Comment by giorgioz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giorgioz | Hacker News Reader

I've been a solopreneur boostrapping waiterio.com for 6 years and then 2 more years with 1-3 fulltime team members with a 20k MRR after 8 years. I've chosen the bootstrap SaaS path after working 1 year in Silicon Valley. I thought all my life my dream was to build incredible stuff in Silicon Valley, then I got there and I didn't like it enough. When I was there I felt lonely and tired and sad. Despite having rare skills as Android and iOS developer 10 YEARS AGO my manager assigned me to build landing pages. This was after not passing hiring interviews for Facebook/Google but still getting in one of the big ones. I felt unappreciated and pushed to work a lot on something that wasn't even my specialty. The Silicon Valley is/was a sausage fest and it was very hard dating. When I pitched at events I felt I wasn't being considered at all. I was and I am too afraid that the fact I am Italian and/or a pragmatic and nerdy developer with no salesy wowing pitch skills would let others with little technical skills and a big mouth take all the venture funds.

I left the Silicon Valley and started to work on waiterio.com while travelling the world. I lived in 10+ countries for 6 months each, I saw the world, met a lot of interesting people and found love.

Congratulations for doing what you love!

I decided to close my startup after I woke up from a surgery which had 50% chance of survival because until couple of hours before the surgery I was typing the product strategy to my shareholders in case I die. Then I spent the next whole year winding up my startup in midst of recovery and the whole process still gives me PTSD.

So I decided to go solo, to build what I want and possibly what others need. I've been doing it for past 2 years and I'm happy.

Are you earning income from what you are building now?

I do, though not at the level of those mentioned in OP or parent; My products have crossed trough of sorrow and so if I stay consistent I could get to a comfortable state eventually.

But consistency is the key which is especially hard for some with OCD to build, So I try to put my maximum energy on couple of main products and the rest on fast to fail side projects.

Thank you! I admire that you managed to turn a life threatening situation into an opportunity for growth and happiness!

How do you approach your potential customers? I applaud your effort, I was in your shoes. But for your idea (SaaS for restaurants), your competitors probably hire an army of sales because restaurant owners are busy with day-to-day and relatively not high-tech.

Yes indeed. My (huge amount of) competitors indeed have an army of sales.

If you are David and the others are Goliath just don't play the same game they are playing because you are bound to lose. Find out what you are good at and play a completely different game from them.

We don't do sales. 8 years ago Waiterio was just a mobile app and got the customers from the app stores. These days we do a lot of content marketing and i18n.

Are you a founder from a non English speaking country? I'll be extracting my internal tools for content marketing and i18n. Write me here if you would like to give it a try.

Would love to! I'm a dev, if it's open source, maybe I can help improve it. Btw I don't see anyway to reach you in your HN profile.

You don't want to necessarily play the same game as your competitors, but you should probably consider at least building up an understanding of what it is they're doing, why, and whether there are lighter versions of it that you can achieve. The 80/20 rule can go a long way, and a B2B company that "doesn't do sales" is probably leaving a lot of easy money on the table, depending what exactly that means (do you just not do high-touch individual pitching? Or no advertising at all? [Sounds like you do some of that at least, which is a kind of sales] Do you try to use existing customers to get referrals to new ones? If a potential customer does want to talk to someone do you support that? Etc).

The best CEOs I've known are basically sales people, and they all tell me that it's a skill you really can learn, even with a language barrier - I know several Indian tech folks who sell like crazy in the US even as I can barely understand their accents, so it's not an insurmountable barrier, though I do understand that's a bit of a special case since the Indian culture is very keen on teaching negotiation and sales as a life skill and a lot of the dealings end up being with other Indian entrepreneurs.

Thanks for your thoughts.

WHAT WE DO By not doing sales I mean that customers can register and use our product and pay for it without being forced to speak to a human being. We have few transactional flow emails but we do not try to establish a one-to-one relationship with every customer. We offer chat support and email support but that's it. I do contact restaurants on Whatsapp asking them to be alpha users in new products to get feedback. My intention though is more to get feedback rather than make a sale.

