Bootstrapped Expectations
We made our first dollar.
We still haven’t met our goal for the year, and we launched later than desired, but we made money. Correction, “revenue”. Scrawl It hasn’t made a profit yet. That’s the goal by the end of the year, $1 in profit. It’s lofty, but not unrealistic.
You see, we are bootstrapping this product. The only expenses we have thus far are for setting up the LLC. The rest has been free because I’ve been self-hosting the application on a server in my home. It’s beefy because it is an old rack mount server I got from a friend who bought a few off of someone on Reddit. You could call it an “untracked” expense, but I bought it before I fully decided to self-host this application. Beyond that, I intend to use it for more things than just this application. It’s a proving ground for product ideas and my own education. Maybe that will change at some point, but we are expecting to be flexible.
Let’s take a step back for a minute. I said that we launched late. We were targeting July. We launched in October. No one knew that but us. We set a goal and just missed it. We didn’t even deliver everything we wanted to in the original time frame. Talk about a lot of unmet expectations. Did we at least have good excuses though? Maybe. But honestly, I don’t really remember. It’s been a whirlwind building this product on the side, one late night after another. Some nights, you can’t work on it. Some times you spend way more time on a problem than you intended. So you miss goals and have to reset your expectations.
On top of that, we have some tech debt. If we weren’t both software engineers, I’d be more concerned, but we know the path to alleviate that tech debt. We’ve done it before and it isn’t the end of the world. Admittedly, if we weren’t engineers, we would just have the naivete to not even for free to receive new posts and support my work.be concerned about tech debt yet. This tech debt is important though. It let us launch sooner and for far cheaper. If this product doesn’t work out, we didn’t just burn money. We were smart with our expenses. If it does work out though, it might be a painful migration, but we’ll have a very good reason and motivation for doing so. It will mean that we have enough traffic (and therefore enough revenue) to justify the added expense and effort.
All this being said, the most important thing is that we have a few users. I truly didn’t expect that right out of the gate, even though I hoped for it. That will really allow us to get more feedback and keep iterating. As I said in my previous post, we still have a lot to work on (namely sales and marketing, but also plenty of product). So many thoughts and ideas, so little time. Glad I can at least scrawl them down and keep working.