Bootstrapping two products with a full time job and two infants — AMA
Hey friends, I'm Aaron 👋 (@aarondfrancis on Twitter)
I'm a software developer and bootstrapper working on two products.
The main product I'm working on (with my two partners!) is a visual query builder for Laravel, Rails, Vue, React, Livewire, and more.
It's called Refine, and it lets your users build complicated filters to find the data their looking for without being a pain for you to build.
We've been working on it for almost 2 years now! We've been working with a client for the past year, so that's really slowed our release for the Laravel version. We're finally at the point where we've started onboarding our first users though, and that's such a huge relief.
The other product came out of Refine, it's a syntax highlighting API called Torchlight.
As I was writing the docs for Refine I was frustrated by all the syntax highlighters missing stuff and generally not being suited for clearly communicating ideas. I built this to help make my own life easier and decided to open it up for other folks. It has a few hundred uses, and low hundreds MRR. It's a great product that I have big plans for.
More importantly than ANY of that, my wife and I have 7-month-old twins! A little boy and girl. It's been a whirlwind of a year, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I also have a full time job at a property tax company in Texas, where I do some programming and managing of a team of ~25 non-programmers and 2 programmers.
I'll be around for any questions, looking forward to hanging!
If you want to follow along, my cofounders and I also do a podcast at hammerstone.dev/podcast.
I'm only sort of joking with this question: where do you get the energy???
Your output is insanely impressive, period – add in FTE, marriage, and infants on top of that and I'm blown away by the quantity and quality of the stuff you put out.
Thanks Travis! That's very kind.
Well, it ebbs and flows. During paternity leave I kinda had an explosion of creativity. I feel like I was able to turn off work brain for a while and all sorts of fun stuff came out. That's when I wrote Sidecar, when Torchlight became a thing, and when I proposed the concept for Laravel Octane on Laravel Vapor, which they eventually adopted.
Since then I've slowed down a bit as I've gone back to work, but still, I feel like working on the side stuff gives me an energy that FT work doesn't.
As for the quality, I really appreciate you saying that. Part of the thesis of Hammerstone is that we can care more than any reasonable person could justify. That fits well with my personal outlook on building things, but also makes business sense for us. If our whole deal is "we'll write the components you don't want to write" then we can spend a lot of mental and emotional anguish on making them juuuuust right, where other people would need to get back to work to accomplish their end goal. Our end goal is the component, theirs is not.
More on this, please :)
Thanks!!
I have two co-founders that are relying on me, so that certainly helps. There is also some good public pressure, as I have been sharing my journey as I go so I feel like I need to see it through all the way.
More than that though, I have this burning desire to see this product released. We've been working on it for a long time and the emotional toll of having it not released really drives me forward. Everyday I try to make a little bit of progress and eventually that adds up into something that's enough.
As for objectives and priorities, I have a pretty clear vision for what the product should be in its first iteration, so I'm not trying to "discover" it along the way or anything. My priority is finishing the things that I know are broken so I can get this into customer's hands as fast as possible.
My wife and I do have somewhat of "a deal," in that we have certain nights of the week where I work on stuff and she either works on stuff or watches The Crown. It really helps to have those planned out ahead of time so that I don't spring it on her last minute.
And after all of that... there are times when I just don't do anything because I'm too burned out. And that's ok! I'll just hang out for a little while and usually my energy comes back to me!
"I'm not trying to "discover" it along the way" nails the problem I am trying to describe.
I am in the "discovery phase," and that's why it is super hard to work every day on my side-hustle. I don't have a straightforward thing to do every day/week/month. So:
Not having clarity = indecisiveness = no traction = lack of motivation = not moving forward
Thanks for answering because you helped me identify what's causing inaction. :)
Awesome! Glad that helped :D
How did you make the decision to make Hammerstone a components business and less of a SaaS? Are subscriptions still part of it?
Our "thesis" with Hammerstone from the beginning was that there are a lot of things for modern web apps that are:
So you end up spending a lot of time reinventing the wheel and then when you're done, you're just at parity with everyone else and now it's time to add your differentiated features. "Undifferentiated heavy lifting" I suppose.
We decided that we could spend unreasonable amounts of time working on one or two of these specific components because it would be our entire business, and developers could just buy the component and drop it in, knowing it will be fully featured and supported for the long run.
Our first product (Refine, the query builder) is a package that developers will install, so there's nothing for us to host, which is super nice. Billing is still done on a subscription, in that it costs 1k/year to gain access to the product. So it's kinda SaaSy in that way, but also not because it's not a "hosted" product.
Refine looks interesting, but I (like most devs) have probably built something similar before. Is there a standout feature as to why I shouldn't do that moving forward and instead use Refine?
