10 Lessons from 6 Months of Bootstrapping My Open Source Startup

Here are 10 lessons I have learnt so far whilst bootstrapping my open source project into a sustainable product.

In 2024, I left my job at AWS to double down on my open source project, EventCatalog. By November, I took the leap and went full-time. Since then, it’s been a journey of learning, building, and adapting. In the spirit of transparency and helping others on a similar path, I wanted to share some of the key lessons I’ve picked up along the way.

1. Talk to users/customers over everything else

The most important. Talk to humans, learn their problems, dive deeper with them. Do this above all things.

Personally I try to meet 1 or 2 users a week, every time someone is doing something interesting with EventCatalog, or have questions, rather than spending the time on Discord, I invite them to a 30 minute chat to learn more.

Create your own mechanism. I use Notion to track my engagements. I track things like who they are, company name, engagement date, and more importantly the problems / use cases they are using my project. Following practices from “The mum test” I try and dive deeper into their issues, and document these. Once I collect problems from companies I compare and contrast them all and find themes between my users, this influences the roadmap.

Do not build in the dark. Talk to people, get feedback. As a bootstrapper you don’t have time to waste. Build useful things, don’t waste time.

2. Self motivation is key

It’s an emotional roller coster. It’s a marathon not a sprint. You will have days where you are on top of the world and days questioning everything. You need to get up, push through and continue. No-one is there to push you along, people can advise, but you need to turn up and do it.

Being your own boss, you have to be self motivated, understand your market, talk to customers, write the features, do the marketing, documentation, videos and much more.

Find your way of working, stay motivated and focused.

3. Work in public, share your story

Don’t perfect everything. Share what you think, what you have, and keep momentum. People like a story, so share yours, even if you feel no-one is listenning, people are.

In the past working in public has landed me jobs at Postman and AWS, and now it brings people to EventCatalog. Share your story, not just the highs but also the lows.

4. Be frugal with time

You are bootstrapping, you have a runway (more on this later), your time is finite, you need to focus. You can’t spend days/weeks building stuff people don’t want (I’m still learning this!).

As I mentioned before, this is why talking to users is important. You need to focus your time, work on things that push the needle (even if its just slightly).

Time evaporates as a bootstrapper. Your days turn into weeks, and the months fly by. Focus, know your roadmap, pivot when you need to, try things, experiment and move fast. Not everything needs to be perfect.

5. Get comfortable being uncomfortable

You will be doing things you never done before (e.g marketing, sales, contracts), this can be scary at first, but you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Everyone learnt this stuff, and so can you. Lucky for us we now have LLMs to help us with our journey. What would of taken hours previously takes minutes now, use this to your advantage.

Accept the fact you don’t know everything, seek advice or support, or just ask LLM ;).

6. It’s an emotional rollercoaster

You will have days you are super motivated, focused and think its the best feeling in the world, you will have days where you feel unmotivated, unfocused and questioning why you are doing this… you will question everything.

I’m not sure I have much advice here, but this is something you need to be aware of. It’s tough, it’s hard, but it’s worth it. You will learn a ton of things, you will have a rocket attached to your ass, you have no idea where your going, but the experience is awesome and you will learn a ton along the way.

If you are considering bootstrapping, get ready for it, as will make and break you, weekly.

7. Track metrics, burn rate and runway

I think I obsess about this a bit too much, but you need to know your runway and burn rate, how much is coming in vs going out. Get on top of this early, get your system in place, I just have a spreadsheet. I review this every month, to work out how sustainable the project is. (super important if you have a family).

Also it’s important to have an emergency fund. A set of cash that you won’t touch, incase things go to shit and you need some money.

It’s tough, but you need to stay on top of all this.

8. Momentum Beats Perfection

Not everything has to be perfect. Focus on momentum over perfection.

Move fast, experiment, what sticks, what is crap, figure it out. Don’t spend months building your next feature… you are just running out of runway and losing time. Figure out the MVP, get feedback and pivot from there. Talk to your users, get feedback.

9. Community Is Your Superpower

Big driver for me is the community, and giving back (just part of my personality), but the community is your superpower in your project.

You want to create champions in organizations around the world. People will come to your project, they are your champions. They will find the budget and champion your project in there organization. Create relationships with them, help them out and spend time with them. If you don’t like talking to people, you will struggle!

My advice? Create a simple Discord server, plaster the link on your website and project and spend time in there. Let people ask questions, join calls, contribute there ideas… create a community, focus on that.

At EventCatalog we now have 1,100 members in our Discord server. (come join if you want!). These folks all come to the project with the same problem, these are my users/customers/community for the project, it’s awesome to spend time with them, learn from them and build a better product for everyone.

10. Small Wins Keep You Going

Take the small wins when you can. Take time away from your business and keyboard. Take a step back and look at the past, what you have done.

At EventCatalog I create monthly blog posts, this forces me to look back on the month, review what we done, publish growth metrics with the community. This is a great way to work in public and focus on the small wins.

Got a new user? GitHub stars? New pull request? Let the small wins feed your motivation.

Summary

I hope these 10 lessons help you if you are on your bootstrap journey or thinking about it. These are just some of my raw thoughts (here at 6am), but if you have any more questions please feel free to DM me and get in contact.