My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

Author here. As always, I'm happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post.

No question, always nice to read your yearly updates.

Last year looked really promising , your revenue already high but profits not there yet, but I'm happy to see you turned a nice profit this year! Congratulations!

Why the sharp drop in adspend?

Thanks for writing a great summary of year #6 for your business. Question: where do your advertising dollars go and how do you measure their success?

Good luck in year #7!

Hi mtlynch, I just wanna say that your post brought back a lot of memories for me. I distinctly remember reading your original post back in 2018. I remember feeling that I really hoped you would succeed since your complaints were so authentic. When I was reading this post, I was like - wait, i think i remember this post - and it's you! Happy to hear that you've made it with tinypilot

Good question! I actually hadn't noticed it changed that much, but you're right.

The biggest difference was that in 2022, I hired a paid ads consultant to set up ads automation for me on a few different platforms. That had a high up-front cost, but then it was inexpensive to maintain those ads in 2023.

I also spent money experimenting on more channels in 2022, so in 2023, I cut out spending on the ones that weren't earning a positive ROI.

Thanks for reading, and that's really nice to hear. That quitting Google post ended up being more popular than I ever expected, so from time to time, people tell me, "Oh, you're that quitting Google guy. Glad it worked out!"

Could you share platforms/channels were more profitable/worth it and which of them weren't? I love your blogs btw!

If possible, could you please the website for this ads consultant?

Thanks for reading!

>where do your advertising dollars go and how do you measure their success?

Sorry, but advertising spend is one of the few things I avoid sharing publicly. Most other things about my strategy, I think our execution is what makes the difference, so I don't care if competitors know. With advertising, it was expensive to figure out a successful strategy, and it's the kind of thing that a competitor can copy perfectly.

I can talk about measuring their success, though. The metric I focus on primarily is revenue on ad spend. Material costs make up about 33% of the revenue from TinyPilot's product sales, so if we get $1.50 for every $1 we spend on ads, we'd end up about breakeven ($1.50 from revenue - $1 for the ad - $0.50 for materials), so I aim to be at 2.25 ROAS or higher on any channel so we have a comfortable margin.

Have you thought about expanding into the void left by SlingBox?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingbox

How detailed is your time tracking in terms of what you actually did (not the mythical calendar/plan/TODO list)? You're not going to get down to 20 hours a week without identifying the chunks of time you're doing and essentially outsourcing it to someone on the Tiny Pilot team (or removing yourself from meetings).

Always interesting to follow your progress Michael! I managed to sell 100 units last year and feel ashamed compared to your numbers but hey it’s better than the nothing of the previous year!

Nice work! I think units sold varies so much by business, so no need to feel shame at all.

Selling 100 units per year is a nice spot to be in because you're making sales frequently enough that you probably have some knobs to adjust and see what impact it has on your results, and that makes it so much easier to improve. That's why I've always been afraid of businesses that rely on enterprise sales, where you're going for 3-4 big deals per year, and the sales cycle is 6-18 months. It seems so hard to know whether you're doing well or poorly until it's too late.

No, that's an interesting idea. I don't know that much about that market, but I guess it seems like a bad sign that SlingBox couldn't make it work even with dominant market position.

I think detailed tracking can be helpful, but I don't think it's necessary. I reduced time I spent on TinyPilot in 2022 even though I don't have rigorous time tracking to prove it.

Do you have recommendations for granular time tracking? I don't know of any tool that seems like it would do what I want. I know there are tools that track your active window, and I'm not crazy about the privacy aspect of those, and I don't think window titles map perfectly to activities. And then I could manually log every hour of my day, but I feel like the time I'd spend bookkeeping aren't worth the insights I'd get from it.

You’re right. I find you very inspiring Michael. Your writing has given me a lot of new ideas on a crossroad I’ve been stuck at recently.

Wow, super inspiring.

I've coming up on a crossroads where I'm considering leaving my high-paid low-pressure cushy remote job at some big tech company to chase some silly ideas I have. The timing feels right - but I can't help but be fearful of a jump without any sort of indication on whether I can actually pull that off.

Thanks for the transparency and sharing - you've got a new fan!