The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey, it's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap Founder. This week taught me an unexpected lesson about entrepreneurship, and it's been a couple weeks since like the Christmas and New Year's festivities, those annual traditions of sharing joy and memories and apparently germs, that I found myself running a fever of nearly 40 degrees, that's I think 104 in Fahrenheit. And for someone who really get sick, this hit particularly hard. And you are probably going to hear it in this episode. So, as I lay in bed over the last couple of days, barely able to function and I'm still on the verge, I realized just how crucial it had been for me to build the businesses that I have built the way I did.

Because they needed to keep running. Right. Both my software company PodScan and my media business. They needed to continue to run smoothly without my active involvement. I think this is kind of the entrepreneurial dream anyway.

Right. Build a thing that does the work for you. But the forced pause of me allowing myself to take time off and watch Lord of the Rings while coughing all the time, it became quite a powerful reminder of why I chose the entrepreneurial path in the first place. And that's to have control over how I spend my time, what I do with it, and who I work with and who I work for. And the beauty of being an entrepreneur, even when you're sick, is having the freedom to say, today I'm not working because I need to take care of myself.

And paradoxically, I talked to some people on Twitter about this and I got a couple of responses in, in that kind of vein. It's one of the hardest things to do as well. When you're the one running your business, if you don't show up, often nobody does. And that's why I have over the last year or so in, in building PodScan and the couple years before in building the Bootstrap founder invested significant effort into making my businesses as independent of me as possible. Of course with the media business, I'm always needed, which is why I'm sitting here suppressing all my coughs talking to you, but with a software business it's a different story.

Every feature, every piece of infrastructure in PodScan has been built with this self healing idea in mind and I've put automations in place that handle everything from service restarts when something is wobbly to scaling resources up and down as needed depending on traffic and the system is grounded in what I consider a somewhat resilient architecture. I made it resilient and it's designed to operate autonomously. And during my now two and a half days of being completely out of commission, all I did was occasionally check my email for reports of abnormalities, which, fortunately for me amounted to exactly 0. Every usage spike, new customer sign up, subscription change, all these little things, routine operations, they continued without a hitch.

I mean,

it's aaaS business, right? That's the idea. But the system just worked and it validated all the time that I invested in making it robust. So if you find that interesting for your own business and if you maybe struggle with this, I have a couple of ideas here. The key to this reliability lies in very comprehensive and intentional error reporting.

Like since day 1, I have turned on error notifications almost to a fault because it might seem annoying to receive notifications for every single error, every time out, every disconnect in your software stack. This granular monitoring is essential because as you scale these issues will increase and that's going to be very annoying. The internet is after all a series of leaky tubes. Not every connection will work perfectly and not every service will run indefinitely without needing a restart. Both your own in your own SaaS and some dependency that you have somewhere out there.

Right. I had some outage, a couple minutes of outage on my email provider last week and my payment provider also had a couple minutes of downtime, but at that point, once I figured it out, it was already finished. It was already, kind of caught up again. But that's just the nature of technology that just happens, right? We have 99 point some percent uptime, never a 100.

So being aware of how your system operates both when it comes to normal operations and these kind of error cases, error states is crucial for this peace of mind when you're not operating it yourself. And that's why I built performance monitoring into my software stack from the beginning. I think I've been using, Sentry quite a lot, Laravel PHP application that I have and on the front end in the Vue components that I have. So Sentry can kind of report on both, which is really useful. For Elixir back in the day, I used AppSignal, which was really, really good.

It integrated deeply into the Elixir Stack. And I would just check it out. I think New Relic has APM as well. The Application Performance Monitoring. These things, they are not too expensive, particularly Sentry is like $29 a month.

That is an expense that I would highly recommend because it always allows you to backtrack problems. And I am particularly excited as a Laravel nerd about the upcoming Laravel Nightwatch tool, which was introduced at Laravel in Australia a couple months ago. And that looks amazing because it integrates directly with Laravel applications hosted anywhere, both on the new cloud service that they have and supposedly, even the ones that we host on our own servers. It was really cool. I'm really looking forward to using this because it promises to make application performance monitoring and error tracking even more accessible.

First off to me, because I run the business on Laravel, but also to everybody else who chooses to stack and I think that's really cool. So I track the slightest deviations, right? Any tiny little error, time outs beyond normal, like anything that is an abnormality and if you do this, you gradually build a more stable and reliable

system because each error notification becomes this opportunity to address

a potential issue at its root right now. Opportunity to address a potential issue at its root right now. And that ensures it won't cause problems in the future. And this feels annoying to developers and to software entrepreneurs in particular because you're always chasing these little issues, but it's absolutely worth it. Because if there then ever is a problem that does slip through, it's usually a novel problem that you then solve and once solved it strengthens the system even further.

You can never gonna be caught up on errors that you had in the past because you solved them when they happened. The recommendation that I give people when it comes to your own process management, right, if you have a conversation with a customer and they have a problem and you solve that problem, you might want to turn that into an SOP in a standard operating procedure right there and then, because if that problem ever comes up again and it's not a problem you can solve with code, it's something you have to manually do. Now, you know the steps you need to take and you don't need to do the research twice. That is the benefit of this kind of approach is to always solve the problems when they occur. So even in my current state, I feel compelled to share this with you and record this, not because I, think I need to appeal to sponsor obligations or analytics concerns for the podcast.

This episode has no sponsor and honestly, I couldn't care less about the ratings, but when it comes to my media business, that's the other side of things. I really wanna maintain my weekly episode streak and that matters to me. It's an accountability measure and both for myself and hopefully for you as well to just keep doing the thing you're doing and do it every time. So consider it as a gentle nudge to think about how you can set up your business to function without you. And either delegate responsibilities to reliable team members, that's the best.

If you're a solopreneur, you don't really have that. At that point, you might want to be implementing robust automations and build a self sustaining system that allows you to step away when life demands it, whether for health and family, any other reason. When you take care of yourself without worrying about this business crumbling because you always need to be at the helm. Well, if you remove yourself from that, you've built something truly valuable and also sellable. Well, we talk about this another day.

And that's it for today.

Thank you so much for listening to the Booster Founder. You can find me on Twitter at abitkal. Find my books and photo kostat too. If you wanna support me and the show, please tell the people that you know would be interested in looking at the world of podcasts and use it for marketing or research purposes about PodScan dot FM. That's the business that I'm running, and I'm always happy about a shout out and leave a rating and a review for this podcast if you can as well.

Makes a massive difference if you show up because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds, and it helps the show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.