When founders talk about validation, we often engage in wishful thinking. We say that we want to validate an idea, an audience, or a problem, but in reality, we hope to find a way to be sure. We hope to discover a guaranteed win—a surefire way to build a successful business. There is no such … Continue reading Avoiding the Validation Trap
Author: Arvid Kahl
Arvid Kahl is a software engineer turned entrepreneur. He co-founded and FeedbackPanda, an online teacher productivity SaaS company, with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, two years after founding the business.
Arvid writes on TheBootstrappedFounder.com because bootstrapping is a desirable, value- and wealth-generating way of running a company.
In over a decade of working in startup businesses of all sizes, Arvid has learned a thing or two about what works, what doesn't, and how to increase the chances of building a successful business.
Open-Source and Bootstrapping
This week, a few remarkable things happened in the open-source scene. First, Mapbox decided to change the license on their popular Mapbox-gl-js library, used by many to power their fancy in-app maps. They went from the very permissive BSD license to one that contains these fragments: "This license allows developers with a current active Mapbox … Continue reading Open-Source and Bootstrapping
Tech Stacks and Indie Hacking
David Heinemeier Hansson tweeted about Shopify this week. A lot. He was shining a light on their use of the Ruby on Rails framework, which he open-sourced back in 2004. That sixteen-year-old software powers a business that processed over $100m in sales per hour at peak Black Friday. Not only is Shopify running on Ruby … Continue reading Tech Stacks and Indie Hacking
The Rewards and Perils of Being Your Own Customer
There are many risks and advantages to being your own customer. Today, I want to talk about how I am doing this with my current business, PermanentLink, and how Danielle and I did this with our previous company FeedbackPanda. So, what do I mean by being customer #1? I'm talking about using your own product … Continue reading The Rewards and Perils of Being Your Own Customer
When Privacy and Customer Value Clash
This week, I want to talk about a critical decision in the life of my new SaaS project PermanentLink. I've been doing some research on competitors and competitive alternatives. I looked into link forwarders, link shorteners, link branding services, pretty much anything that could technically compete with my core product, which boils down to branded … Continue reading When Privacy and Customer Value Clash
How I Approach Pricing for a Brand New SaaS
It's "pricing week" for my SaaS permanent.link. A few weeks ago, when I made the product public, it had only one price. I had pretty much guessed a random number to start with, and I landed on $25 per month. In the weeks after, I had many conversations with prospective customers. It was clear that … Continue reading How I Approach Pricing for a Brand New SaaS
Sunk Cost Fallacy Engineering
While working on permanent.link this week, I ran into the same issue twice. I had built something that was working great, only to scrap it for another solution a few days after. The first time this occurred, I had just finished my infrastructure for allowing custom domains to be used for permanent links. The other … Continue reading Sunk Cost Fallacy Engineering
Customer Lock-In and “Insurance Features”
Over the last week, I have metaphorically left the building and had several conversations with the audience for my most recent project permanent.link. Since this is a product aimed at authors, I've been chatting with writers about their experiences with links in their work. My service can theoretically solve any number of problems, but I … Continue reading Customer Lock-In and “Insurance Features”
Limiting Beliefs
Throughout most of the last two weeks, I have been working on a new software project. It's called permanentlink, and it's a SaaS tool for authors. When I published my book Zero to Sold, I ran into one particularly annoying issue: after the book was out, many links that I had put into the book started … Continue reading Limiting Beliefs
Early Tech Choices and Analysis Paralysis
I was working on a side project this week, and I ran into an all-too-familiar pattern: the more I thought about the technical requirements for this project, the bigger it grew in my mind. I only want to build this for myself to see if I could be Customer Zero. But it derailed quickly. What … Continue reading Early Tech Choices and Analysis Paralysis
