The road less funded: Turning passion into thriving software businesses
I've always liked the idea of tracking habits. A couple years ago, I had a large whiteboard and I would draw a calendar and put an X on every day where I wrote some code towards a side project. When I needed the whiteboard space, I switched to marking an...
My blogging journey started 5 years ago on Medium. I had a blast writing on that platform. Then, I moved to Ghost and put my writing on spencerpauly.com. I wanted a central hub for my content. Ghost was perfect – it had a beautiful editor, elegant themes,...
A few years ago, I was building a product, moving fast, shipping features daily — until my test suite became the biggest bottleneck. Every small UI change would break my E2E tests. Fixing them quickly became a full-time job. My test suite, which was suppos...
For the past month, I’ve been building a new SaaS product, and today I’m excited to share a sneak peek of it with you! This is particularly exciting for me, as I haven't launched a paid side project since Engine. And although I’ve built things between then...
This is just a brain dump of how I program my weightlifting. This isn't really a guide or strategy for how to get optimal results. There's plenty of those guides out there. Personally, I feel like the difference between "good" programming and science-back...
Picture yourself and a hundred other souls stranded on a remote island. You wake up and jump right into the daily grind of hunting, fishing, and cooking. It's simply your way of life. But, one day, as you struggle to catch elusive fish, a spark of ingenuit...
Last week I woke up to an email from my friend and fellow bootstrapper, Tyler Dane inviting me to join him and others on a 15-day productivity challenge. <Image src='/content/images/2023/08/Xnapper-2023-08-15-21.28.01-1.png' alt='' /The premise is simple:...
I'm currently sitting in a coffee shop in Copenhagen. It's one of my last bits of travel before returning to the U.S. A victory lap in a sense. And it feels like a victory lap. <Image src='/content/images/2022/12/AF1QipMMuPD8cxhl0OJsTCyTbfa9rC3K5QkYk9dOsy...
Exactly one month ago, I quit my job, sold my things, and booked a flight to Europe. The destination? My dream city of Amsterdam. This was motivated by many things, but ultimately it came down to three main factors: freedom of location, freedom of time, an...
This week has been extremely stressful for me. I made a tweet last week about moving: <Tweet author="Spencer" handle="spencerpauly" date="July 24, 2022" url="https://twitter.com/spencerpauly/status/1551324602764337153?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" Unpopular o...
There's a lot of great advice online to build better software businesses. The common wisdom includes "start marketing before you start building", "build in public", "validate your business idea", and more. And don't get me wrong, this is great advice! But,...
🚀 Product update: 2 new engine customers this week 🚀😄! yay! I'm very independent. And I'd argue that if you're building a bootstrapped software business you probably are as-well. How do I know that? Well, think about it! You have no funding, no team,...
Starting something new shouldn't be hard. But, it is. I think Newton's first law explains why this happens. An object at rest will remain at rest, and an object in motion will remain in motion. Of course Newton is talking about motion, but I think it appli...