Ask HN: How to bootstrap my own business?

Prioritize family time, work on your side project when your family is sleeping. Maybe work out where you can spend part of the weekend on it. But prioritize family time when it's family time.

Don't risk your families savings on a business idea.

I would look at B2B vs B2C.

Check out Rob's stair step approach at StartUpsfortheRestofUs.com.

Basically start with a product or simple app to start generating revenue and use that to fund your next larger project. Do this till you can quit your day job. Having revenue will make it easier to justify the time you spend on side projects too. And get you familiar with running projects, doing support etc.

I would keep your secure full time job so you don't have to focus on the next contract.

Start small and build things up. You can never get back family time so enjoy that while you can. The kids grow up fast.

I feel your pain. I also have a wife and two kids and have been through this. With poor web dev skills going into it, I tried to build a doctor appointment booking marketplace. I eventually got my MVP done, but the practice I trialled it at didn’t really buy into it and I didn’t have the time to spend with them to get them up and running properly. Plus, there were some intermittent sync issues with their system. Meanwhile, Healthengine pivoted into the space and took off.

By the end of it, I was a much better web dev and I’m doing quite well in the contracting market in Sydney. I’m still tinkering with side projects, but deliberatley avoiding unrealistic ones.

Trying to bootstrap a startup when you’re supporting a whole family and you’re one or two paydays away from financial destruction is virtually impossible.

Don't risk your family savings.

Feel out if you might be able to go part time at your current company. Half days or a day off a week may be more appealing to them than you leaving. If not the current company, then exercise your network - put out there you are looking for something part time.

Even if you are a generalist, you can look like an expert at something. I wear many hats personally.

First piece of advice is to get it in front of potential users ASAP (if you haven't yet). Just to make sure you're going in the right direction. Even just mockups or wireframes is good enough (we started off showing hand-drawn designs at the very beginning).

And secondly, if you want to speed things up I'd look into hiring a developer in Eastern Europe through Upwork. That's what I did and I wish I'd done it a lot sooner.

Happy to talk more. I built my startup on the side and now it support me full-time. Good luck!

Either you risk you're own money and get the product done fast. Or risk your time and spend 12 months building it and working part time. Either way you forfeit time and money.

Or you forget bootstrapping and seek out investment. It sounds like a small startup incubator would be perfect for your needs, they take some equity, you get funding $$ and the chance to build your product!

As echoed by everyone else, don't risk your family and family finances.

Look for B2B ideas not B2C.

Don't focus on big ideas, I read a dry old book a long time ago, called the 'wealth of nations'. The key bit that stood out for me was an observation that the workers in the looms and mills built machines to improct things for them, and then capitialsed on it (where their landowners/lords etc supported them)

With that in mind, the best comment I ever read was 'every spreadsheet tool you see in a business is an app crying out to be made'. Look around the company and business area you already work for/in. You have an advantage in knowledge of their business and where the shortcomings are.

You will need to tread carefully as you don't want to loose your idea to a byline in your employment contract.

I would like to go on a similar path one day, with following differences:

* not quitting a job, change job, negotiate higher pay, long weekends (done ;)

* figure out what side project I actually want to pour myself into

Based on what I hear, B2B is easier than B2C, and info-products (book/course/e.t.c.) are easier than SaaS. Bonus points if the problem solved by the course could be turned into a SaaS later on.

After I would have my bright idea, I would start reaching some potential customers, (blog? mailing-list? cold-emails? conference talks? this is the biggest problem for me probably?) to get some confirmation somebody would actually buy the product. I know there is a cottage industry just for creating landing pages and getting emails of potential customers.

After I would see the idea has traction, I would have time (due to my 4-day/week job) to write/record the damn thing, and sell it, to the people that presumably wanted it enough to be on my damn mailing list :D

My big inspirations in this regard are Amy Hoy [0] with her methaphorical brick-stacking course and Nate Berkopec [1] with his book on ruby.

My biggest set-backs are that I am mostly too tired to actually execute on the plan, so I mostly use my extended weekends for more recovery/family time :)

Second, I am not sure I have enough expertise on a anything that would warrant writing such book/make course?

I.e. I was thinking about writing about Jenkins, but I am not sure my expertise is enough, and I work with it much less than a year ago when I was thinking about that most :-)

I wish you luck!

[0] https://stackingthebricks.com/ [1] https://www.nateberkopec.com/blog/2017/03/10/how-i-made-self...

While each situation is always different and you haven't provided many details about your business, here are some things to think of:

- As someone said already - if your MVP takes 12months to build, it's probably too big, especially if it's a B2C Website. Think of the very essentials your service/product will need and launch it as fast as possible. Then go to get as much feedback as possible from your target audience. You'll be surprised how what you think people need, might be the opposite of what they actually need.

- Are you using all of the off-the-shelf solutions already available to speed the website development? In my previous startup, our CTO has insisted in building a marketplace website from scratch, which ended up being a very lengthy process and it was always buggy because he needed to code even such basics like responsiveness from scratch. I later found a WordPress template for a marketplace that would have done 90% of what we need and we would have had it done in 1 month, instead of 6. So really look at platforms like Wordpress - they are a lot more powerful than you think and are really good for prototyping at least.

- If that website is something so huge and no-way can be stripped down - try to think from a different perspective. What is the purpose of the website? Is it to get you leads? Provide a service? Sell something? Maybe it can be already done by existing platforms like Instagram, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Messenger Bots, Course using thinkify etc. etc. Is the website the only way to reach that goal?

These are the tips on how to make things faster than 12 months. By doing it - you will be able to test it quickly and will know if your idea is even worth changing your lifestyle or risking your financials and family love (probably nothing is really worth risking losing family support).

