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Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch
No co-founders. No funding. No connections. No customers. No — you’re not nuts.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 61 posts.
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Opendoor, a startup worth emulating
OpenDoor has a unique yet high-risk approach to residential real estate; that’s a great thing, both for its prospects and for society.
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We turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k debt and broke even
This is Part 3 of “Making The Contender: Conception to Completion”. Here are links to Part 1 (how we made the game) and Part 2 (how we ran…
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Ideas for Startups (2005)
October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. ) How do you get good ideas for startups ? That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask…
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Talking to users
Get expert tech help, plus the latest in PC and console gaming. Boost your setup, fix issues, and level up your play—start now!
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How Generalised Problems Kill Startups
It’s crazy how often I hear founders say ‘I think the problem we’re really solving is X’. Hang on a second… You ‘think’? The surprising…
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Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Mi…
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The Hard Raise
In the summer of 2003, Brad Burnham and I set out to raise a $100mm early stage venture capital fund. We had both been successful VCs in other firms and we had a thesis that the second wave of the Internet was upon us and that large networks were going to get built in this […]
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My Experience Running Development at a Startup
Posts from the old antjanus.com blog (2012–2020), rebuilt from the Wayback Machine.
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Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean , so the…
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A Letter to the Berlin Startup Scene
Dear Berlin Startup Scene,
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Uber's Failure in Japan
Uber’s disastrous failure in Japan was not caused by local competition, but by a uniquely American strategy that simply could not work in Japan. You see, Uber represents a new kind of startup. The very thing that makes them so successful in America dooms them to failure in Japan.
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Tips for selling your side project
All I did was put together a trivial web app to scratch my own itch, and it keeps scratching it, while I drink my free beer.
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The meeting that showed me the truth about VCs
I had a meeting with a well-known startup investor yesterday. The talk somehow pivoted from my seed-seeking startup into talking about the…
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From Losing Money to a Profit Margin in 5 Months
A few months ago I wrote about the difficulty of self-funding a rapidly growing startup. If you haven’t read that yet, go and do that now. I’ll wait. Here’s the quick timeline: JAN 2013 — Started on the idea for ConvertKit JUN 2013 — Reached $2,000 a month in recurring revenue (MRR). SEP 2014 — Revenue declines to…
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Twilio's Seed Pitch
I read yesterday evening that our portfolio company Twilio, which priced its IPO last night, is going to live code from the NYSE this morning. That brought a powerful flashback to the first time I met Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO of Twilio. It was 2008 in our old offices on the 14th floor of […]