Ask HN: Should I put my startup behind me?
zenshop.appI’m a solo founder, bootstrapping a startup called zenshop. I’ve been working on zenshop since late 2019, a good portion of that full time. I have three paying customers, and I’m starting to seriously consider - am I making a mistake to continue building this? Customers of zenshop like it, I think mostly because it’s cheap to run, and easy enough to use. I have built an enormous amount of functionality (apps on mobile, desktop, Shopify integration, websocket updates, push notifications, automations, templating… the list feels nearly endless). There always feels like more to build, more features to catch up to (compared to competitors). I’m starting to feel exhausted from it (I have a high pain threshold… but it’s not limitless). Can I save it? What can I do? Everyone tells me to do more marketing, more sales, but every time I do this I’m also fighting off the feeling of all those features, bugs, all needing my time, I can never get enough time to spend on sales.
Seems to me like you have three options: keep on growing bootstrapped 100%, grow to 10k-20k mrr range and find investors to help you build a team to further grow and compete, third is to close the project and find better opportunities (a talented dev like you will not have a problem finding one). All of these options have expected rewards and risks, you must weigh out these alternatives compared to what you can currently sustain.
Option 2 will require you to focus on what are the 20% of tasks you can do that will have the highest short term impact to build traction.