If you don't need color I recommend going with a laser printer. Not only for lower consumable costs, but better software support too. In 2009 I bought a Lexmark laser printer new for $120 at Frys. It has native postscript support, so it will work with anything without having to load software from the manufacturer. I systems ranging from an old Macintosh Quadra running System 7 to new Mac running MacOS Tahoe, a PC running Windows 11 and everything in between. It even works in Linux too.
The consumables are cheap too. I have just replaced the toner cartridge once and a new OEM one was about $80 on Amazon.
Pricing is something I struggle with too. I really need to figure out my pricing model and price point as it makes a difference to some deferred architecture decisions. I can't put the decision off much longer as I'm getting to the point where I need to make a decision.
My biggest issue at the moment is that development of the MVP is taking way longer than I had initially thought. It's just me working on it and it has turned into a real grind. I am just so ready to get this done. I could hire contractors, but quality contractors are expensive and cheap ones don't deliver quality. Either way I would be burning runway and I'd rather save my money for later.
My other issue is that it is just me sitting at my home office working. I don't really have anyone that I can talk to. I started this venture after I took a sabbatical from work, so everyone IRL just thinks I'm unemployed farting around the house all day. Whereas I am working 6 days a week, I'm just not getting paid. I have tried to join some online communities, but there are just people stumping for their own start ups. I am considering joining a coworking space next year that is geared toward startups. The problem is that is also expensive, especially considering that next year I have to pay full freight on my health insurance.
Right now I am living off my investments. I have done well this year, but like others I am starting to be concerned that we might be in a bubble. I am pretty conservatively invested, but it would suck to have a prolonged 20 or 30% draw back.
I really need to bring on a cofounder to help with business development. Though I have to find someone willing to work for equity only as I don't have enough cash to pay them a salary.
So I guess you could say money is one of my biggest struggles.
Have you considered slashing features in order to speed up your MVP release? Our own "must have" features are often not must haves for users. I was in the same boat a few years back and released a cut down version missing what I thought were must have features. Many years and 1,000+ users later no one has ever requested the missing "key features."
I have the same issue as him but the issue is that users today expect a certain level of fidelity otherwise they will stick to incumbents.
I think your advice worked back in 2010-2018 when the bar was very low.
My audience literally didn’t want to use my product because while it was solving their problem it didn’t have the same level of fidelity as their current stack. So I had to spend a lot of time improving it.
These days the bar is so high. Unless you really do find something unique that has not been technified.
These days it’s mostly a David vs Goliath style of battle.
Man I really feel you, being a solo founder is tough. If it's possible for you to relocate temporarily Antler has a accelerator-esque program. They'll pay you a tiny stipend to move to Austin or NYC depending on which location you get into, for the duration of the program (5-6 weeks). You'll have like minded people around you giving you an opportunity to maybe find a co founder and get some motivation.
At the end you'll get a chance to pitch and get 100+k(varies by location) in seed and then another shot at getting funding.
Tbh their deal is doodoo compared to YC but it's a lot less competitive and you'll be out of the rut you're in right now.
As for the MVP taking time... I think it's perfectly fine, probably better even. The bar to impress it's very high now, specially since llms have made it pretty easy to add polish. I completely understand that feeling where you've already whittled your idea down to it's bone but you still can't get it done. That happens, I've faced that same problem numerous times. Whenever we thought we'd done enough we'd go out to testers and they'd point out the exact rough edges we'd intentionally tried to ignore to ship it out faster. Most of the time those edges put off people completely.
All you need to know is your target audience. If it's enterprise, having that added polish will make or break your deal if they're larger companies, specifically when they're customer 1-2. What won't matter is having 1-2 more metrics in a dashboard or maybe a customizable layout. But let's say you're report generation is a csv file that's generated client side with nothing asynchronous or email based, that would raise some eyebrows about the expected quality of service. This isn't to say you won't have understanding and patient customers, however you'll always have to earn it first.
Get the basics right, make sure it's all functioning together well and hopefully it'll all go well. The hardest part is always bd, that's where you'll truly start to feel like Will Smith walking around with your bone density scanner.
There’s a lot to unpack. I belong to a mastermind with multiple seven and eight figures founders. If you want to talk about some of this things, send me an email (my username @ gmail)
In my sphere most companies are going to either Hyper-V or the cloud. Hyper-V kinda won by default as a lot of orgs already had Windows Server licenses.
Do you have any legitimate traffic coming from AWS? My thought is to just drop all traffic from their ASN. Once they can't contact you for a while they'll move along and you could unblock.
If it's all from a single AWS region, this is the way to go.
I tend to be careful with residential or office IP ranges. But if it looks like a datacenter, it will be blocked, no second thoughts. Especially if it's a cloud provider that makes it too easy for customers to rotate IPs. Identify the ASN within which they're rotating their IPs, and block it. This is much more effective than blocking based on arbitrary CIDRs or geographical boundaries.
Unless you're running an API for developers, there's no legitimate (non-crawling) reason for someone to request your site from an AWS resource. Even less so for something like Huawei Cloud.
"Legitimate" is relative here. I would count you as using unusual software to hide your actual source address. Not a huge concern because if you're doing that, I assume you also know how to move around to avoid getting blocked.
In fact, the ability to move to a different cloud on short notice is also part of the CAPTCHA, because large cloud-based botnets usually can't. They'd get instabanned if they tried to move their crawling boxes to something like DigitalOcean.
