Thank you!
2,292 karma · joined February 14, 2016
We could have mathematically made without it.
But three things to consider here:
- TS money multiplied our runway by 10 and really reduced the amount stress we've experienced. Especially with COVID, during which we experienced our first negative growth month
- We were able to finally pay ourselves above minimum wage (1,500$)
- The mentoring and advices which came out of the program, really made the whole difference.
Where we live, the startup ecosystem is basically 0, we don't know a lot of startup funders or experienced entrepreneur. It changes everything when you can ask a precise question about business and get a response from an expert in the next 6 hours.
We had call with mentors and other member of the community, basically a one hour free consulting with an expert, about SEO, copywriting, recruiting, sales, growth, and marketing and THIS does move the needle a lot.
Wishing you all the best with NewsCatcher and happy that TinySeed is living up to your expectation.
Yes, TinySeed mattered a lot.
So in essence, if you consider that bootstrapping is building a business without external funding, you're correct.
But to me, bootstrapping VS "VC road" is much more nuanced than this.
Going the VC road forces you to have crazy growth and raise more round because the VC model only works if they fund unicorn 1 time out of 100(0).
TinySeed works even if they fund 8/7 figures businesses, and this was our goal. We had no money when we began (we went through most of our savings during our first venture), no family to raise an angel round and this solution was perfect for us.
The amount of money we got was nothing near what we could have had raising traditional money, but it allowed us to stay independent and grow at our own pace.
I totally agree, the $1 dollar you make online is really special.
I know that, as a computer engineer, it really made us shift our whole mindset about what we do.
We thought all we were able to do was to write code for someone else, we discovered that we could also sell a product and make a living out of it.
Let's say you exit 1 year after YC at a $5m valuation
With the MFN, does that mean that YC get 28% of the sale instead of the initial 7%?
HN and PH audience is 99% of Marketing and / or Tech people.
Coincidentally, those people make product for Marketing and Tech people, and of course promote on website visited by Marketing and Tech people.
But basically anything outside of those two realms feels completely under-addressed by SAAS:
- industry - public services - waste management - etc
mostly "unsexy things".
A huge fan of the game, the team, and the entrepreneurial adventure.
Their willingness to share insights, every weeks, for 7 years is quite rare in the industry.
It was also awesome to read the thought process behind each design decision alongside some nerdy story about C++ optimization.
Factorio team, if you're ready this, thank you!
I was really surprised by the business diversity of this batch with, amongst other:
- note system for researcher
- evidence, and lab management software for digital forensics labs
- CRM for senior placement
Disclaimer: part of TS 2020
Congrats to them!
When we applied we were at around $1k4 MRR, when we joined, $3k MRR.
Terms we had were close to what is published on their website.
10-15% equity for ~$150k.
Here's a little thread I made that goes into the details: https://twitter.com/PierreDeWulf/status/1346890035493265411
The money, advice, community and mentorship we got those last 10 months were definitely worth it.
From what I can observe, 2/3 websites can be scraped without using a headless browser.
Even Google SERP can be scraped with a simple HTTP client.
All work related task (email / slack / reading the news / paperwork / ...): 8 hours
Time at my desk: 11 hours
The typo about Rob's name is a bit embarrassing. I've asked the editor to correct it.
You are correct, IH was started in 2016, I could have sworn it was started earlier.
It's hard for me to put an exact date on this, but I entered university in 2010 and I remembered reading about startups almost from my first or second year.
Paul Grahams essays, Zero to One, The Family (french thing), Rocket Internet, VC etc.
This whole thing kind of fascinated me, but reading about it felt like watching a soccer game. I was just a spectator of a world I though I could never be a part of. Probably a mix of lack of confidence and unwillingness to takes risks.
But then I discovered this whole bootstrapping thing, IH, Rob's books, Kalzumeus essays and for the first time, I was reading about thing I could see myself doing.
Even though you didn't ask, I hope it clears things up :)
PS: My english being a bit clunky, this article was editorialized quite a bit
PSS: Thanks for the kind words
Apparently he's having a livestream the 29th showing how he did it.
Best-Books.dev is a curated programming books recommendations from all the programming books list I was able to find on the web.
6 months ago, I wondered what was the most recommended programming books of all-time. So I asked Google about it and compiled all the results in one big list.
I shared the results on Twitter and on my blog and had many people asking me to do this for languages, frameworks, techno.
So I did
And this is how Best-Books.dev was born.
So far I compiled more than 7,000 recommendations from more than 500 lists but I don't plan to stop here.
So, what's next for Best-Books.dev?
- Completing 1 recommendation list every week for the next 6 months
- Writing other sorts of curated lists
- Planning a weekly newsletter with recommendations and new interesting releases
Excited to be back here with my first no-code thing.
Best-Books.dev is a curated programming books recommendations from all the programming books list I was able to find on the web.
6 months ago, I wondered what was the most recommended programming books of all-time. So I asked Google about it and compiled all the results in one big list.
I shared the results on Twitter and on my blog and had many people asking me to do this for languages, frameworks, techno.
So I did
And this is how Best-Books.dev was born.
So far I compiled more than 7,000 recommendations from more than 500 lists but I don't plan to stop here.
So, what's next for Best-Books.dev?
- Completing 1 recommendation list every week for the next 6 months
- Writing other sorts of curated lists
- Planning a weekly newsletter with recommendations and new interesting releases
This part of Steve definition is for me the most fundamental: "The goal of your early business model can be revenue, OR profits, or users, OR click-throughs – whatever you and your investors have agreed upon".
When bootstrapping you cannot afford to have a business model that can generate anything else than revenue. Except if you optimize for time while having another full-time job for example.
I was not at all implying that you can't do anything meaningful if you don't raise money. But again it depends what you mean by meaningful.
If by meaningful you mean developing a product / idea that will completely disrupt an industry or the way people live (think Tesla, AirBnB, Apple & co), I'd argue that 99% of the time, people with that ambition will use the VC way.
If by meaningful you mean building a strong business, generating millions of $ and creating hundreds of jobs (think BaseCamp, MailChimp, ConvertKit), I agree that raising money is not mandatory.
But I stand by my point, if you want to change the world, you should probably aim for the VC road.
Bootstrapping or indie hacking have usually different goals: you optimize for revenue or time spent.
Shortly said, when building a startup you aim to change the world, when indie hacking you just want to change yours.
At least that is why I chose that path 2 years ago :)