I am somewhat technical — building sites since the early 2000s, but I’m in my 30s now in a non-technical corp marketing gig. As I started working on this side project, I knew it was important to hire a dev who can code while I leverage my day job salary and bonus to keep the whole thing afloat.
My technical knowledge (very basic self taught sql, php, command line) allows me to product manage quite well, and I have worked with this freelance developer on other small projects of mine for years, so while the common advice is to not project manage out your coding — this was a special circumstance.
The easy part about my project is that I am the end user. I am essentially building a SAAS for myself to automate specific business processes within an industry that sells specific products to consumers (B2C). Essentially, I am automating an entire business. And once fully scaled, it could have a huge share of the market of this niche industry. The industry is quite old, and super niche, but still has a lot of scalability. The audience is consumers (not businesses). There are physical products which cannot necessarily easily be drop shipped, providing somewhat of a moat.
Nearly 4 years in now, I have spent roughly $75K on the outsourced (non-US) developer and the project is in good enough shape that I am finally able to get scale. The channels I use to market/sell are your usual marketing/selling channels. I’m not going to list them, but just think where you buy stuff online. It’s probably those.
Yes, it took a long time to get to this point, but that’s the fate you accept when you solofund and found. Common YC advise is to build quick— so you can iterate when you can see things aren’t working. But since I’m the end consumer, I could see the progress all along and thus I can give real time feedback all the time to determine priorities and the next most important thing to work on at any given time.
Scaling continues now. Over 6 figure yearly run rate now and over $300K in total revenue since starting in 2020. And with each bonus I get from the day job, I deploy it into this business. Essentially, it’s cash machine generating 25% ROI with each dollar I toss in. I see a pretty easy path to mid 6 figure revenue in next 3 years, and even 7 figure yearly rev seems possible.
I’m excited and optimistic for the future. My take away here is it’s fine if things take a while if you are a solo founder, especially if you are the end user. Sure some APIs we integrated got deprecated during the 4 years and we had to rewrite and rebuild, but that’s just the cost of doing business as a solo & self funded founder.
As of today, I have no plans to garner outside investment and plan to continue bootstrapping indefinitely. I could certainly grow more quickly with cash and investments, but I’m in this business for the extreme long term and taking funding can have dire long-term consequences even if its not very apparent right now- despite what YC or others may say.
I also have no desire or plans to ever sell, but that probably has to do with the longevity of the business that I think I’ve built. Since I have essentially no overhead, and everything is automated, it’s very improbable that a competitor could oust me. Weird things can happen to the market, but it feels extremely safe. Much safer than if I had a big team.
I see an unlimited number of ways to expand to adjacent industries in the future. I plan to expand in a controlled and methodical way.
Shout out to all you self funded solo founders. I also give many thanks to the freelance dev who worked with me on the project. If you find a good one, they are truly worth a significant amount and I plan to bring him along for the ride. As for why I post this on YC Reddit, I think it’s important to share solofunded and founded stories since they are so few here, to give you a vision of what the process is like.
Feel free to post questions about the journey and I’ll do my best to respond.
My technical knowledge (very basic self taught sql, php, command line) allows me to product manage quite well, and I have worked with this freelance developer on other small projects of mine for years, so while the common advice is to not project manage out your coding — this was a special circumstance.
The easy part about my project is that I am the end user. I am essentially building a SAAS for myself to automate specific business processes within an industry that sells specific products to consumers (B2C). Essentially, I am automating an entire business. And once fully scaled, it could have a huge share of the market of this niche industry. The industry is quite old, and super niche, but still has a lot of scalability. The audience is consumers (not businesses). There are physical products which cannot necessarily easily be drop shipped, providing somewhat of a moat.
Nearly 4 years in now, I have spent roughly $75K on the outsourced (non-US) developer and the project is in good enough shape that I am finally able to get scale. The channels I use to market/sell are your usual marketing/selling channels. I’m not going to list them, but just think where you buy stuff online. It’s probably those.
Yes, it took a long time to get to this point, but that’s the fate you accept when you solofund and found. Common YC advise is to build quick— so you can iterate when you can see things aren’t working. But since I’m the end consumer, I could see the progress all along and thus I can give real time feedback all the time to determine priorities and the next most important thing to work on at any given time.
Scaling continues now. Over 6 figure yearly run rate now and over $300K in total revenue since starting in 2020. And with each bonus I get from the day job, I deploy it into this business. Essentially, it’s cash machine generating 25% ROI with each dollar I toss in. I see a pretty easy path to mid 6 figure revenue in next 3 years, and even 7 figure yearly rev seems possible.
I’m excited and optimistic for the future. My take away here is it’s fine if things take a while if you are a solo founder, especially if you are the end user. Sure some APIs we integrated got deprecated during the 4 years and we had to rewrite and rebuild, but that’s just the cost of doing business as a solo & self funded founder.
As of today, I have no plans to garner outside investment and plan to continue bootstrapping indefinitely. I could certainly grow more quickly with cash and investments, but I’m in this business for the extreme long term and taking funding can have dire long-term consequences even if its not very apparent right now- despite what YC or others may say.
I also have no desire or plans to ever sell, but that probably has to do with the longevity of the business that I think I’ve built. Since I have essentially no overhead, and everything is automated, it’s very improbable that a competitor could oust me. Weird things can happen to the market, but it feels extremely safe. Much safer than if I had a big team.
I see an unlimited number of ways to expand to adjacent industries in the future. I plan to expand in a controlled and methodical way.
Shout out to all you self funded solo founders. I also give many thanks to the freelance dev who worked with me on the project. If you find a good one, they are truly worth a significant amount and I plan to bring him along for the ride. As for why I post this on YC Reddit, I think it’s important to share solofunded and founded stories since they are so few here, to give you a vision of what the process is like.
Feel free to post questions about the journey and I’ll do my best to respond.