This is one of the best articles about running a bootstrapped business that I've ever read.
These are all great tips that obviously come from years of hard work and introspection.
>When I started, I integrated with standard SaaS product analytics software that most big SaaS products use. They tend to have features like session recording, where you can see exactly where their mouse moves in your product, and funnel tracking for working out how many users make it the whole way through from landing page to using your product.
I had the same experience. When I started out, I'd see people talk about complicated views in their analytics with cohort analysis and A/B testing. I'd think those people were succeeding because of their analytics, so I kept trying to build complicated views in Google Analytics or investigate expensive alternative analytics platforms. And I eventually just landed on going even simpler than Google Analytics and not checking it unless I had a specific question I wanted to answer.
>People will suggest you should build particular features to improve your product. They'll never use those features.
I've experienced this as well. Early on, prospective customers would tell me that they'd definitely buy if I had X feature, and I'd spend a week implementing it, and then the customer would disappear or say they couldn't purchase for some other reason.
>When a user signs up for OnlineOrNot, I have an automated email going out asking what brought them to sign up today. I explicitly tell them I read and reply to every email. This is the main source of my insight for building product.
I like this a lot. The main competitive advantage indie founders have is a personal touch and direct access to the founder.
I think too many indie founders over-automate and over-outsource their customer interactions. It always drives me crazy when I use a product from an indie founder, and I reach out with feedback and the response is just a generic, outsourced customer service rep who says, "Thank you for your feedback. I'll pass it along to the team."
>Tracking your MRR is a crap way to measure how you're doing as a business... Find another success metric to figure out if people are actually using your product, and whether it's bringing them value. Things like number of images generated, or number of form completions, for example.
I agree, but I'll add the caveat that the other metric should be as proximate to revenue as you can get.
Early on, I made the mistake of measuring success based on things like social media followers or SEO rank, even though those things didn't directly translate into revenue. I felt like I was succeeding, but I eventually realized I was pursuing metrics that were too loosely related to revenue.
> And I eventually just landed on going even simpler than Google Analytics
I am biased because I built my own platform (with heatmaps/recordings), but I also have a version of it without those features. Whenever I use the lighter version I wished I had the full version installed. It's not like I watch session recordings daily, but if something out of the ordinary happens, having the recording can be a life-safer.
One example, is when I received a suspicious email from my landing page, it looked scam-ish, but I was not 100% sure. When I watched the recording, I saw that the user went directly to the contact form and copy-pasted their message, that made me certain it's just a spam/scam attempt.
Another example is when watching recordings of a specific browser resolution, where two elements overlapped in such a way that one of them became unclickable (the chat widget was overlapping the purchase button), which made it impossible for customers to actually purchase in that case.
Simple analytics can also be enough, but visitors number is not enough, it should at least support some way of storing events (e.g. purchases) or whether some error occurred or not. Of course, a business can run blind with no stats at all, just launch and pray, and it might work, but many times having those stats not only helps with increasing your conversion rates, but can actually improve the user experience on your site.
This is one of the best articles about running a bootstrapped business that I've ever read.
These are all great tips that obviously come from years of hard work and introspection.
>When I started, I integrated with standard SaaS product analytics software that most big SaaS products use. They tend to have features like session recording, where you can see exactly where their mouse moves in your product, and funnel tracking for working out how many users make it the whole way through from landing page to using your product.
I had the same experience. When I started out, I'd see people talk about complicated views in their analytics with cohort analysis and A/B testing. I'd think those people were succeeding because of their analytics, so I kept trying to build complicated views in Google Analytics or investigate expensive alternative analytics platforms. And I eventually just landed on going even simpler than Google Analytics and not checking it unless I had a specific question I wanted to answer.
>People will suggest you should build particular features to improve your product. They'll never use those features.
I've experienced this as well. Early on, prospective customers would tell me that they'd definitely buy if I had X feature, and I'd spend a week implementing it, and then the customer would disappear or say they couldn't purchase for some other reason.
>When a user signs up for OnlineOrNot, I have an automated email going out asking what brought them to sign up today. I explicitly tell them I read and reply to every email. This is the main source of my insight for building product.
I like this a lot. The main competitive advantage indie founders have is a personal touch and direct access to the founder.
I think too many indie founders over-automate and over-outsource their customer interactions. It always drives me crazy when I use a product from an indie founder, and I reach out with feedback and the response is just a generic, outsourced customer service rep who says, "Thank you for your feedback. I'll pass it along to the team."
>Tracking your MRR is a crap way to measure how you're doing as a business... Find another success metric to figure out if people are actually using your product, and whether it's bringing them value. Things like number of images generated, or number of form completions, for example.
I agree, but I'll add the caveat that the other metric should be as proximate to revenue as you can get.
Early on, I made the mistake of measuring success based on things like social media followers or SEO rank, even though those things didn't directly translate into revenue. I felt like I was succeeding, but I eventually realized I was pursuing metrics that were too loosely related to revenue.
> And I eventually just landed on going even simpler than Google Analytics
I am biased because I built my own platform (with heatmaps/recordings), but I also have a version of it without those features. Whenever I use the lighter version I wished I had the full version installed. It's not like I watch session recordings daily, but if something out of the ordinary happens, having the recording can be a life-safer.
One example, is when I received a suspicious email from my landing page, it looked scam-ish, but I was not 100% sure. When I watched the recording, I saw that the user went directly to the contact form and copy-pasted their message, that made me certain it's just a spam/scam attempt.
Another example is when watching recordings of a specific browser resolution, where two elements overlapped in such a way that one of them became unclickable (the chat widget was overlapping the purchase button), which made it impossible for customers to actually purchase in that case.
Simple analytics can also be enough, but visitors number is not enough, it should at least support some way of storing events (e.g. purchases) or whether some error occurred or not. Of course, a business can run blind with no stats at all, just launch and pray, and it might work, but many times having those stats not only helps with increasing your conversion rates, but can actually improve the user experience on your site.