MAKE: Bootstrapper's Handbook

You'll need persistence, and luck You may need to try shipping 10 to 30 products for 1 to 3 years before

will be successful. But by doing you'll have figured something new out, that might lead you to somewhere else, that will make you successful. Startups, and life, are about constantly pivoting when things don't work out. If you don't take action though, you can be sure nothing will ever happen. Stagnancy kills. So ship.

launch early and build with/for your users.

Perfectionism is detrimental because 9 out of 10 times it doesn't make things better but just creates inaction.

Nothing is perfect at the start. Things become perfect through lengthy iterations!

Here's a little secret: The people discussing what programming language is best are not shipping products. The people who don't care what programming language they're using are shipping products. They'll use whatever tool they need, whenever they need it

Build for the web first, you can go native mobile later. Don't build on an MVP too long, a good rule of thumb is to spend max. one month on it and launch.

How fast should you launch? In most cases, you should launch as fast as possible. Because you want to have people using it. Why? Because then you can figure out if they use it, how they're using it and if they don't, why not? You can find bugs you haven't found yourself. And you can get direct feedback from users to improve it

being on top of Product Hunt will get you around 10,000 people visiting your site, with around 300 simultaneous users, with a percentage of those signing up. Product Hunt traffic may convert less to paid users than normal traffic that arrives on your site by search. That's logical, because those users have a set goal. Instead, Product Hunt users are curious

Most sites can't take Reddit's traffic The secret of getting on the front page of Reddit is to make sure your server can handle Reddit's insane traffic. There's a reason most of Reddit's front page is image memes from IMGUR. Because most servers crash before they even reach the frontpage. If you're on the front page, you get from 50,000 to 500,000 visitors and 5,000 to 25,000 simultaneous users. That's gigantic amounts of traffic! To compare: Nomad List might get 50 simultaneous users at any point of they day. My server crashed when it was on page 2, then I asked my friend @aikedejongste to jump on Skype and help me in the middle of the night. He logged into my server and together we optimized it to handle the traffic. TL;DR we made all dynamic (PHP-run) pages into static HTML files and as it was running on NGINX server, it went fine. With 5,000 people on there, it was usable. A small miracle. You can always make your site dynamic again when the traffic goes down. But static is definitely the way to prepare for this. A quick and dirty way to make your dynamic pages static is to make a scheduled server job that does something like this: php index.php > index.html

Your baby that you worked weeks or months on is now out in the world. And the world can be a pretty dark place. People will judge your app fiercely. If something doesn't work, well it's bad. But if two things don't work, they'll just say the entire app sucks. That's how humans work. Think about yourself, you do the same clicking on random links on Reddit. You get angry if it doesn't work. And you dismiss it

You might need press to kickstart traction, but you definitely need it less and less when you have traction already. Especially in these times. If you do use the press, make sure you control the conversation. You set the angle of the story. Check what type of articles journalists write before you talk to them. Fact check the articles they post about you or your product after and ask for corrections if necessary. Press can easily flip a story to become negative about you and your product in favor of page views. The press is not necessarily your friend, as much as they like to make it sound like it when they talk to you.

Most importantly: be concise. Keep your email to one or two sentences max. Here's a good pitch to Susan from TechCrunch, who you know is interested in food or pet industry startups: Subject: Food delivery startup for pets Hi Jody! I made a site that lets you subscribe to food delivery for your pet. Let me know if you need more info :) https://petsy.com

How many ideas should I work on at a time? I think my strategy is that I work on a lot of stuff at the same time because I want to not have all my eggs in one basket. I think there's a higher chance of success if you try different stuff. Right now, I have two main projects. I have a third side project I work on. Then there's two others that are kind of small that might go somewhere in the next few months or few years. The most important ones obviously get most of the focus. They get like 80% of the focus. I also get pretty bored quickly, so switching projects works for me.

You should launch early so you get feedback from users quickly. Launch on the typical tech sites like Product Hunt, Hacker News, then go for the mainstream on Reddit and go for your product's niche on specific niche platforms. Don't spam your launch, but do let people know you've launched, like your followers and press outlets. Most importantly, a launch is not finite. If you'll have a product running, you'll keep launching repeatedly every few months or years when you have specific big new feature developments.