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First, I realize this is controversial. 🤨 I’ve been building a company for the last 4 years that I intend to run for the rest of my life. All decisions I have made in the company were made with the extreme long-term in mind. No short term decisions, ever. My company reached $100K+ ARR this year...

@theeducator You’re 26 dude. Your next role doesn’t have to be VP, SVP, COO. Titles in companies don’t matter too much when you know in your heart that you’ll eventually go down the startup path again. A regular job is a means to getting that back. Find anything, and get more experience and...

@gladtobeelect 👍

@gladtobeelect To succeed, don’t build a company for an exit. If you do, then in the long term, you will be absolutely crushed by those that aren’t doing that.

@tomorrow ROI measures the gain or loss from the amount of money invested. How fast did Uber or Amazon return a gain to its investors? It took a long time, unless they sold. Unless you are considering the increase in valuation in your ROI calculation, the ROI was not accrued until money was...

@tomorrow Many sacrifice positive ROI for growth.

@tomorrow What is the minimum ROI figure that you personally consider to be a “start-up”?

@juremahrb $125K My margins are lower than a lot of true SAAS products because there is a physical product component. This also makes it more defensible. Gross profit % will likely increase as I scale more.

@lorak Simplicity is so important when you are solofounding. Keep everything as simple as possible for as long as possible. In my city/town/village/region/state (keeping things vague here), there are no taxes on the revenue, only on profit. The platforms that I use automatically remit sales tax...

@swordfish11 I hope I can help other solofounders with the advice I’ve provided above, but I don’t want constant critiques of my every move in the future. As a solofounder, hiding in the shadows is a choice and I get to decide on my own terms when it’s Groundhog Day and I’m ready to poke my...

@paraklettos Thank you! I happily accept the “lifestyle business” moniker. I fully believe a lifestyle business can outcompete and outlive a gasoline-fueled rocket ship, but it will take some time to prove that out.

@doantrang You raise a good point. I have been told that I should have made a SAAS to sell to existing businesses in this industry. But that sounded a little boring to me honestly, so instead I just created a business that uses the SAAS that I developed and I have been scaling up and taking...

@doantrang Competitors can and do jump in all the time in my industry, but they can’t compete with my price point and level of quality. Most of my competitors have 10-20 employees and antiquated systems which drives up their overhead and actually reduces their ability to scale. In my case...

@doantrang Thanks for you comment. Can you rephrase what you believe the risk is? If you believe my comment above refers to the business being stale now that “everything is automated”, that is not the case. Everything to this point has been automated but there is still endless runway ahead to...

@danielkibby I actually considered documenting the entire journey from day 1 into vlog style content, but decided against it. Turns out I’m not photogenic nor do I want the reputation. Feel free to message me here on Reddit from time to time and I’ll do my best to keep you updated. But spoiler...

@danielkibby Many of the hard skills needed for this startup came not the 10 years of corporate marketing industry experience that I have, but rather from the random internet business and side projects that I created when I was in my teens. Those experiences laid all of the ground work. It took...

@danielkibby I’m in analytics-based advertising. I discovered long ago that I fit in more with the engineering crowd in my way of thinking, so I am a bit of an outlier when it comes to traditional marketing and sales personalities. I also discovered early on that I could never do agency-based...

@heavenward7 Good question. The answer is complicated. I need to keep all of the chips on the table to stay interested, motivated, and driven. This is different for everyone though and likely why there are so few large bootstrapped companies. I am aware of the common trope that it is better...

@valentinap See my prior responses above for more detail, but I found him on Upwork (then called O-Desk) in 2013. He was the best bid for a custom script I needed for a different (but also solo) startup I was founding. That particular job required a complex skill set of back end and front end work.

Something else for those that read this far: I’ve spent essentially $0 on ads. The products sell themselves on the major platforms at the quality and price point that I am selling for. I guess you can chalk the platform % fees as somewhat being marketing fees. Eventually, I will build more...