Agreed with the automation — I’m a fellow bootstrapper[0] in the SaaS space, and wouldn’t be without it. If there is anything that can be automated, even if slightly prematurely before the need to scale arises, I do so.

In terms of infrastructure, this meant using Ansible for quickly deploying new servers where needed and adding them to the right load balancer. Currently all I need to do is spin up a new instance with the right tag & run the relevant Ansible script - this will grab a copy of the site from git, sort out dependencies and any other apps needed (supervisord and so on), and add it to the nginx loadbalancer config as a new upstream server.

Same applies for things like billing. Yes I could have started off doing billing manually, sending out invoices etc, but these take time and realistically need to be automated to avoid any errors.

These things definitely meant I didn’t get my MVP out in weeks, but meant I could still do this as a solo-bootstrapper and look after a young family and such.

[0] https://breachinsider.com