Bootstrapping a SaaS, indie hacker is a lonely journey
In november 2022 I decided to dedicate myself full-time to building Owl Duty, a test and monitoring SaaS. After 7 years of experience as a Software Developement Engineer in Test, the idea of bringing all my knowledge in a single SaaS emerged.
The indie hacker thing
Being an indie hacker means for me the ability to define your own schedule, your organization and to build a project that can generate a recurring revenue. It's not true for everyone but I would add that you have to love what you create and if possible have an unfair advantage (or create one, I'll talk about that later).
So far, I do all the development, from UI to microservices to infrastructure and I really enjoy using all of my skills. I even open sourced my service's core library for those who want to run API tests in Rust. It's like going back to the basics of software engineering where there are no silos and where you build everything from scratch (idea to product). Even the marketing part is interesting, I try to keep an authentic message and I will explore other channels than social medias (see why).
But there is one thing that I don't appreciate at all: indie hacker is a lonely journey. And I underastimated the weight of making decisions alone. It's just hard! I love having this chat over coffee, even virtual, and sharing ups and downs. Being with people / someone sharing the same mindset.
About bootstrapping and hiring
Why don't you hire someone or find a co-founder? This is the first thing that came to your mind right? I also thought about it. But here is the thing: when you're bootstrapping you have no money, just your savings to pay your bills and provide stability for your family. I don't want to touch investors' money, at least not now.
In my opinion this can be quite harmful for the company and the entrepreneur in the long term: lack of freedom and control, deadlines pressure, partial ownership, ... Money is power. What happens when you secure funds? You have the ability to hire, build your infrastructure, pay your bills... but yet your business doesn't generate any revenue.
So this is all somehow fake and you will have to find a way to make it real. How? By ensuring your business doubles (or more) the initial investment. This means that you need to expand your activity, have maximal growth to be able keep your team and regain some control over the decisions. If you can't? You will likely end up laying off some of your workforce, or worth, closing your business. Likewise, if your investor goes bankrupt, you're completely dependent (hey SVB 👋).
Unfair advantage
I mentioned it's great if you have an unfair advantage. Rob Walling talks about it in his Youtube video How to Build SaaS from Scratch in 8 Simplified Steps and here is the list (with my personal notes):
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A network: people met via conferences or social medias, bloggers, groups of makers, open source developers. You can also build your product in public and interest founders and influencers. They will follow you on your journey and maybe even help you!
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An audience: so when you launch your service/product you can get more traction and amplify the signal. But make sure you have a product-market fit before releasing it to your audience, otherwise you could get the opposite effect.
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Being early: you're in the right place at the right time and your bet in a specific space pays off! You are visionary, a bit lucky, and now have the unfair advantage of being the market leader.
Personally, I decided to build my network and thanks to my past eperiences I already have connections all over the world! I now want to write articles on test engineering and maybe consider submitting talks at conferences. My work revolves around three main activities:
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A day job: This is where I work with people and for people. Where I can learn, apply my skills , contribute my expertise and get paid for it.
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My micro-saas Owl Duty: Imo, it must remain a micro-saas that I can run in parallel with everything else. I will try to apply the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule), and concentrate 20% of my efforts in the morning, evening and on rest days to obtain 80% of the results. I think that's a healthy way to manage my expectations between time and results.
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Open source: It's important to me. It follows the universal law of Giving and Receiving. There I met great people (the Rust community ❤️!) and I have the opportunity to contribute to the projects I use every day or that I'm dependent on.
Looking for a job
So I'm now looking for a job! Not in freelance because it's quite difficult to find clients as SDET (Software Development Egineer in Test). I think this title is the best way to define my role, I can work in both software development and testing. But the job title is quite vague and depending on the company it can be declined in many different ways: Test engineer, QA engineer, Test automation engineer, and of course SDET. So you need to read the job descriptions carefully, between the words, and get an interview to confirm what you will be responsible for.
Writing test tools and setting up a test infrastructure is an expertise for sure. But I still apply software engnieering concepts in my daily work. In addition, I must have an excellent understanding of the system under test. This is why I've always been in contact with many different roles: devops, dev, product owner, users, and even security. You need to think beyond the scope, and security is an area that also needs to be tested and broken!
You also need good communication skills. I can say it's really frustrating for developers to get bug reports because they put their hearts into their work. If the culture of the test is already well established, this shouldn't be a problem, but there is always a kind of disappointment in the process. It's your role to reassure people. What I like to say is that I write blameless bug reports so they are honest, factual and help people collaborate. It's all in the words and in the mindset! You can find the same idea for incident post-mortems.
But I digress! All that to say I'm looking for an SDET full-time position. I want to join a company that loves technical challenges and is willing to bring (or maintain) their quality at the peak, from development to production. Finally, having a day job might be the best thing for an indie hacker! Especially with a micro-saas and when you want to network and escape the lonely journey.