Notes for Devs Wanting to Bootstrap a Software Business

Here are a few tips or insights that I believe are fundamental if you are a dev wanting to bootstrap your software business.

A quick note on my personal self (biased of-course)

• I am Someone
• who like to abstract everything in life
• who falls in love with the architectural designs
• who thinks that you can code anything out in life if given enough time
• who likes to expand the problem so that I can solve more problems

Notes from me

• When picking technologies, pick the one you are most comfortable with. Not the best ones. The internet will fight over the best, you don’t have to.
• I built one product that has Angular, React, and Vuejs - because I wanted to understand all and pick the best later. In hindsight, I was stupid!
• When designing a new solution for your product, just design one that solved the immediate problem of the customer. You can abstract it and make it beautiful later (You’ll have to do it when you have time otherwise you are going to have a debt that you don’t like to deal with)
• I’ve tripped on beautiful solutions that are abstracted to every bit that would scale and wasted many days and weeks building frameworks. Only to solve a problem that a customer has that can be solved in 2 hours by commando coding.
• When picking servers, just go with the cheapest servers
• I’ve had servers and Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. I’ve settled in Digital Ocean Droplets that work just fine. Never had any issues in the last many years
• When you have time, spend some time setting up the dev ops. You should be able to test and deploy really fast
• And, when you have a dev ops template that you are already comfortable with, just stick to it as long as it works. You don’t need to make it more beautiful and more whatever
• Be Agile - My work is in Notion Kanban boards
• Don’t set up any further PMs. If you have consultants working for you, then keep their work also in Kanban. Don’t make life complicated for no reason
• Prioritize for Money. Priorotize based on paying customer requests not on what you think on what would be the next big thing. You’ll have time to work on them once your paying customer requests are done.
• I’ve fallen a lot of times into the trap where I think that It would make a lot of sense to work on my imaginary problem and solution because that is the next big thing and that the customers I don’t have will be throwing the money at me to buy the solution for imaginary problem I thought that was real.
• Take some time off to re-group your vision, replan your growth, and replan expansion based on your new learnings. When you don’t do this, you’ll burn out thinking why your business is not growing in the phase that you work.