alt Hacker NewsI see, thanks for responding. Curious if this was an industry you were super familiar with?
Without revealing what your product is; how did you come across a good problem statement?
I've started on the bootstrapped train as well, also a senior engg.
I'd launched a pre AI software which grew to 5000 users and more and made me some money.
but post AI, I'm finding it hard to get into a non competitive industry. Like everything seems super captured already.
I actually acquired this as a little side project from some guy online. I hadn’t even really heard of the niche, but I knew enough to know that it had some potential, and I could also see that it could be used for an adjacent market segment that I was pretty familiar with, because my dad worked in that segment when I was growing up. And the price was cheap because it just had a few users and was pretty new. All but one of those users cancelled in the couple months after I bought it, because it turned out the product just didn’t do what it claimed to. But I didn’t really care about that, because 1) I knew it could deliver if built correctly, and 2) I could just tell there was demand for this and it wouldn’t be that hard to sell.
So I turned off the signup form and started rebuilding it and improving it, but I kept getting people emailing me and wanting to sign up. No marketing, nothing. I held them off for almost 18 months while I rebuilt it on the side of my day job, and that gave me a ton of confidence that I was on the right track.
Then about a year ago I got laid off. I was really close to relaunching it at that point, so I used all my severance to go all in on it.
Twelve months later it’s doing $30k MRR.