[frabia]

I've experimented with this approach and here are my two cents. I've built an app meant to be "an advanced prompt editor" for working with LLMs (https://www.quartzite.ai in case anybody is curious).

I've seen that a lot of bootstrapped recommended starting with LTDs and I decided to try this approach. Sure, in the beginning, I got a bit of money, and surely it's easier to convince somebody to pay $50 once (i.e. LTD) compared to $5/month. So right in the first months, I've gotten approximately $1k/month with very little promotion, which is nice.

However, as the user count grew I also started to feel an increase of pressure. The cost of running my app is very low, so cost wasn't the issue, but I felt a bit like a fraud. What would happen if I decided to discontinue the product? Refunding 100 customers would have been painful, but still doable. However, as I kept increasing the user base, so were my concerns about how to handle a worst-case scenario.

Furthermore, offering an LTD for a product that still needs to grow means partially that you are making a promise about the product you want to build. What if you decided in the future you wanted to pivot? Sure, you can disregard your users who bought the LTD thinking they would get a certain product, while you decided to build a different one, but personally I didn't like that idea, and once again this increased my stress level.

So, all in all, I didn't like it too much and decided to switch to a subscription (although fairly low). Nowadays I feel much better with the overall revenue model. A user doesn't like the product? They are free to leave after one month, and nobody has different expectations about that. At the same time, I came to discover some additional benefits compared to an LTD:

- users are more engaged with your product. In a way, with a subscription, they are deciding every month whether your product makes sense for them, and they will be more vocal about what they need and don't, which is very useful feedback as a founder. Plus, churn data can tell you more accurately if you are improving your product or not.

- to my surprise, my conversion rate didn't change (it might even be slightly higher than with LTDs). My guess here is that buying a LTD still involves a bit of trust in the founder/company which, if you don't have a large following on social media, it might be difficult to get upfront. Overall this has been a painful lesson, as I realized that if I started with a subscription right from the beginning, I would have a much greater MRR by now.

- best of all, I see my product growing sustainably now. Every week/month is a little better, and I don't have to worry every month about how to reach a certain target revenue (of course, with LTDs you start from zero every month). Overall, I feel I'm building a product for the long run now and towards being a profitable business (still getting there).

So all in all, I don't know if I would recommend the same approach as the author describes. Sure, I've seen people executing it well and effectively bootstrapping their app in a short time, but my guess is that happens if you have a good base of followers and you can kickstart your marketing channels too. Also, if your product is sustainable as a one-time purchase (e.g. a desktop app, a content piece, etc.) then LTDs are definitely more attractive, but I don't see the point of trying to build a SaaS without having a feedback if your users are really willing to buy a subscription form you.