I do have an understanding of the strategy of many competitors. Sales are not my forte and I prefer to pursue other strategies where I can outdo my competitors. I've a background in software engineering but I did acquire a lot of marketing skills to have the startup succeed. I do not wish to get in high-touch sales. I'm not good at it and also I don't think it's a good strategy with restaurants which are SMB (small and medium business). The SaaS plans for restaurants range in the 15-100$ and I think is a classic example where nets will catch more customers than spears.

What's your background? Are you in sales?

>Are you a founder from a non English speaking country?

Glad to take a look at it, shoot me an email!

Where are the forums for people with this mindset? It used to be you could talk small-scale entrepreneurship on webdev forums of old, but now there s too much talk of raising money/marketing to death/bulshit your way up/game the system

https://microconf.com/ and surrounds

Great story, thanks for sharing it. I have a friend who has been an entrepreneur his whole life, many different kinds of businesses. He wanted to partner with me eight years ago to write something similar to your Waiterio product, but I have always been hesitant to give up just working for pay. Your story, and this article is inspiring, but probably not enough for me. It is difficult in life to give up successful paths for the unknown.

I often say that high dev salaries are both a blessing and a curse for entrepreneur-minded devs. The opportunity cost and bar for success can be insanely high

Where did you meet your love?

Asking the right questions!

How on earth do you afford 1-3 team members on 20k MRR?

Easily? Depends on the location of course, but for central/east EU the numbers are legit.

A big part is probably not being in Silicon Valley or any other high cost of living location. T&C has governing law in England & Wales so remove company paid healthcare insurance as a big factor.

You pay them $70k instead of $150k

What sort of tech stack do you need for these types of businesses?

I was wondering too, particularly whether most MVPs and early stage startups are web apps (React, Vue etc.) delaying native mobile versions.

Very inspiring. Thank you for sharing.

For those thinking the Silicon Valley is still a sausage fest, I suggest you guys to try Northern Europe. Good life, nice pay and amazing women :)

They are low key racist though (compared to the US). They are kinda racist to other Europeans. Eg Polish people and Southern Europeans would be looked down.

That’s a bizarre generalisation.

1. I lived in Sweden, and kinda experienced this. I was treated much better when I told people I live in the US/NYC. Also my colleagues there had hard time making friends.

2. Norway is staunchly anti-immigrant for a reason. It has resources and they like to keep it that way. They wont even give visas to foreign grand-parents unless one of the grandparents has died. This happened to my dad's friend. His daughter married to a Norwegian, he couldn't stay more than few weeks at a time with his grandchildren (treated like a tourist). Finally when he died from cancer, wis wife (the grandmother), finally could. This is especially cruel from a country that has trilions of oil money. (The US sytem, while flawed, is very family friendly).

3. Danemark had enough, and it is turning to the right and started doing all kinds of ant-immigration laws.

Denmark's immigrants forced out by government policies: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/06/denmarks-immigrants-for...

Now, the OP, said came to north europe as they are plenty of women. I am warning the OP as he will face some kind of low key discrimination as those countries traditionally have been mono-enthnic nation states, and as a foreigner you will always be treated like an 'other'.

Just giving it the reality on the ground. I know the US gets a lot of flack about racist this, or that, but the reality the US is the least racist country among western countries. Europe is on another level. They discriminate routinely against other europeans.

The main complain in the UK during brexit was about Romanians and Polish plumbers taking the jobs away....

well, I am from Turkey and I have been living in Denmark for 5 years.

I really understand what you are saying. I think that Racism is everywhere and it is not specific to Northern Europe. During my 7 years in Europe, I have developed some sort of immunity for low key discrimination and I have been lucky enough to build my social circle. So, I don't care right now much.

P.S: I'm white, good-looking and have European look. I think these are also important.

You’re mixing up two different things. A desire to control immigration is not evidence of racism.

Where specifically in Northern Europe do you suggest? What is the visa situation and cost of living? I'm assuming any mobility will be difficult in COVID era.

If I were you and If I were in my 20s, I would definitely go to Berlin.

Mobility is easy within the EU. Assuming you’re vaccinated of course.

which part of northern europe? my experience was that it was cool but not particularly different in that respect

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