Ask HN: Leaving my job to boostrap my projects. Advice?

[welpwelp]

Hello HN! I've decided to quit my job to boostrap my projects à la IndieHackers. I don't want to raise money and I only have a few $k. My plan is to build everything myself, using a stack such as Python/Django + HTML/CSS/JavaScript + eventually iOS, and the initial goal after validating my MVPs is to become "ramen profitable."

Levels has been greatly inspiring to me and I've read most of his blog and work about NomadList. https://twitter.com/levelsio

I'm going to go with the flow and figure out and learn things as I go, so my question is whether there are any advice you can think of (release on Tuesday?) that could possibly save me time, money, and mistakes.

Let me know if knowing what the projects are about, but they're basically simple services with niche userbases (e.g: Squarespace for photographers and Slack for gyms)

Thank you HN!

[tiborsaas]

> I've decided to quit my job to boostrap my projects à la IndieHackers.

I did this and it was fun and everything, but I never made a single cent. I did grow my personal network though :) If you value learning from others, keep your job and only quit if you make at least 50 to 75% of your salary AND you see constant growth.

> using a stack such as Python/Django + HTML/CSS/JavaScript + eventually iOS

Another red flag. Technology doesn't matter and the fact that you mention this instead of business validation you should think twice before making such a commitment.

EDIT: I forgot to add that the technology part is at most 10-15% of it. The rest is boring marketing, tons of spreadsheets, Google, Google, Google, Email^n, more spreadsheets and business operations if you are lucky.

[marktangotango]

>> Another red flag. Technology doesn't matter and the fact that you mention this instead of business validation you should think twice before making such a commitment.

This is a very, very true. I also did this, quit to work on a side project for about 8 months (2008). I wrote a lot of code, but in the end the project had a couple of hard problems and the market was a small number of large corporations. When I finally realized this, and ran the numbers, I discovered my folly. That and I found myself web surfing all day instead of coding. Went back to work.

Next project (2011) I also didn't validate the market, but kept working, it never launched. For my third project (2016) I launched but didn't validate the market either.

What have I learned? Validate the $#@!ing market before writing a line of code! I'm still trying to figure out how to do this however.

[jventura]

Another one that quit his job to bootstrap own projects, and only made some 100 Euros from them..

It is hard, really hard, and I even had some kind of a business plan. But one thing is sure, you'll learn a lot about yourself from the process.

I'm now teaching CS classes on a local university.

[siphr]

> "...Technology doesn't matter..." <

Key point this one.

[swalsh]

I'm in a similar boat, I left my job a few days ago. I have a substantial savings though, and i'm actively looking for contract work.

I've spent 10 years trying to get side projects off the ground while staying employed, each time I've gotten a little bit closer to something, but not quite there. Here's what I've learned.

1. Tech doesn't matter, the value you're creating does. If you build something no one is using, who cares what powered it? You should use what you're already most productive in.

2. You need to start selling before you have a product, it should influence your product, or help you avoid building something useless.

3. If you want to do everything yourself you should choose your idea based on what you're capable of. In terms of sales I had a lot of B2B ideas, but I found i've been more successful with paid ads and SEO. Doesn't mean that cold calling, and networking are not effective, but it's not my personal strength. Building a business is hard enough, ramping up new skills probably isn't something you have time for.

4. You can create a market, or you can compete in an existing market. If you have to create demand, it's going to take a lot longer than your planning for.

5. Getting people to pay for stuff is REALLY HARD, you should talk to people. The idea i'm working on now came after hours of talking to potential customers, I didn't write a line of code until I fully vetted the idea.

/just where i'm at right now. Hope it helps.

[erjjones]

> 2. You need to start selling before you have a product, it should influence your product, or help you avoid building something useless.

This is the best advice and to push it further I would say you need to have a customer ready to go and willing to work with you.

6. YOLO so go for it. You don't want to be 80 years old looking back and thinking I wish I would have.

[BugsJustFindMe]

Hi there. Fellow job quitter here, (though for extremely long vacation rather than bootstrapping). A lot of people in this thread are telling you not to quit your job because they are scared of not having "a long runway". I'm going to tell you about the other side of that.

Understand how much it actually costs to live for a year. In reality it doesn't cost all that much. You can live comfortably in Boston or Paris, not cheap cities, with loads of extra traveling to keep yourself happy, for less than $20k/year without resorting to sleeping on couches or in your parents' basement. If you cut out expensive traveling, the truth is that reasonable rent and healthy food aren't _that_ expensive.

