Method - seinecle/QualityOfLife GitHub Wiki

In this project I’ll follow the boostrapping approach to creating a startup. "Bootstrapping" means the project is as self-made as possible. I choose an extreme version of bootstrapping, by Pieter Levels:

• no external funding

• team of one person

• as little delegation as possible: I’ll create the front, back, do the sysadmin, promotion, etc.

• no dependency on an incubator or coworking space

This seems like absurdly limiting, but Pieter Levels makes a very good case for this approach. That’s the way he built a series of successful products, and he explained this method convincingly in his book (and tweets).

Pieter has also a series of sound advice I’m going to follow:

• automate when possible

• avoid frameworks

• prepare your launch carefully (this one is so important and less intuitive than it seems)

• connect to your users, be honest and open to them

And he has three pieces of advice I won’t follow:

• ship many products because just a few of them (or one, or none) will eventually be successful. Leave the product when signs show it doesn’t take off I have limited resources and I must say this project is really fun to me - I’ll probably stick to it even if it would be reasonable to leave it.

• be careful with survivor bias: his projects might have succeeded because of a random combination of factors, not because of the specific method he followed to develop them. I’ll just assume his method favors success.

• do things quickly (like, ship a beta of a product in 3 months max). Quality of Life remains a side project for me, not my day job. I choose to do develop it precisely and carefully, at the cost of being very slow.

Curious about what my project is about? Check out the other pages of this wiki!