Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business with Jason Cohen

Step-by-step approach to building a bootstrapped software business.

“the best paint-by-numbers approach to it”

Jason Cohen on optimising SaaS cash flow with annual prepay.

“you MUST watch Jason Cohen”

Scratch-and-claw bootstrapping and 150 customers instead of 1000 true fans.

“I highly highly recommend watching the video”

Thanks for reading, Patrick! I'm a big fan of your work, and your Indie Hackers interview was one of the big motivators that sent me down the solo developer path. > You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (appropriately priced; hundreds to thousands of dollars per year) product against those problems, build contingent on getting 10 commits to buy, and be at +/- $100k in 12 to 18 months. Many people with less technical and writing ability have done this in e.g. the MicroConf community. If you want the best paint-by-numbers approach to it I've seen, c.f. [VIDEO] Thanks, I'll check out that video! I hear that advice a lot from people I respect, and I put a lot of effort into that over the past year, but I was never successful. The biggest problem I ran into was that there's this "disconnect problem." I know I'm a competent developer and can build niche solutions to $10k problems, but I don't know which companies have $10k problems. I can guess at it, but they sometimes don't even realize their $10k problem has a software solution. The companies also don't have incentive to talk to me to explore the possibility if I'm just a developer off the street. In 2019, I tried to do this with stone quarries[1], sheet metal shops[2], and email copywriters[3], but the first two mostly wouldn't talk to me and the latter didn't seem to have enough opportunity for a niche business. > I would encourage you, to the maximum extent compatible with your sanity, to priorit