Talk to your current employer before quitting. If they are happy with you now, they will most likely be happy to re-hire you in 7-12 months or however long when things don't work out as planned. Don't say that you're quitting. Say that you're leaving to try to start a business and that if it fails you'd love to come back. If the people who are currently happy with you and who matter aren't still at CompanyX in Y months, plan now to hit those people up directly at whatever their CompanyZs when things don't work out as planned. But ask now before you quit.

Get a gym membership and use it at least 3 days per week.

[BugsJustFindMe]

One more thing. Remember that the cost of doing this is not just your cost of living for the duration. You also lose all of the salary+benefits that you would have made. Loss of continued earnings can have a big impact on retirement investment accounts long term. Prepare yourself psychologically for that reality with a quick lifetime opportunity cost calculation now.

[mod]

I both agree with this comment, and want to say I'm not sure it fits OP.

You can live very, very cheaply. I was almost 30 before I made 20k+/year. I never felt put out or hungry. I always had a place--usually a room in a house with other people. I paid rent every month of my life starting when I was 16, so I wasn't just bumming around, eitehr. I did feel I was "behind" my peers, sometimes.

Anyway, you will find that a majority of people, particularly in places like HN where income is high, vastly overestimate the amount of money required for a single, obligation-free adult with few bad/expensive habits.

During all of the above time, I didn't eat out, I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I didn't do any drugs. I also didn't visit any doctors, buy anything new at all, etc.

There are many, many tradeoffs to consider, but the point is a barebones existence to develop a website involves a safe place to sit, sleep, shower, and have internet. That can be had for a very, very small price if you are willing to, for instance, rent a room from a stranger. You can subsist on relatively healthy foods without access to a stove or refrigerator, etc.

The problem typically is occupying your non-work time. For most people living in similar conditions, that's where the bulk of their money goes.

As for OP: I'm not sure you're prepared to live this cheaply. If you were, it seems like you'd have mentioned it already. For a more-normal person, like renting an apartment and eating out sometimes and owning a car and tv and all--a few thousand dollars (as in singluar-thousands) is not much runway.

[xenopticon]

1. Don't quit your job if you can't live off savings for at least a year. Having a job allows you to have a safe base to experiment ideas without the burden of making profit.

2. This is business, forget about the tech stack you are using or finding the perfect tool. Your main goal is to create value and make someone's life easier. My advice is to use the tools you are most familiar with, this will allow you to be productive without worrying about things like "which chart library is the best for Angular 2 RC 5". There are successful business that started out with a spreadsheet.

3. Be aware of survivorship bias. While Levels apparently succeeded bootstrapping many of his businesses (and I think he did), there are hundreds of other people that you'll never hear the name of who failed miserably and wasted many keystrokes on launching a failed product.

4. "Perfect is the enemy of good". Ship things fast and don't be afraid of doing things that don't scale like processing payment, hard coding a few things (if you know what you're doing) and even calling users to get a feedback on your product.

[porpoisemonkey]

About #1... If you're going to work in the same field while trying to start a company it's important to have your employment contract reviewed by an attorney. Intellectual property rights can become contentious if your business starts making money.

[tonylemesmer]

Generate income first then quit your job. If you don't have revenue coming from your products, you'll spend most of your time trying to do that. And note, that isn't coding or product development its advertising.

Before I started contracting I changed jobs to ease my work / life situation. Early finish at work and shorter commute allowed me to do side projects. After 1 year I'm now starting to launch some of the projects and still not generating revenue yet.

Set yourself goals and hit them, every month. Then quit.

[chrisabrams]

I'd second this. The stress level between a profitable / breakeven setup vs one that is not is quite large.

[ghettosoak]

Almost 2 years ago, I quit my cushy dev job at an ad agency to do just this. I was bored to tears, and the thought of the work that really interested me languishing at home while I hacked away on yet another promotional website drove me batty.

I got lucky and was able to live rent free for a few months, sleeping in guest rooms and couches while I travelled / hacked around the midwest. Living is expensive, make sure you have things budgeted properly. It’ll save a lot of unpleasant surprise down the road.

Unless you’re building something that’s immediately profitable, you will take on outside work. But that’s okay – you now get to decide what you work on.

Don’t expect anyone to understand your path. Sure, you’ll get the few pats on the back for being ‘courageous’, but those closest to you will think you’re nuts. If you have a girlfriend / wife, this adds a significant stressor to your relationship.

