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A comment on Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business. Parent comment

Re:Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business by jwr on Monday December 03, 2018 @11:25AM (#18589984)
Exactly. Even in technology circles people will not necessarily understand the compromises you have to make as a self-funded entrepreneur. To take an example, there is often a way of building things that is understood to be the "correct" way. Comprehensive tests, continuous integration, container orchestration, there could be many examples. What people do not understand is that a self-funded solo entrepreneur has to compromise all the time, being desperately short on time and money. So yeah, some tests, very limited CI, and scripts that start docker containers, for now, until there is time to do more, because time is so short. Talking about this openly always raises eyebrows.

What few people understand is that a solo self-funded developer is not supposed to get tech things "right". That is a good way to run the business into the ground. Instead, the goal is to optimize cash flow by carefully balancing your time investment between technology and marketing.

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Re:Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business by ryanwaggoner on Monday December 03, 2018 @01:17PM (#18591290)
Few of my projects have ever had any tests. And none of the even remotely successful ones have. Luxury I just can't afford.

The work I do for clients is always much higher quality from a purely technical perspective, but when you're solo and working on side projects, you optimize for a completely different set of variables (or fail).

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Re:Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business by abalashov on Monday December 03, 2018 @01:27PM (#18591416)
Interesting. For me it's the opposite. I'm not saying I do sloppy work for clients, but the gold-plating really happens on the product side. For consulting projects the decisions are usually more pragmatic and get-it-done oriented.
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Re:Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business by ryanwaggoner on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @04:34AM (#18597857)
I used to be more like this. To a fault.

Being a perfectionist and having no accountability and unbounded time to tinker on a side project and not release it or charge for it or market it is a recipe for disaster in my case. So now I try to do the shittiest first version that I can live with, and then revise as I go. It’s painful and stressful, but the money the projects make really helps :)

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Re:Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business by abalashov on Monday December 03, 2018 @12:32PM (#18590735)
Or people don't understand why you build things "right" anyway and are always broke. ;-)

But yeah, I agree. So much advice out and Best Practices out there that only work if you've got a 10-person org and plenty of time to spare, as well as a clear ROI for gold-plating.

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