Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business with Jason Cohen

What Hacker News said

Strong rec shoo · 2021-02 · on “Ask HN: Have you taken on debt to fund your startup?”

In Australia our major commercial banks offer unsecured loans to businesses based upon the business' cash flow. Example eligibility requirements: turnover of at least $75K per year ; have been operating as current registered business for 1 year+ ; you can provide 12 months of business financial data from your accounting software. You'd need to convince the bank that your business is a relatively reliable and sustainable cash generating machine. Example terms: 9% p.a. interest rate, borrow up to $250k, no fees. Another trick you can do, orthogonal to finance, is the annual-prepay trick. Offer the "sign up for 12 months at a X% discount" plan to customers. If you can get some fraction of custo

Strong rec chdaniel · 2021-04 · on “Ask HN: Where do you find potential customers to validate your idea / MVP?”

A couple of things need to be balanced, I think, as I'm doing just that with PriceUnlock ( [LINK] ) PriceUnlock will help SaaS owners finds the perfect pricing for their product, with more upside and less downside when trying new prices. Besides, it helps you stop leaving money on the table. * THE THINGS* 1. You can "scratch and claw", as Jason Cohen (founder of WPEngine) puts it. He talks more about this in the YT link below and he also puts out this idea of 150 customers, not "1000 true fans". I highly highly recommend watching the video, regardless of going VC/bootstrapped. He also talks about 2 other ways besides scratching and clawing [this video] 2. Building in public is an upward trend the

Strong rec yoshyosh · 2021-04 · on “My experience releasing failed SaaS products”

This talk is the holy grail on this topic [this video] niche b2b, w/ natural recurring cycles, $99 price point at a minimum, and not needing to be on call is most ideal

Strong rec stevoski · 2021-05 · on “Show HN: Csvbox.io – CSV import button for a web app, SaaS or API”

A good place to start with pricing is tiers at $49/$99/$249. (As recommended in Jason Cohen’s classic and awesome talk “Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business”: [this video] ) Customers at very low price points (such as $9/month) tend to churn quickly, and, counterintuitively, send more customer support interactions per customer than at higher points. You’ll never earn enough from them to cover your customer acquisition costs. Getting rid of the cheap plan also removes the, shall we say, more difficult customer.

Strong rec philmcc · 2022-07 · on “The New American Micro-SaaS Dream”

Jason Cohen is one of my favorite people speaking in this space. Here’s a great, actionable, talk he did at the equally informative Rob Walling’s conference. [this video] (I have followed this advice, and it has brought me a level of success and comfort I didn’t know I could have, as an admittedly run of the mill developer)

Strong rec robocat · 2022-09 · on “Ask HN: Is it okay to just bootstrap it, even when VCs are knocking?”

Jason Cohen has an amazing talk on bootstrapping, with some very solid advice from his own experiences: [this video] Personally I think there is a lot of “kudos” for getting VC funding, so founders often get lured just for status reasons, joining the competition to become a unicorn. Unless you want to (or need to) “swing for the fences”, why give up ownership? Being a founder is already hella risky, and accepting VC money increases your leverage and your risk, which is just uneconomic for an average individual to do (unless they are already wealthy). Don’t double down on a risky bet. VCs get preferential shares, and they have a lot of different ways of taking control in the clauses of the contrac

Strong rec mtlynch · 2023-06 · on “Biggest mistakes to avoid to build a better 1-person business”

I think the better version of these ideas is in Jason Cohen's classic "Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business" talk.[0, 1] The difference is that Jason Cohen's advice is based on personal experience growing four businesses to over $1M/yr in revenue. I'm not seeing what qualifies this author to give such broad, sweeping advice about bootstrapping. [0] [this video] [1] [LINK]

Strong rec satvikpendem · 2023-09 · on “Every Software Project Is a Startup That Will Probably Fail”

I looked into that book, looks like it's really for venture backed companies trying to form a founding team. I'd recommend that you instead look up micro-SaaS, where you just target making $10k+ monthly recurring revenue and be set, rather than going on the VC treadmill and trying to raise capital, hire a team, etc which is often overkill for first time founders. Rob Walling coined that term initially through his conference on it called MicroConf, he has a new book called [LINK] which I'd recommend. His older book Start Small Stay Small is also quite good. But to start off with a free resource, Jason Cohen's video on designing a bootstrapped business can't be beat: [this video]