<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 28255" data-quote="SEOguy" data-source="post: 975556"
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How did you find product/market fit? did you go launch a MVP in the beginning?
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</blockquote>I was already the target customer in my market and I knew it was going to be a hit from the moment I thought of the idea. I think this is ultimately very rare and that finding a product market fit that good and it isn't going to be the case for most products. I had a lot of conviction that this was going to be a hit IF I could cross the immense chasm of what we had to build technically. We launched a pre-MVP out of desperation (contracts ending, running out of money back in 2019, etc) and even that outperformed our expectations despite how bad it was in retrospect. But the thing to realize is that at the time it was the coolest thing people in our industry had seen in many years. We wanted to do our full MVP, but we just ran out of time. Launching way too early was a good thing though ultimately.<br />
<blockquote data-attributes="member: 88314" data-quote="joshuajwittmer" data-source="post: 975579"
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How did you choose your partner? Did you already know the person? Was it someone who could run the technical side of building a software product? Did you have a written agreement to deter your partner from running away with your idea?
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I met them on discord via a programming server I was part of. I saw their work and figured I should ask them to join me. I cold approached them and initially they told me they didn't want anything to do with it. Almost a year later they saw I was still trying to launch the business and decided to join me, thankfully. I was never scared of someone running away with the idea because most programmers by default aren't even thinking about running a business anyway.<br />
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<blockquote data-attributes="member: 88314" data-quote="joshuajwittmer" data-source="post: 975585"
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What sort of education and work background did you have before building your business? Had you tried other business ventures?
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I dropped out of college twice. I have tried other business ventures and failed. I did end up working a full-time job in my industry while building my company to get inside knowledge on how I could apply my software to the task at hand.<br />
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<blockquote data-attributes="member: 88314" data-quote="joshuajwittmer" data-source="post: 975599"
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If you could send a message back in time to your bootstrapping self, what would you say?
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Don't stress so much as most of it was unwarrented. Be more empathetic to the people around you.<br />
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<blockquote data-attributes="member: 60898" data-quote="addV" data-source="post: 975592"
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Did you decide at some point to leave the day job and go 100%? If yes, at which point? how did your decision process look like?
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I did decide at one point to leave the day job. As soon as the business could pay my same salary I left. Unfortunately as soon as I left sales dropped and we had to struggle to release our pre-mvp like I mentioned above. It was a stressful month <img src="/community/imgs/emoticons/em-smile2.png" class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-shortname=":)" /><br />
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<blockquote data-attributes="member: 87503" data-quote="Christopher104" data-source="post: 975598"
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With so many third world programmers like people on freelance who will design and create things for a hundred bucks, how did you seperate yourself from that level of competition?
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I didn't look for third world programmers to begin with. I looked for high quality programmers that had a solid trackrecord (in my case seeing their posts throughout the years on discord by looking at their post history). By reading their post history I could see how they interacted with others and if they were mature. Worked out great.<br />
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<blockquote data-attributes="member: 36811" data-quote="CaptainAmerica" data-source="post: 975632"
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How hard was it to switch from regular accounting to Profit First? Or did you start out that way?<br />
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Do you hire pen testers? What's been your experience with them, if so?<br />
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I used to work for a company that would rank our success partially by how fast the Chinese hackers put out a counterfeit. What negative things do you use to gage progress?<br />
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As someone in the bootstrap phase again, it's heartening to hear that you did it for 3 years. I'm hoping for less, of course, but I think the big lesson in perseverance needs to be shouted out.
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It was a easy switch as I wanted money, and taking profits *first* made a whole lot of sense to me. I ended up hiring a profit first accounting firm too.<br />
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Not sure what a pen tester is, so probably not.<br />
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Negative things we use to guage progress: Competitors stealing features, cracked versions of our software existing.<br />
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Perseverance is a major key here, this journey is HARD.<br />
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<blockquote data-attributes="member: 76544" data-quote="jdm667" data-source="post: 975677"
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Congrats <a href="https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/members/12271/" class="username" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" data-user-id="12271" data-username="@Ravens_Shadow">@Ravens_Shadow</a> , and thanks for posting this.<br />
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There are no-code options out there for building software - do you think it is worthwhile to use them to create a prototype, or is it more trouble than it's worth in the long run when you need more customization?
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</blockquote>No-code never could have been used to build what we did. Even today if i wanted to build a web app or something I would want us to build it with our own code from scratch. Then again, we had no choice in our case but to do it from nothing and with pure code.<br />
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<blockquote data-attributes="member: 29097" data-quote="Dami-B" data-source="post: 975692"
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Congrats <a href="https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/members/12271/" class="username" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" data-user-id="12271" data-username="@Ravens_Shadow">@Ravens_Shadow</a> , I have no doubt you'll accomplish your goal and hit the 1 billion mark.<br />
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Thanks for giving back and providing an opportunity to answer questions.<br />
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1. What's the best way you've been able to handle customer churn in your subscription business?<br />
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2. How do you find 15 great people to work with you, what's your hiring/employee acquisition strategy if you don't mind sharing?<br />
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3. What's the bottleneck stopping you right now from reaching $1B?<br />
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3.
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1. Provide a good enough product that has enough lasting value and updates to prevent churn. Also good customer support reduces churn, we're at 5% or so.<br />
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2. Discord (or finding good programmers I admired on twitter) is how I found almost all of my people. After the initial crew was formed, they had solid recommendations and we went from there. I don't have much more of a strategy other than that. When hiring people we're up front with what we do and don't provide. I.e work from wherever you want, but no health insurance. We also list salaries on our postings and have unlimited vacation days. It's straight forward and I haven't had many issues yet. A few problem employees but they get put out quickly.<br />
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3. We don't have enough products in our suite of tools yet. Only a matter of time though. We also don't have enough infrastructure to handle things like customer support for something that large. I don't know, I'm still struggling to get to 9 figures in valuation.. $1bn is still a decade away.</div>