For sure, I think most of us have built something like this before! There are a couple of things that I think we do exceedingly well, because it's our sole focus.
Out of the box we have all the "conditions" that would cover about 95% of standard use cases:
Those are all the basic ones, but we also have some provided for your convenience:
All of those come with built-in input validation and application to the query, but we also provide the frontend for you. So you really don't have to do anything.
We also support querying against relationships. So if you wanted to query on any related attribute you could! For example, you could easily find "Users named Aaron that have made a comment fewer than three days ago."
We also support saving the filters, so your users could come back to them or you could use them to trigger other behaviors, like sending email, etc.
Honestly I think the biggest one is that we have the frontend and backend totally integrated! Most people will just drop one line on the frontend and then everything is configured from the backend based on what the developer decides to show. It's a pretty magical experience when you do it the first time.
I've got no questions, but I want to express my respect! I've got boy/girl twins, too, and I am so happy they are 8 y/o now and the nicest little people. It wasn't always easy and I can't even imagine how you're dealing with having two babies, supporting your partner, working a regular job, working on side projects and aligning with your project partners. I wish you continued success and a happy family life!
Thanks for the encouragement. It sure is fun to be a twin dad, but a lot of work too! Glad to hear it y'all made it, that gives me hope ;)
Your output is super impressive.
Do you find that you're able to spend as much time as you would like with your kids, or are you in "temporary trade-off mode" where you're working more than you would like in order to kickstart your company with the goal of having more freedom in the future?
I really appreciate you saying that, means a lot.
To your question: very, very much the latter. I'm feeling like this is my last easy opportunity to really give the side stuff a huge push before the kids get old enough to really be interacting. It's a tough balance for me honestly.
I'm always going back and forth in my head between "sacrifice now it will all be worth it" and "dude, just work a job and chill." But! I don't think I'd be happy long-term just working a job and chilling, so I'm over-working right now with hopes that in the next year or two I can drop the FT job (or cut back) and my time will open up more.
I'm basically working way too much now in hopes that I can reach escape velocity soon and have more of the time freedom that entrepreneurship can offer by the time the kids are wanting to show me all the worms they dug up. I really, really want to be able to head out on a random Tuesday to dig up worms with my kids.
I just had a nice long call with Matt Wensing this morning on this very topic, because he's someone who has been exactly in this spot before. (I'll edit it and release it next week as a podcast.) I know you have too @robwalling, and I'd love to talk through that if you're ever game to!
There are no easy answers, but I'm trying to make the best decisions I can with the information I have at the moment.
Cool! I respect your work, I would not be able to.
Thank you Alex, kind of you to say.
I have a baby coming up, fear she will eat all my time is encroaching on me, you’re an inspiration, thanks for sharing !
She will eat a lot of your time and it will be wonderful! You'll figure out how to make it work. Congratulations!
very inspiring Aaron, i’ll be hitting that subscribe button on your podcast, are you posting to build in public? what’s your MRR like? do you see yourself getting to the point where you can work full time on your side projects? is this something you are working towards?
Thanks Mike! All of my "building in public" happens on Twitter, where I'm basically hanging out all day. I've made a lot of friends over there. Our MRR with Refine is both non-existent... and extremely high. We've sold 2 licenses so far, but they both came with pretty big consulting engagements. We're going to start opening up to our early access list this week.
I would love to work on this stuff full time, but I think that's still a ways off. I have a pretty good job, healthcare, and a family now, so it'd be hard to go indie any time soon.
thanks for taking the time to respond, can see you’ve replied to every comment 👏
yeah that’s fair, great hustling, look forward to following your progress on twitter, i’m at the early days of my project cashew. https://cashew.events/mike-james a calendly alternative with lots of big ideas 💡
nice!
Being a parentrepreneur myself (I talk more about it on the indiedads podcast with @PocketBryan), something that I've been considering given the extremely limited time, is finding a co-founder to look at the marketing / sales side.
How important has having cofounders been to your ability to get traction? Any advice there?
I always love a new podcast, adding it to my queue.
Having a cofounder (now two) has been amazing. Early on we were able to separate our areas of focus, me on the Laravel backend and him on the Vue frontend. Then we had a client come along and offer us a sweet deal to build out the product in Rails and he was able to take that on and help coordinate with a contractor who eventually became our third partner.
Now the three of us have very separate roles. Colleen is working almost full time on the client's project and getting lots of amazing hands-on experience with the problem space while still getting paid. Sean is finishing up the Vue frontend and going to be focusing on our traction channels. I'm working on the Laravel backend and gaining a foothold in that community.
It would be super tough to do this alone, but I've also known these two people for a very long time (Sean for 8 or 9 years, Colleen for 3 or 4) so I didn't feel like there was a lot of risk there!
