One month in

It's been about one month since we launched PostPeer. I had no idea how it would turn out. We're still early, but things are starting to clear up.

I've learned a ton about the indie SaaS bootstrap culture. As a dev who came from a big company and a VC-funded startup, my entire rule set flipped upside down.

A few misconceptions I had:

1. It's not supposed to work at first

Think of it like a puzzle you don't have all the pieces for yet, and you shouldn't go looking for them either. Building is aggregative, a step-by-step process of making the product a little better each time. Zoom out: what matters more is product and marketing, not chasing every technical issue.

The whole point is to be live early. See traffic. See users come in. Some things won't work yet. There will be edge cases and bugs in your head. None of that means you can't keep pushing the product forward on the marketing and distribution side.

2. You are your customer's bitch

This one surprised me. I now understand how important it is to talk to people and actually try to understand them.

Excuse my words, but it's true.

In big tech, product talked to customers and promised stuff would be ready as soon as it could. Then it came down to us devs. The first thing we'd say was, "No, that's not going to work," or "I'm not doing it, this is a dumb request."

I've got news for you. The user is not as dumb as you think. If you want him to stay on your platform, you have to make him happy.

This might sound obvious if you come from a sales or business background. You want him on the platform, paying for a subscription. For that, he needs to like you, and he needs to like the product. If he feels like there are people working for him, taking the time to do things he cares about, he renews.

3. Support, support, support

Support can be exhausting, even scary at first. But if you don't have people to talk to and people who need your help, you're doomed. Even at the very start, when someone needs you, talk to them ASAP — before they leave.

I never thought I'd talk to so many people in a developer role. But in bootstrapping, you're not really a developer, and that's worth knowing before you jump from a dev job to a founder one.

Support takes a big chunk of your day. The context switch is brutal. The urgency is high. If I don't answer now, he might leave, and that's a chance you don't want to take.

Final point: it's fun

Uncertainty is a huge part of life, but in the bootstrapping world it's such a big part of your day that you have to embrace it as a friend. If you find it fun, and the hours feel like they're moving fast, that's a good sign.

The creative side of your brain is on all the time. You are literally doing everything, which means the whole company is in sync about what you want. You are the system architect, the product, the junior developer, the salesman, and the marketing.

Each one bleeds into the other. I'll build a feature with my developer hat on, then put on my sales hat and realize this is not really what I would do.

The other thing, which matters a lot to me, is that you learn a lot. "Learning all of it" can sound exhausting. The truth is you only learn what you need when you need it. Stuff piles up over time. You end up feeling like you have more control over your planning and what you're doing in general.

My girlfriend recently did a seminar in her degree about how founders manage uncertainty. It stuck with me. Uncertainty is one of the big keys of life, but in this world it's not background noise. It's the job. And when it stops feeling heavy and starts feeling fun, that's the part I want to hold on to.

In a perfect world

In a perfect world, you love all of this. All the jobs, all the different hats.

In real life, you might not feel like doing marketing that day. You might not want to fix the small bug a user asked for. You might not even agree with him. But you do it anyway, because it keeps the product moving forward.

You might need to answer a customer late at night. You might work in sprints for weeks and then chill the next week. You don't have the kind of control you'd have in a regular office job.

That's the trade.