Two things worth mentioning about bootstrapping. First, getting a product off the ground is hard. Second, nearly all of your products will fail.
The first bit is common knowledge. But nobody seems to prepare themselves for that second one. And when it happens, it often hits hard.
Don't give up though. I live primarily on the income of a single SaaS product. It is the fifth complete project that I built with the intention of getting to this point. That's only counting completed products, ready to go out the door or even launched and running. Call it a dozen or more if you add in things that only lasted a month or so.
Now I'm in the process of getting another solid income stream up and running. There are two more complete sites in the can that didn't work, another half dozen false starts, and one site currently about to launch that hopefully will be the one.
Perhaps you see a pattern here. There are entire years of effort written off up above, many with a lot more work put into them than what you would ever want to go to waste. You are virtually guaranteed to fail at least once at building something profitable. If you decide to pick up and try again, be certain that you'll have this same experience several more times before you finally hit on the thing that will pay for your kids' college fund.
But once you have that thing ticking away, it'll make all the effort worth it. It was sunny yesterday, so I ditched work for the day and went out rock climbing. It was sunny again today and the kids had the afternoon off school, so I took that off too. That's the lifestyle you're working towards.
Keep at it, and don't get discouraged by minor setbacks.
Good luck!
by
Jason Kester
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