This is absolutely correct, in my view. I spent the last 4 years trying to bootstrap with a partner. I’ve kept up the day job to keep the lights on, and provide some limited support to my partner whilst they commit 100% to writing code. They are a junior developer, so there was a lot of learning, and slow going, which was fine and accounted for.
Product 1 was a coding tool for a low/no code system that is really very good and provides amazing functionality, but most devs (the target audience, really) are - unsurprisingly - put off by the GUI based approach. We built a tool that allows developers to drive the platform using a DSL we developed. This was built based off the IntelliJ community edition platform.
The majority of the two years time we worked on this was spent on polish, and there was no end in sight. It is functional and really fills a solid niche, but the product is not something I would consider ready for production use by other developers. Given the amount of work left to be done, the possibly imited target market even when finished, and the growing realisation that to make this profitable we’d have to go enterprise B2B (again a massive hurdle) we left it at that, and started looking at something else to build. We spent a year on product 2, think saltstack, but better, but my partner was already on their last legs, emotionally and financially, and they called it quits a few weeks before v1.0 of product 2, leaving me in a position where the product is nearly there, but we are unable to cross the finish line on account of me not being able to quit my job and work on this full time. It is beyond frustrating.
In hindsight, there are many things I could have done different or better, but bootstrapping is hard for anything but the simplest products. I have two major products that are totally cool but unfinished due to the need for polish, life altering bills left over from this adventure, and I am facing a job/project market that is aggressively ageist (I’m officially an Old) and no outlook on better professional and financial prospects (boo-hoo, poor me, I know).
Product 1 was a coding tool for a low/no code system that is really very good and provides amazing functionality, but most devs (the target audience, really) are - unsurprisingly - put off by the GUI based approach. We built a tool that allows developers to drive the platform using a DSL we developed. This was built based off the IntelliJ community edition platform.
The majority of the two years time we worked on this was spent on polish, and there was no end in sight. It is functional and really fills a solid niche, but the product is not something I would consider ready for production use by other developers. Given the amount of work left to be done, the possibly imited target market even when finished, and the growing realisation that to make this profitable we’d have to go enterprise B2B (again a massive hurdle) we left it at that, and started looking at something else to build. We spent a year on product 2, think saltstack, but better, but my partner was already on their last legs, emotionally and financially, and they called it quits a few weeks before v1.0 of product 2, leaving me in a position where the product is nearly there, but we are unable to cross the finish line on account of me not being able to quit my job and work on this full time. It is beyond frustrating.
In hindsight, there are many things I could have done different or better, but bootstrapping is hard for anything but the simplest products. I have two major products that are totally cool but unfinished due to the need for polish, life altering bills left over from this adventure, and I am facing a job/project market that is aggressively ageist (I’m officially an Old) and no outlook on better professional and financial prospects (boo-hoo, poor me, I know).