People like Levels make this lifestyle look easy. It’s not. ‘Ramen profitable’ has the same romantic appeal as a ‘starving artist’, but when you’ve got $54.20 in your bank account to pay 7k in bills that were due last month, and no money coming in; it loses a bit of its lustre.

This life is hard. It is often lonely. But if you play your cards right, it is fun. I unequivocally have the coolest job in the world – and I don’t regret a step I’ve taken.

Who dares, wins.

[shinamee]

I really love your facts, knowing that the journey wont be easy but its all about the things you want in life and you also have to learn to enjoy the process

[bshimmin]

I've decided to quit my job ... and I only have a few $k

I don't know the specifics of your situation, but this seems like a really bad plan. Usually when I advise people who are about to start contracting, I tell them they should have 3 to 6 months of rent before they start; contracting is much more of a sure thing than building Slack for dogs.

[aaronhoffman]

Yes, bootstrap at night while paying the bills during the day. As your side project starts to make money, contract less.

[soneca]

I believe superniche is good.

If you dont hate your job, I would suggest you to stay in your job until you validate your idea. It allows you to keep earning money while you are not actually building anything (validate an idea is not a fulltime job). And also it helps to keep you in the right mental state that your first idea most certainly isnt the right idea.

If you quit your job with an idea in mind and the plan of validating it then executing, it will be much harder to change or even discard this idea ("this idea is why I quit my job afterall!").

Validate your idea (with or without a MVP) before quitting your job. That's my two cents

[welpwelp]

Thank you for your reply! I have tried to keep my job, but working a 10am/7pm job with a 90mn commute everyday left me with only the weekends to work on something else. Also it's become harder and harder to get up everyday to spend the day working on something that does not wholeheartedly passionates me. Hence the decision to quit.

[hluska]

Lots of people are pointing out that you have focused too much on your stack. Don't be dismayed by that feedback - it is incredibly common, especially among the sorts of people who are skilled enough to bootstrap a software company.

That said, don't ignore the message behind that. At this point, the only important thing is to build a product that a few people absolutely love. This product has to solve a problem so acute that those people are willing to pay for it.

That is a marketing problem, so it is going to take some different skills. You're going to need to learn how to go out and find users. You are going to have to learn how to pick out problems that are small enough for you to solve, yet big enough to earn a living off of. And, you are going to have to learn to kill off your emotional attachment to your product.

Those are tough problems and they tend to require significant personal growth.

I have been guilty of jumping into businesses too quickly, so I understand your zeal. Without knowing more about your life, it's hard for me to say whether a few thousand dollars is enough to survive on. So, let me frame my last point as a question.

If you quit your job today and did not make any revenue at all, how many months are you away from being homeless??

Sometimes, when you're excited about a vision, it is easy to come up with conservative estimates of, say, $1500 of monthly recurring revenue in four months. That is a big mistake, especially amongst newer founders. With products like ours, the only truly conservative estimate is that you will make $0.

I don't know if I would put that in a pitch deck though...:)

Anyways, best of luck and have fun. You caught the bug!! I hope that you have an immense amount of success and when you do, I look forward to reading about you on Indiehackers!

[Kiro]

I think you should become ramen profitable before quitting your job. When I quit my side-business was doing $1 million in revenue. I only quit because the work load from customer support had become impossible to deal with on evenings and weekends.

[kowdermeister]

Oh wow, what industry / service you did as a side project?

I can't imagine keeping my job once I start to make more on the side than doing something full time. Maybe there are that cool places to work, but I haven't seen any so far :)

[OJFord]

$1M in revenue and you're doing so much customer support yourself that that's the reason you quit the day-job?

[santa_boy]

Wow! Did you have a team when you were 1Mn in revenue!? If not, what was your side business?

[dutchbrit]

Launch as soon as possible/keep your first version as simple as possible (proof of concept). You might think, ah, but I need that cool feature, bla bla bla. It might be a cool feature, but is it essential for your product to simply work?

Listen to feedback. Keep everything bite sized & keep releasing new features along the way. Don't let people find your product, but approach your potential customers.

Allow them to take your product for a test drive & listen to there needs & frustrations. Focus on satisfying your customers & fulfilling their needs.

Keep building your network. You can build the best product out there, but it's useless without users.

