Przemek Chojecki of Contentyze ($4k/mo) bootstraps his way to 3000 users, finishes strong in 2020
Ending 2020 with 3000 users. Happy New Year, folks! I hope 2021 is a wonderful and fulfilling year for you and yours.
In many (very obvious) ways, 2020 was a doozy. But a ton of indie hackers came out ahead.
Here's how @pchojecki of Contentyze ($4,000/mo) used the lockdown to knuckle under, overcoming his doubts and finishing strong:
The best and the worst thing that happened to me in 2020 was bootstrapping my business as a solo founder.
It was all coming out of my pocket so I worried about every single cost. It limited what I could do. And it meant spending more time working. Between building Contentyze and consulting to make sure I had a budget, it took up my whole summer. Weekends included. But with COVID and the travel bans, it didn't really feel like a sacrifice.
As a solo founder, there was no one there to help me. If I didn't do it myself, no one would. So I needed to have a constant stream of internal motivation. Luckily, I had that. Contentyze started as a tool for myself, and I wanted to build it even if no one else ended up using it. But I had my moments of doubt too. I was very tempted to just get rid of the frontend component and use the algorithms on my own again. It would have been a lot easier.
So I gave myself a deadline — the end of 2020. And in the end, I went from an idea in January to a working product with 3,000 users in December.
The feeling of responsibility makes it all worth it. I'm responsible for the successes. I'm responsible for the failures. And there's this really amazing sense of fulfillment that I get when I complete something and see how it grows the organization.
In late November, a VC firm invested in my business. I'll probably miss my bootstrapping days, but now I'm fully focused on growth. 2021 definitely looks exciting!
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