What I learnt after bootstrapping my startup for a year

Bootstrapping my startup, Bameslog, for almost a year has been an incredible journey for me. I’ve never imagined learning so much in just 365 days, both on a technical and personal level.

Lessons I learnt after bootstrapping for a year

1. Sometimes you have to walk alone

I still remember the early days when one of our product team members helped build our server side services and APIs, primarily with Node.js and MySql. Node.js was unfamiliar territory for the both of us, with the Internet as our only ally.

He had spent 5 years as a coder with some of the biggest names in the Indian IT sector, and was working at Accenture at the time. His experience and passion inspired me to explore Linux, Apache AWS and Javascript. We had a good run coding together for around 3 to 4 months.

After the initial launch, he went to Australia to assist his company’s clients for the next 5 months.

There were two good programmers in our team at the time. And then there was one. I was left alone fending for the team as the sole programmer.

Everyone in our team thought it would be a walk through an inferno to continue building the product without him. This was a huge problem since we had no money to hire a new programmer.

It’s heartbreaking to see your team lose faith, to see the shine leave their eyes and their hopes drown. Giving up was never an option, so I decided to shut down all team operations (content, blog and social) and decided to code alone.

 For next 3 months, I worked between 16 to 24 hours a day.

For next 3 months, I worked between 16 to 24 hours a day.

Every now and then, we would run into some complex server side problems where the internet would not be able to help with. Every time I found myself on the verge of giving up, I would keep telling myself, “Just one more attempt.” I soon realised that by persevering and staying put, you can find the solution to almost every problem.

Finally, after continuously working alone on Node.js, Express, AWS, MySQL, Jquery, Php and Design Framework, we launched in beta.

Looking back now, I don’t regret working alone at all.