Ask HN: Bootstrappers, what do you do during down time?

Keep in mind that downtime is what you're optimising for.

The big benefit of building a bootstrapped business is that you're not accountable to anybody. When you get to the point where you're making a nice profit and things slow down such that you don't need to put in 40 hour weeks anymore, that's an indicator that you need to go rock climbing.

Or surfing, travelling, playing with your children, salsa dancing, counter striking, novel writing, or whatever it was that you were planning to do once you hit it big and didn't have to work anymore.

Bootstrapped SaaS businesses have the nice side effect of giving you small tastes of that success before you actually hit the point where you can do it full time. My advice is to take advantage of it.

I was in a similar position as you two years ago. I had an app with steady sales, I handled rate customer requests, but for the most part didn't know how to improve my app and ended up wasting lots of time.

Then I realized that my app was finished. There was nothing to improve.

I concluded that there was only one possible thing to do: start something new. I made enough from my first app to support the family, and started working on my second app.

Now I have two apps earning money.

Also, 15h per day is way too much. I work an average of 4h per day, any longer and I lose concentration (unless I'm cranking out some interesting new code, then I work any minute my kids let me)

I wonder if you feel that you ought to be at your desk for at least the bulk of the traditional working day... Other people are working 8+ hours a day, so I should be too.

I struggle with that feeling. I've been bootstrapping my own business for years, and I have a strong inclination to feel guilty if I'm not "at work" while other people with more conventional jobs are at work. It can result in me spending a lot of unproductive time at my desk.

I recently took a year pretty much away from work, to do my house up (mostly building a home cinema, woo!). The business kept ticking over just fine with me doing 20 minutes of emails a day on average, and a bit more here and there to fix the odd pressing issue.

The time off reshaped my attitude to work-life balance quite considerably. After a year of not doing much work on my business, I no longer felt so guilty for not being at my desk. Now I go through phases of doing lots of work (I reckon that when the motivation is there, one should run with it), but I also try to do other things: meet friends for lunch, play tennis, learn Spanish, go on the odd little holiday. My instincts still tell me that I should be at my desk, working (or at least at my desk), but I've got better at seeing them as illogical and fighting them.

A huge perk of having your own small business is having the freedom to organize your time the way you want to. If you can have a successful business without having to put in lots of hours, that's great. But you have to give yourself permission to do this.

Sitting at a desk wasting time is pointless, but I can associate and I think it's a natural inclination. But it's a very unhealthy inclination, in my opinion much more so than the inclination to go and do something completely different, something fun.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't be able to find productive business-related things to do. Without knowing a lot more about what you do and what you're looking to do with your business I can't really comment on that. But with almost 15 hours a day at your computer, and "no life" (your words!) I do think you might do well to try and address your work/life balance, which may involve tackling the deep-seated feelings or instincts that have you sitting at your desk so long when you're not being productive.

I wonder if you feel that you ought to be at your desk for at least the bulk of the traditional working day... Other people are working 8+ hours a day, so I should be too.

What I learned as a writer is, focus on output, not time-spent or schedules met.

Set yourself a daily goal, but from there, be flexible in how you achieve it. When I was still writing, I'd try and aim for about 2k words a day, usually done off and on, but if I had an off day I just let it happen and took whatever break I needed to let the creativity come back in its time.

The thing is, the traditional work day is lousy for creative professions (and I count programming among these). It is a construct born of factory work, and you can't produce a quality creative process under factory conditions.

Give yourself a break, and let the mind take the respite it needs to get spinning again. I recommend taking a look out for John Cleese's insights on creativity and the creative process, he has done some lectures and videos on the subject that should be findable on Youtube, and they're very valuable insight into the different pressures of a creative field versus a 'production' one.

This. I have to say my happiest and most productive period was when I didn't have a desk job. I found a trick that worked really well was to start the day with a list of accomplishments that I thought would take less than 6-8hours. Often framing it like "I'll be happy if I do X,Y, and Z". If I finished in 15 minutes, I was done for the day. If I didn't finish by my 6-8 hour time limit, then I was still done for the day, and tomorrow I'd try to break up the task in such a way as I could finish parts of it in less than a day. I think an important part, and something OP might note, is that framing the tasks in terms of "happy if" really changes the psychology of the process. No longer can you say "I did all this stuff and it's not enough", since you already identified enough at the beginning. This coupled with the constant readjusting of expectations really helps avoid feelings of anxiety. I'm not sure this helps for a failing business (or if rent is due tomorrow) but it certainly helps if you have even a month's runway.

BTW, another place to ask this that's a bit more focused on bootstrapping is: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

One thing I do is hang out on the forums where people congregate, giving out some help. This generates good will, some links to my product, via a signature link and nothing more, since I want to be kind of subtle about it. It is also a good way to tune in to what problems people are facing.

nice! moving there from bootstrapers.io (community doesn't seem very active anymore).

easy answer: take a break/vacation!!!

hard answer: assuming you've taken the vacation, some options, in order:

1. if you're missing payroll, then cut staff & costs - you're bootstrapped and don't have 6+ months of payroll.

