My Fifth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder
Five years ago today, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own self-funded software business. This is a review of my last year and what I've learned so far about bootstrapping software businesses.
mtlynch.io
Hi Michael, awesome post, you're building a really cool product! Hardware looks like a tough business. Hope you have a great next year with a lot of profit and less annoying chip shortage issues!
PicoShare also looks cool! Do you have any further (commercial) plans for it?
Thanks for reading!
I'm leaving the door open for commercial plans with PicoShare, but I don't have any spare personal bandwidth in the short-term. I think there might be a market for it, but I worry I'd spend too much time fighting abuse.
Hey Michael,
The first thing I thought when I saw it was file sharing was abuse. I would imagine it would be a nightmare to stay on top of. I've dealt with similar issues running the URL Shortener T.LY. Malicious users are relentless, and you must build tools to stay on top of it.
Awesome job with TinyPilot. I've been following your journey for a long time. It's a really neat product! Curious about how you are marketing and what has worked best.
YouTube has worked really well. I've contacted YouTubers in the homelab niche and offer them a device to review, and their audiences tend to be a good match for TinyPilot. There's a big spike when a new review comes out, and then for months after, people tell me they found TinyPilot through a YouTube channel they like.
That's an awesome idea to reach out to YouTubers! Thanks for sharing
Totally get it! Do you think it would be viable to offer some kind of premium self-hosted version of PicoShare in order to not have to deal with abuse?
Inspiring! I would love to see MORE bootstrapped independent founders like you!
Wow, what a legend!! Ty for building in piublic.
Im starting with rippedrich.com
Any advice from your early days? Looking to build a newsletter and grow an audience
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youre my inspiration dog
Good idea for product, but probably should do market research first. I think the profitable kvm business would be thunderbolt kvm.
That said, perhaps you can tailor that to have some value add services or other way to monitize instead of selling as kvm devices. find out what your customers are like and maybe customize for their needs. getting that first step is hard which you already did, you can think about what they need on top of it.
Keep going!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.