I think that's the key. Many of us will see the need for a co-founder, but then link up with people we don't know very well - it works for some, but generally a recipe for disaster. So if you don't have a network of like-minded entrepreneurs, preferably experts in different areas, then it's a tough thing to get right.
Have listened to the first 5 episodes of y'alls show now. It's great!
wow - already? :)
thanks Aaron, appreciate it.
Super inspiring! My wife and I have twin boys that are 2 years old now, along with a 7 year old. I can say things haven't gotten much easier, and free time consists of a few hours in the evening after everyone is in bed. I've mostly prioritized exercising with what little free time I have.
Any hacks you've learned for creating more opportunities to work on your projects? Is your current approach sustainable? Are you having to sacrifice other things to make time for the bootstrapping?
Thanks Jeremy! Twin parent friends 🤝
I think I've still got it pretty easy because the twins don't do too much. Like over Thanksgiving break I was able to work on a ton of stuff because they just kinda hang out and roll over, and then go back to sleep.
If they were 2 (or 7) then they would probably want to go to the park and stuff, and I would 100% want to go with them! So I'm still in the sweet spot of getting to spend time with them, but still having some free time. I think that will change soon.
I'm desperately trying to get as much done now as I can so that I can not do much later, when they are aware of me and want to spend time with me.
I've taken my fair share of PTO days to knock stuff out too. We also have half-day-Fridays every Friday from August - December, so that gives me a bit of time as well.
And finally... I'm just ok with going slow! I wish I could move faster but alas, here we are.
How are you finding people who will buy this product? Are there any demand signals you've seen to validate this idea?
A lot of tweeting.
Seriously though, people seem to really be glomming onto the idea. I tweet about it a fair amount, but it seems like people are always reaching out asking if they can buy access to it.
We would've been done a long time ago, but we landed a big client that wanted to pay us to come build it custom for them. That was a huge signal there, because it's such a painful issue for them that they've been thrilled to have us contract with them for about a year to build it out from scratch in their tech stack (Rails/Hotwire).
That's really given me a lot of confidence that this is a hugely painful problem. I have people messaging me about once a week asking to get on the early access list or tell us that they're willing to pay to be in the beta. It's a good feeling!
Wow, a job, side projects, and infants! What does you average weekday and weekend day look like?
Ha yeah. It's a lot.
I had a good amount of paternity leave and with twins we were basically awake at all hours of the day/night, so I'd grab my computer in the times when it was my turn to be "on duty." It helped keep me awake!
Since then it has gotten SO much easier, as the twins have been sleeping through the night since about 4 months old (way to go twins).
These days I work until about 5:00 - 5:30, go in and help feed and put them to bed, then they're usually asleep by 7:00 - 7:30. My wife and I eat dinner and then depending on the night we'll hang out together or do something called "individual pursuits," which is basically a free-for-all.
We've found it helpful to schedule individual pursuit nights because then neither of us feels guilty for basically saying "peace out" and doing our own thing.
I work from home so I don't have a commute, which helps a ton. I work early some mornings and of course I try to squeeze some work in over the weekend during downtime.
Also... things just take longer! And that's ok. I wish I could be moving faster but hey, life is more important. Things will get done when they get done.
We do something similar to your "individual pursuit" nights. It really helps so can also highly recommend it. Of course, it helps if the significant other also has something that they are pursuing.
Love the “individual pursuits” agreement !
Great Aaron.
I have 2 daughters ( 6 years and one year old), got a job not related to this world, and have my company and I am launching the first digital product. I know the struggle.
I only can work when everybody is sleeping.
I could make it to work while they are awake but the productivity would not be the same and I would feel bad for it as I would not spend the time that I need to spend with them
Glad that you are killing it and all the best for your family and your twins Just followed you on Twitter ( @moreira_creates) and sure got listen your podcast
The struggle is very real! Things will absolutely change once they are a bit older and sleeping less. I'll want to be there for every minute, so I think it will get tougher to do stuff like work on the weekends or on holidays. I'm not quite there yet though!
You are my hero, simple as that!
Ha thank you! It's a lot of slow progress in the same direction. Adds up over time!
Congratulations and everything: the kids, the products and everything else. I admire people who find the time even when to the rest of us it looks like an impossible thing.
Thank you! I find that as long as I make a little bit of progress consistently, it adds up over time to something that appears much larger.
Love the idea for Refine! How could you see us at Transistor using it with our users?
For Transistor it would probably make the most sense for an internal dashboard / reporting tool.
For example, if you wanted to find "users that have published more than twenty episodes but haven't published one in 2 months" you could probably do that with database access, or ask Jon to run a query. That may work perfectly fine, too! But when you start needing to do that over and over or you don't want to give database access to anyone, or you need that kind of feature in your app, Refine is a good fit.
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