[rozenmd]

The thing that blew my mind at the time was that the initial licence was like $9, something you could throw onto your credit card as a dev and just have a heaps better way of tracking bugs.

Most of their growth playbook from back then is obsolete or basic knowledge these days.

[moneywoes]

Yep, exactly. The more I read and it seems that these huge incumbents were all building in a blue ocean market.

Have you ever found any useful guides for bootstrapping in competitive markets?

It seems based on indie hacker building a personal founder brand is the only viable method for low customer acquisition.

[rozenmd]

I have very little personal brand (I went from writing about React to around 900 subscribers to running an uptime monitoring SaaS - https://onlineornot.com), but am still managing to grow in a red-ocean market.

The trick is:

- being default-alive (the business will never go under, as I have a full time job)

- continuous progress (2 hours a day, every workday)

- learn everything you can about sales and marketing, the engineering is the easy part :)

[caditinpiscinam]

> learn everything you can about sales and marketing

Are there resources you'd recommend for this?

[rozenmd]

I've mainly been learning by doing (and failing), though I've read these books which helped solve problems I had at the time:

- Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra

- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford

- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

- Every book Seth Godin has written, particularly This is Marketing

- Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen

- Forget the Funnel by Claire Suellentrop and Georgiana Laudi

[jimbokun]

I guess the meta lesson is find today's blue ocean markets.

The "obvious" things the Atlassian founders did back then were not obvious at all at the time.