If you talked to your users, build an mvp, and it seems to be clicking with your target audience - then start thinking how to bootstrap most effectively. One of the best ways - to launch any sort of paid product and try to get a small income stream from your business already, this might help you to reduce your workload at the day job and then focus more on the main idea. Also, think of getting an intern. There are tons of great people out there who are willing to trade their time for nothing but real life experience (ofc, check your local laws are you required to pay your interns or not).

Anyway - wishing you all the best in your entrepreneurial journey. It's not possible to lose, because even if you fail - you learn.

Talk this with your wife. Explain her what you want to do and why. I'm sure she will support you. I did it without telling my SO and without kids, and I didn't pay attention to our relationship and it went bad, really bad.

I'm a developer who does part-time contract work to support bootstrapping (so far) a business. Here's my advice to you.

> I am building a B2C website after work and on weekends, however it is very slow going and at this speed I think it's going to take at a minimum 12 months before I have something to launch with. This is frustrating on it's own, since I want quit my job and build something that I can pour myself into, but I'm never able to make any meaningful progress between work and family. I really beleive in this idea, however I am trying to be realistic.

Don't spend 12 months building something. Please. Unless you mean 12 months of building something while showing and selling it to people along the way every week or so. Whether you believe in your idea or not, it's the opinions of your customers (and more importantly, their wallets) that will decide whether you've got a business here.

> I am building a B2C website

Understand that the #1 challenge in B2C will be marketing. It doesn't matter if you build the best version of something, or a completely new something that people find amazing. They will not know it exists or find you, unless you put a ton of effort into marketing. More than development.

I learned this the hard way. I've built a B2C product that users love, but getting users to it is challenging, even though the product has some built-in virality. I'm actually pivoting the core technology to a B2B use-case that I can sell to companies for recurring revenue. To be honest, I wish I had done this from the start.

> I have a wife and 2 young children, and my wife is getting upset that I spend all my free time working on my side project instead of hanging out with the family. So it's getting to the point where something has got to give. My initial thought is to quit my steady decently paying full time job, and move to contract work.

Yes, this is a good idea. I didn't even start getting seriously into entrepreneurship until I had established a successful consulting business. Your family, especially your spouse, are going to be your number one support through the tough times. Do not take them for granted - they need to be on your side.

> Am I just being naive? Is it a requirement to risk my families savings on my business idea?

The naive aspect that I see is that you haven't really presented any real validation or traction for your "idea". Pre-sell it, build a fake MVP, etc. there are tons of ways to get out there and validate an idea before building it. Just please, don't spend 12 months where you're primarily developing software, because it's such a small part of a successful business. Find out whether your idea is something you can sell and people will pay for first.

My best advice is to post this over at https://www.indiehackers.com/. It's a great community of people who have bootstrapped businesses (and/or are in the process of doing so).

You sound pretty stressed, which is understandable with the kind of pressure you are experiencing both from within and from without. This is purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but entrepreneurship is very stressful. It's unlikely you will find a soft landing making a sudden jump from a paid gig to supporting yourself fulltime with a new business (freelancing), while trying to build another business on the side which might not work out (your B2C project). That's not to discourage you, but a dose of reality which can help you look at things differently. For example, whatever you have now, just launch it. Launch it and ask people to pay for it. It will never be "good enough", and 12 months is way too long to work on an MVP before launching, because it never survives first contact with customers.

None of what I've said above is new, particularly wise, or even true in all cases. It's just the basic boring truth about entrepreneurship, it's hard, you're likely to fail, and you should've launched yesterday. That's why I like the indiehackers community, acknowledging the challenges above is an important part of working around them, which is a big theme in that community. Most are destined to fail, but not everyone does. So what smart things can you do to try and get yourself into the percentage that don't fail?

If you jump straight from having a stable income, to having absolutely none but with a family to support and without the ability to live off savings, you're not giving yourself a very good head start into an endeavor you're already most likely to fail at (statistically). Focus on what you can do now while you're still employed that will actually get you closer to making money from your product. The only real way to tell if you're getting closer to being able to make money from a product, is to start charging for it. ASAP. In whatever form you are able at the current moment, to people who really want to use your product.

Basically, I'm saying validate demand for your product, start selling it to people, market market market, sell it to more people, etc., and then think about quitting your job. Honestly writing lines of code correlates very poorly to making money in most businesses. Finding more customers for your product (and first finding out if they exist at all!) is far more important than building the product (until it's not, but at that point you should be selling said product whether it exists yet or not).

To your specific questions: You quite likely shouldn't risk your family's savings on your business idea. What I think you're missing is that there are so very many options out there. Bootstrapping only means that you fund the business out of pocket. But making the assumption that you need to go broke to build a business is, I think, a mistake. Don't pursue a business idea which demands more of you monetarily, or in time, than you can afford to risk. Because as you acknowledged, there is always some risk. It's up to you to mitigate that risk by both approaching the business in a smart and focused way, and by picking the right opportunities to pursue. If you're not a billionaire, don't bootstrap a Rocket company.

It sounds in general like you're frustrated with where you are, and want to work on something yourself. Scratch that itch, 100%, just realize there are options to scratch that itch where you don't have to upend your life. Maybe pursue a job that gives you more freedom, so you can have both more time for family and your side projects.

Best of luck to you, there's a million people out there who feel just like you do.

Source: Im a fulltime freelance dev and wantrapreneur

Edit: See also this related thread on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18438118

- Strip away 80% of the B2C website and launch an MVP in 2 months (if you can't, maybe create a B2B solution instead?)

- Try lining up contract work before taking the plunge. It's a new skillset and you may find that you can't sell yourself (or, don't like selling)

- You can always find more time. Spend family time and then code into the late hours?

- Honestly, you sound like you're just making a lot of excuses. Either do or don't. It's up to you.