2. if you need help with leads, hire a startup marketing consultant (example: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=764310) to generate new growth hack ideas.

3. if you believe in your business model and you're simply "ahead" of the market, then use the time to "clean up" the business, e.g. automate things that are manual/expensive/unscaleable.

3. if you don't entirely believe in your business model, use the time to experiment with pivots e.g. soft-launch radically new things and see what happens.

hope this helps, adam

I think you've got this backwards. Your scheduled time should be focused on building the business, whether that means new features, improving operations, or marketing. Figure out which of these are the most important, break that down into individual subtasks, and then schedule that out for the next week.

The stuff like sales and bugfixes are really interruptions to doing the stuff which builds your business. Ultimately you want to hire people to help you with all of the existing tasks within the business, and the only way you're going to get to that point financially is by expanding.

As far as the HN and Counterstrike, you'll need to find a way to give that up and focus on the tasks at hand. I typically only check HN in the morning and at night, or when I truly have time to kill, like waiting for the dentist. This post spoke to me, so I felt the need to respond. One trick I came up with is to allow myself whatever timewasting activities I wanted during the day, BUT I'd keep a running tally of how many times during the day these interrupted what I was doing. My websurfing sessions rapidly diminished.

Finally, I'd agree with everyone here who recommends physical exercise. I've got a goal to shoot for here, which helps with motivation: to win a 5K, or at least my age group.

>The stuff like sales and bugfixes are really interruptions to doing the stuff which builds your business.

Sales and marketing is what will build a business....

In general, I agree, but I get the impression that the OP is spending a lot of time on small sales, rather than figuring out how to automate or delegate those.

If all you're doing is working all of the time, then you're not as effective as you could be. By choosing to work within certain time constraints, you could be more productive, while having the time for guilt-free play, which is essential. Look up "Stuart Brown and Play". You'll know what I mean. The important thing is to set boundaries between work and play. Look up Cal Newport fixed-schedule productivity.

Documentation. I'm pretty sure you can never have enough of the stuff! Being proactive about it means you can point people in the right direction when those inevitable questions come through.

Do make sure you take enough time off to do "fun" things. It's easy to go crazy for a year, but longer term, it builds up. This doesn't just apply to bootstrapping but any environment.

My advice is DO treat it like a regular job, maybe one with some longer than usual hours, but don't try to keep that pace constantly.

It's also pretty good advice that you will come up with some of your most interesting ideas when you are not doing work things.

Zig Zigler says, "Always Be Prospecting."

The problem with making a sale is you lose your best prospect.

Build a reputation on Q&A sites, participate with relevant LinkedIn groups, promote your content with Facebook ads (check out jonloomer.com for help with this.) StumbleUpon ads and content amplification networks like taboola & outbrain.

Always be prospecting.

A habit I have created recently is to watch lectures/webinars/talks in the background when I find myself idling in the internet. I usually play them on my TV via Youtube. You will miss things, but this takes the pressure off. This is how I watched all the 'How to start a startup' lectures. You can shift your focus as you need and if you find something particularly informative then you can pause what your doing and focus solely on the lecture.

Here are some good sources to get you started.

Amazon Web Service Webinars - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT-nPlVzJI-ccQXlxjSvJmw

Caltech - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClGTZDyz3CSl92TgDqIr0nw

Said Business School - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHIqMEje_NFJ2u24CVaNQvg

Yale - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-EnprmCZ3OXyAoG7vjVNCA

Stanford - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-EnprmCZ3OXyAoG7vjVNCA

And of course: Ycombinator How To Start A Start Up https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxIJaCMEptJjxmmQgGFsnCg

There are so many great sources of education out on the web today. For example: who are the thought leaders of your industry? You can probably find video of talks they have given. What conferences serve your industry? They likely have video of talks given.

My Company: http://www.makemassive.com

I tend to make a quite strong distinction between 'work' mode and 'not work' mode. Certainly when working on your own business, there tends to be some gray areas. I also aim to set aside reasonably fixed time frames for work. So in 'work' mode, even if there's nothing to do right now (almost never in my case but well), I'm always doing business development, research, planning/building new features etc.

When I'm not working on my business, I tend to study (unrelated) topics, read, travel or spend time with friends.

But why not build an extra feature? Even if it's not requested, it can make your overall product better. Or work on increasing your conversion rate?

I surf, read books, play basketball and live.

My company: LimeLeads

Getting exercise is a great answer. I always have a few ideas when I go out for a bike ride; it helps both my mind and my body.

Not wanting to work on new features during down time seems like a strange move to me. If the addition of these features improves your product (and should in turn hopefully help with your sales) then wouldn't that be a good thing to do?

"If"

He said (correctly, IMO) that he only works on features that enough customers ask for. If no one needs a feature, then working on it is wasted time.

Learning, reading, resting.