Hi, I’m Paul, I’m a web developer from the small sliver of seacoast in New Hampshire (USA). I’ve have been building side projects here and there to gauge my ability to launch a bootstrapped application.
Some of these side projects have received a bit of attention and I’ve had the chance to write blog posts for both Twilio and Mailgun last year. Smashing Magazine retweeted one of my projects. I received job offers and emails and plenty of traffic which demonstrated the importance of “build stuff and tell people”. (This may feel awkward at first, but a lot of folks are timid and afraid. If you show off your work and learn to ignore the trolls, you’ll quickly stand out from the crowd)
A little less than a year ago, I wrote a blog post titled “What You Really Need Is A Market, Not An Idea” which struck a chord with the bootstrapper audience. It was the top post on HN for a day, I saw 15K visitors in < 24hrs and I still get emails from people on the subject. It’s become a great way to break in to the bootstrapper community and get to know some people.
I’m currently building a contract and invoice management tool called Hourglass which is launching soon. Right now we have a blog that’s seeing some traffic, a nice drip campaign/newsletter signup with > 200 subscribers (and growing) and a recently launched ~50 page effort to test the waters of content generation (for long tail SEO purposes).
Looking forward to participating here and learning from those of you who’ve successfully made the jump to full-time bootstrapper!
