use credit card debt to climb to 15K MRR, it would be a heckuva lot smarter to just use revenue financing since Lighter Capital doesn't take an equity option in addition to the repayment.
I agree with your gut feeling. I think that getting money when there's a lot of room to optimize your current funnels can lead to developing bad habits. You'll start focusing on ads & traffic instead of fixing the leaks that you're otherwise driven (out of necessity) to deal with.
There's probably a sweet spot for outside capital: a time in your business where you've optimized processes enough (marginal returns) and now all that's missing is traffic.
You're absolutely right, and I think when that happens, you don't need money because you can rationally evaluate all available options. On more of a human level, though, it would be nice to find someone that says "You are special and I believe in you. Here is money to go explore and find a business model". Obviously, Indie VC didn't offer that but in 2015 someone in Chicago did. He gave me and a friend $15K to go work on a project (his terms were a zero interest loan for a year and a half). So, iff I get this to a point where I'm making money by scaling through credit card debt, I will talk to him. I more recently suggested to him that I wouldn't approach him for money for this until we're at $10K MRR.
Yeah, I get what you mean. I think I remember the indie vc guy saying that some of their founders simply want to start paying themselves a normal salary. Even if the company is successful, taking money out means less growth capital so most founders delay it as much as possible. It takes a toll eventually though.
Telling myself greatness requires sacrifice
Thank you for sharing your journey!
How do you monitor all these job markets? Do you have a custom scraper for each of them?
Yep, 45+ custom scrapers, managed by cron. But future scrapers are being written as scheduled lambda (serverless) functions
Hey Zack,
really great thing you are doing here. I am new to your work so I don't have much in the way of questions but I wish you all the best. Is this your 100% fulltime gig right now? Seems like it is.
Hey swyx, yes, I am fully focused on this, although I do supplement the MRR with consulting. Tell you the truth, having this as my main income source puts tons of pressure on me to deliver. The opportunity cost is so high.. many days, I do feel like just packing it in and getting a cushy software engineering job
devil's advocate - how different would the business look if you -did- go get a job and only did this on nights and weekends? sometimes things aren't always the either-or propositions we make them out to be.
Well, recently, I've been setting everything up so the business could potentially run on autopilot. So yes, it would be possible for me to run the business and spend the majority of my hours at a square job being exploited by someone else. I would also have to ruthlessly prioritize my time to the 20% of things that deliver 80% of the results. My general point is that everyone, including myself, feels like giving up sometimes. It's the steady grind of work that enables creative breakthroughs and illuminates the 20% of efforts that create the most impact
Edit: I see you are also a UChicago alum
This comment was deleted 9 years ago