Ask HN: Bootstrapped and profitable - what would you like to know?

Absolutely, I am going to try to detail the process of securing our first million users with as much detail as I can :)

My biggest regret is that many things we did back them were motivated by the kind of "get rich quick" mentality that now I know does more harm than good.

I wish we had focused more energy on serving our users well instead of focusing so much on trying to rank well on Google.

However, the interesting question is: if we had focused less on SEO and more on the product as I wish we had, would we be having this conversation? (meaning, would we have survived?)

It started with just me for the first 3 months, and then a friend joined me. Took me about a month to build the very first version and well, it was awful! (but at least it was live)

We didn't seek out any advisors and we still don't have any. Maybe this is something we should be considering?

This is a tough one, probably deserves an article by itself!

We have a team of volunteer moderators that I find incredibly valuable. These are users that love our product so much that they are willing to spend a lot of their time helping us without any sort of compensation - and I cannot thank them enough for that.

Other than moderation, we also have to deal with all sorts of spammers and scamers. We were so naive at first, we built a system expecting everybody to be honest and good - well, that turned out to be a mistake.

Fast forward a few years and now we have generated enough IP on automated countermeasures against spam/scams and automated moderation that we could probably spin off a business to monetize that.

Anonymity definitely brings out the worst of some people, it is rather shocking.

Our product is based around multi-user chat rooms and instant messaging with social networking features on the side. People basically join our service to make new friends instead of connecting with their real world friends.

The first 10k users were hard to get and we had to do a little bit of out-of-pocket PPC advertising to seed the community, after that we focused on building links, SERP and building a product people liked. It was a long road and between 0 and our first million users and we almost gave up many times. At some point we even had the site up for sale on eBay - I am so glad we didn't find a buyer :)

We monetize it mostly with AdSense, we tried other ad networks but nothing quite compares. Adsense combines near infinite inventory with the highest RPMs I have seem anywhere.

We were "profitable" right away because our costs were so low and because we designed the site to run in auto-pilot, requiring very little maintenance. Even so, it took 2-3 of years before we were generating enough revenue to consider quitting our day jobs.

Some PPC, a lot of link building. Our strategy was to rank well on Google and rely on organic traffic to grow. I am not sure if that was a good strategy to start with but it has paid off handsomely (although it took a while...). Having free visitors delivered to us everyday by the search engines is quite an asset to have.

Thank you :)

We were profitable almost right away as long as we were not working on it full time. It wasn't until we were generating 20-30 million impressions monthly that we were able to quit our day jobs.

The service is free and monetized through AdSense - although we have just introduced a virtual currency as an experiment.

On it!

I don't question myself very often, I don't see myself as super smart or super competent but I believe that you can do anything you want as long as you are willing to pay the "price". Sometimes a project may demand from you more than you are willing to give, but rarely a project will demand the impossible. So I guess I never questioned if there was anything I couldn't do, but I was very aware there are certain things I wouldn't be willing to do (black-hat SEO for example).

We have pivoted at least twice but we did so by small steps, we never sat down and decided on a brand new direction. Instead we analyzed the data and changed the incentives in place to guide the community to one direction or another.

Regarding keeping the business alive, we didn't quit our day jobs right away and for the first couple of years we treated more like as a hobby. Then eventually we started supplementing our income with it, etc, you get the idea.

There are two of us and we are both technical (and we have just hired our first non-founding team member, also a developer). My partner is a rare hybrid of brilliant developer and competent designer, something I am very grateful for.

Both of us have a background in high-performance computing and that has helped keep hardware costs down to a minimum - we served up to 2.7 million users from one single server and it wasn't until we switched to MongoDB that we had to buy more servers.

I would, yes. I'm much more interested in what people can do with limited resources.

Good question, I guess I simply assumed there would be an audience for it because people always ask me a lot of questions about it in events, etc. I thought it would be nice to have an article to refer them too instead of telling the same stories over and over.

So, is there interest? :)

I don't feel comfortable disclosing figures but to give you an idea, we have a nice office, we own all our hardware, have just hired our first non-founding member and we eat steak quite often.