I'm a cross between a developer and product manager and I've been bootstrapping a business for a year now. This is great timing as I just wrote a retrospective on it. It's fairly long but here's my TL;DR:
(1) Don't quit before you have serious traction. It's really easy to burn cash building a product and it might take a few iterations to find something people want.
(2) Put your coding skills on the side and focus on validating your idea with mockups, landing pages, fake PR release. See if people would use what you're showing. Even better, ask them if they'd pay for it.
(3) Work on a vision that goes beyond the features. It'll allow you to cut scope, find help, talk to investors. Features live and die, stories stay.
(4) Don't go stealth. Show your work early and seek feedback. There's very little chance that someone will be able to steal and execute on your idea.
(5) Set some targets before you start. It's easy to think that you have more time, more money, etc if you don't do that. Having goals will help you understand what's realistic because you'll see if you miss them or not.
(6) But don't panic if you miss your targets at first, everyone does. What's more important is to evaluate if you're constantly missing or if you're getting better at it.
(7) Accept that things will be slow. You'll see plenty of articles talking about such and such project that got in 6-figures revenus in one year. Don't worry about it and focus on having a steady growth and a great relationship with your users.
I think that coming from development (1), (2) and (3) are the hardest because if you have the skills to build something it's very tempting to do that first. I'm constantly reminded of a quote of Stephanie Hurlburt that said something like "If you know you can build it, focus on selling it first".
I'm a cross between a developer and product manager and I've been bootstrapping a business for a year now. This is great timing as I just wrote a retrospective on it. It's fairly long but here's my TL;DR:
(1) Don't quit before you have serious traction. It's really easy to burn cash building a product and it might take a few iterations to find something people want.
(2) Put your coding skills on the side and focus on validating your idea with mockups, landing pages, fake PR release. See if people would use what you're showing. Even better, ask them if they'd pay for it.
(3) Work on a vision that goes beyond the features. It'll allow you to cut scope, find help, talk to investors. Features live and die, stories stay.
(4) Don't go stealth. Show your work early and seek feedback. There's very little chance that someone will be able to steal and execute on your idea.
(5) Set some targets before you start. It's easy to think that you have more time, more money, etc if you don't do that. Having goals will help you understand what's realistic because you'll see if you miss them or not.
(6) But don't panic if you miss your targets at first, everyone does. What's more important is to evaluate if you're constantly missing or if you're getting better at it.
(7) Accept that things will be slow. You'll see plenty of articles talking about such and such project that got in 6-figures revenus in one year. Don't worry about it and focus on having a steady growth and a great relationship with your users.
I think that coming from development (1), (2) and (3) are the hardest because if you have the skills to build something it's very tempting to do that first. I'm constantly reminded of a quote of Stephanie Hurlburt that said something like "If you know you can build it, focus on selling it first".
If you want to read the full post to see what my journey has been it's here: medium.com/@stenpittet/a-retro-on-...