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themdonutsHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

Yeah, this resonates with me

Yeah, this resonates with me. My side project for 6 years was generating very, very little. Enough for a few pints a month. Fun fact: The project survived a total destruction of the datacenter where it was hosted (remember the ovh incident?) which took it offline for maybe 4 months (no backups at the time). Luckily the server it was on didn't get melted. Also at some point I started questioning why was I still working on it for so little. My wife convinced me to keep going and to be honest I still enjoyed working on it. Then on year 7 things started to change, and on year 8 I was able to quit my daily job! I'm on year 10 now. It's not a 7 figure business, but I enjoy every single day. Also the flexibility it gives me is excellent.

Original discussionBootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business257 source comments · at import
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TE
teifererHN

To me, a lesson is: If you keep chugging along on your idea then you might get lucky and be the one out of 10,000 for whom this single-entrepreneur-bootstrap project works out, you get to be your own boss, have a big payroll and it ends up as a success story on HN. Without that luck, you are among the other 9,999 where it just died. But without trying, you are guaranteed failure (though with less frustration perhaps).

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scubakidHN

That's an impressive number of years to stick with a product you questioned. Probably 2x longer than Google would have maintained it lol (who says products by indie devs always have higher long-term support risk?!) I'm really happy to hear it turned around for you. The 4 months of down time sound terrifying. Can you share more about how you navigated that, how it impacted customers, and what you were able to restore vs what you couldn't, and what processes you changed in the aftermath?

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vlodHN

Can't help thinking that your business is somehow tied to your username. Now I'm intrigued! :)

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