About four months ago, I left a startup I co-founded. It was quite the learning experience—I’ll save the details for another time. After leaving, I knew that I wanted another go at creating a business, but this time I wanted to do things differently. No VC funding, no ridiculous growth expectations. Just a modest business with kind people making a great product. Companies like Basecamp, Buffer, and Ghost come to mind.
To build a company like that, you first need to build a product, so that’s what I’ve been doing these four months.
For the last three months, I’ve written a daily blog post either summarizing what I did that day or reflecting on a topic that was on my mind, and I’ve collected these posts into a work journal.
Why I wrote daily
I did this because I wanted to record, in detail, what the earliest days of creating a bootstrapped business are like. Not just a summary, but every decision I made during each day. I enjoy reading stories like this, but they are surprisingly hard to find. It makes sense—when you’re creating something, you most likely don’t have any idea of what it may become—and when you’re already busy, writing a blog post each day can become a burdensome task. It was.
During a few stretches of intense work, I took brief notes each day and then wrote the full blog posts later. During other stretches where I knew I’d be away from the computer for a few days, I wrote reflections on topics that were on my mind in advance. So it wasn’t really a daily journal, but it was close enough.
How these daily posts helped
I can’t say whether the blog posts helped Dashify itself up until now—they likely took time away from it—but having written these reflections, I can look back and see what worked and what didn’t work, and analyze why.
There is one way these blog posts were indirectly helpful during the process, and that was to alert me if I was taking longer than I should to do something. I’d write about the same thing for the third or fourth day in a row and realize my original appetite for the thing was much smaller, and then I’d find a way to scope it down and finish. It’s tempting to keep building, but the time and money constraints of bootstrapping don’t allow for it. An extra day with zero paying customers is a day closer to running out of money if you don’t have other employment.
Dashify’s growth during the journal
During these three months, Dashify grew from fewer than 10 users to over 100 and got its first paying customer. A lot of features were made, a lot of code was written, and a lot of marketing was done. I’m glad to have written about it.
Again, I want to stress that writing daily refections didn’t necessarily help with this growth. In fact, I made many more decisions than I had time to write down.
What’s next?
With all the interest from people over these past few months, I’m excited as ever to continue working on Dashify, particularly the paid version as that’s what will make this become a business.
I won’t be writing these daily reflections anymore, but I will write perhaps monthly about my bootstrapping journey. Future reflections will be posted as part of my regular blog, not this work journal series—and with the extra time to write them, I’ll try to make them more formal and useful. When I write something, I hope that it can not only be useful for myself, but also for others. When I hurriedly write these daily posts, it’s difficult to make sure there’s something of value that a reader other than myself can take away.
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Other people who kept similar journals inspired me to create this daily journal. A special shout out to Road to Ramen who kept it up for 763 days, slightly over 2 years. My 90 days pales in comparison and misses a lot of the casual life in between. The product made throughout Road to Ramen is now a successful, profitable indie business, and you can watch how it happened day by day. It inspired me and hopefully it can inspire you.