Five years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company.
For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. None of them earned more than a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, and they all had negative profits.
Halfway through my third year, I created a device called TinyPilot. It allows users to control their computers remotely without installing any software. The product quickly caught on, and it’s been my main focus ever since.
In 2022, TinyPilot generated $812k in revenue, a 76% increase from 2021.
In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned about being a bootstrapped founder from my fifth year at it.
Previous updates 🔗︎
- My First Year as a Solo Developer
- My Second Year as a Solo Developer
- My Third Year as a Solo Developer
- My Fourth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder
Highlights from the year 🔗︎
TinyPilot grew annual revenue to $812k 🔗︎
| Income/Expense | 2021 | 2022 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales | $459,529 | $807,459 | enable JS to see delta |
| Credit card rewards | $2,241 | $4,327 | enable JS to see delta |
| Raw materials | -$224,046 | -$333,656 | enable JS to see delta |
| Payroll | -$142,744 | -$206,187 | enable JS to see delta |
| Electrical engineering consulting | -$28,662 | -$124,643 | enable JS to see delta |
| Advertising | -$3,873 | -$51,764 | enable JS to see delta |
| Web design / branding | -$15,931 | -$30,215 | enable JS to see delta |
| Postage | -$24,227 | -$30,779 | enable JS to see delta |
| Cloud services | -$5,553 | -$7,865 | enable JS to see delta |
| Office space | -$4,400 | -$6,600 | enable JS to see delta |
| Equipment | -$2,083 | -$5,915 | enable JS to see delta |
| Everything else | -$4,902 | -$8,183 | enable JS to see delta |
| Net profit | $5,349 | $5,979 | enable JS to see delta |
While it sounds impressive to grow revenue by $350k, it’s a little less exciting that I’m only walking away with $6k in profit. I don’t pay myself a salary, so $6k is the full amount I earned from the business in 2022. Still, I’m excited about these numbers and what they mean for 2023.
One of the major cost increases was electrical engineering. Throughout 2021, TinyPilot’s electrical engineering vendor was struggling to keep up with TinyPilot’s growth. In late 2021, I switched to a new vendor that fits our needs better, but they cost three times as much.
The ongoing chip shortage forced us into frequent redesigns, which bloated costs in engineering hours and raw materials. We were often in a race to redesign a circuit board before we ran out of our existing version, so we repeatedly paid a premium to expedite the process.
We finally escaped the redesign treadmill in September. I’m hopeful that our fourth quarter results will reflect the coming year. Our profit was $28.6k for the quarter, so if we average $9.5k per month in 2023, I’ll be happy.
TinyPilot got a new website 🔗︎
When I launched TinyPilot in 2020, I told myself the website and logo were just placeholders. Then, things took off so quickly that I never had time to replace them.
In 2022, I finally hired a design agency to create a new logo and redesign the website.
Before and after the TinyPilot website redesign
I wrote previously about how frustrating and expensive it was working with the design agency, but I’m pleased with the result. My old website looked like a hobby project, and the new design looks like a real company. I suspect that at least a portion of my increased sales resulted from the new design.
The TinyPilot team grew from six people to seven 🔗︎
At the end of 2021, the TinyPilot team was:
- Me, the sole founder
- Three part-time software developers
- Two part-time local staff who handle assembling devices and fulfilling orders
- One of whom also handled customer service
By the end of 2022, we had added two support engineers and adjusted responsibilities, so the team is now:
- Me, the sole founder
- Two part-time software developers
- Two part-time local staff who handle assembling devices and fulfilling orders
- Both now work on customer service
- Two part-time support engineers
Adding the support engineers felt like finding the missing piece of the puzzle. Before they joined, I was the only person handling technical support, and it occupied about 20% of my time. Now, I spend less than 5% of my time on support requests, and customers receive faster support.
The support engineers also do things I didn’t have time for, like investigating complex bugs, writing documentation, and improving our diagnostic tools.
Growing the team stretched my skills as a manager. In 2021, TinyPilot’s workflows were fairly simple. Almost everyone did their work as a single-person unit. The results either went directly to me or to a customer. When employees needed to coordinate with each other, it was always among teammates of the same role.
Integrating support engineers meant figuring out how different teams work together. How do support requests work when they require cooperation between fulfillment staff and support engineers? What’s the feedback loop between the support engineers and the dev team?
One of my pet peeves in the last few years is how difficult it is to share a single file with cloud storage providers like Google Drive or Dropbox. They won’t give you a direct link to your file — just a link to their web interface, where they pressure your recipient to sign up for an account. If you upload a video to Google Drive, they make you wait 15+ minutes while they re-encode it, even if it was already optimized to play in the browser.
As an alternative to the existing cloud storage options, I made a minimalist file-sharing app called PicoShare. You just upload a file, and it gives you a direct link that you can share. Easy! No re-encoding, no prompts to sign up for anything.
There are a few open-source tools that offer s