Good luck, and more importantly, have fun! ;)

[sharemywin]

It's kinda messed up but I hired a contractor to build my site(even though I'm a developer) I built the database, come up with a spec for what I wanted and found someone for 20/hrs a week. We made a list of things to get done for the week. Used a hosted repository to check in code deployed it to a shared host. He would email me what he got accomplished each day. I would work on things he got stuck on. I payed him 1/7 what I get paid, so I it was a good trade in hours.

--->>>>But it's much, much more important to find some initial users.

[sudshekhar]

I was about to post exactly the same thing :)

Six months ago, I quite my dev job to work on my own startup ideas. Finished the first product, spent a lot of timing polishing it and ended up getting exactly 0 customers.

Then, we 'pivoted' and I created another product. Now we have some users but the growth is slow (marketing is waaayyyy tougher than I had imagined). So having finished the MVP, I am now looking to get a job and use the income to find somebody else to me promote the product.

I should've read Adam Smith more carefully...

[marktangotango]

I've often thought about doing this. How did you find the developer? How did it work out for you in the end?

[jasonkester]

It sounds like you've missed a key piece of advice somewhere along the way: Don't quit your day job until you have something replacing its income.

I live off the profits of a few bootstrapped SaaS products. It took six years before I was bringing in enough to comfortably live on.

If it's not too late, switch the "build a product" and "quit my job" steps around into the correct order.

[quakenul]

Mind sharing those products?

[jaxn]

Spend at least one hour every day on sales. Starting now.

Coding is the easy (and natural) part. In my experience, sales has been harder than I expected. Even when people love the product.

[3pt14159]

My advice is to not build Slack for Gyms, build XXX for everyone and go to market with an early niche that finds your software useful. Why limit yourself? Only other advice is to find clients that both have money and have an obvious problem. Don't try to sell to visible companies that you interact with all the time like a little restaurant. They don't have the income to support you. That military contractor that insecure, out of date site that looks embarrassing they are your target market. They don't bat at eye at a $10k invoice if it helps them make more income.

[SQL2219]

Lower your overhead. Reduce your rent - $0 would be ideal, if you have a car, consider selling it or replace it with a super cheap one. I bootstrapped for 10 years, and I did make some money along the way. BUT, I spent too long trying to make it work. Make sure you don't hang on too long. Give yourself a deadline for when this thing should be self-sustaining. Understand UPFRONT that taxes are going to suck up every penny you have. You are no longer a W2 employee, make sure you understand the difference taxes have on a business owner and a W2 employee.

[sahrizv]

Context: I quit my job in June 2016 to take a break from my career and among other things, build a product end to end. Money has run out now but passion hasn't and I'm close to first launch. I'm in Bangalore so I'm able to keep burn rate below $400/month.

Advice: I'd say go with the tech you know(exceptions only apply if your core differentiator is technological superiority, but that's rare). You'll have full days to yourself, so separate work time from leisure time, do physical exercise, be in touch with friends, don't reveal your plans/progress to many people, involve target users as soon as possible(most important). Lastly, enjoy the ride!

[lefstathiou]

You move a mountain one stone at a time. I strongly recommend that you find a way to create structure for yourself and make (meaningful) bit of progress coding daily. Set goals and deadlines early and measure yourself against them. You're on the clock (limited cash to burn through) so it's important that you avoid rabbit hole ideas and "fail quickly". Good luck and send HN your work for us to test out and provide feedback.

[welpwelp]

I like that idea and will keep you updated with progress. Thank you!

[traviswingo]

First of all, congratulations! This is a big step (albeit a little scary), but it's the kind of step you'll never look back and regret.

I quit my job about a year ago to pursue my startup. It didn't work out, but I don't regret it.

I think the biggest thing that I messed up is truly underestimating my expenses. Make sure you budget (on paper, not just in your head :)) for "miscellaneous" expenses. When bootstrapping a project, it's really easy to say "woah, this really is valuable, I'll just put it on my high interest credit card because I'll be able to pay it off in a couple months with my cash flow." I made the mistake of looking at what it took for me to live and pay my bills, and severely underestimated all those little "misc." expenses that show up when bootstrapping a project.

Oh, and for what it's worth, the company I quit to work on my project full-time hired me back with open arms and a raise :). So don't worry too much about quitting, people understand and support your decisions more than you might think!

Good luck!

[dlss]

> and the initial goal after validating my MVPs

Validate before building an MVP.

See: https://steveblank.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/customer-deve... -- company building happens at the end, not at the start.

His book: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0989200507