My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

I think people (and the founder) are focusing on yearly profits as their remuneration and comparing it to a salary... but the reality is you're creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings - and you really should be looking at that increase in value vs your increase in profits. In reality your net worth went up by over $1.5 million in the last year, in addition to earning 236k - that is the actual value you created for yourself in the last year and not the 236k you cashflowed.

I find it redeeming that despite having a gift for development - software and hardware - the biggest factors affecting profitability and growth here are things that most MBAs would do in a business quite regularly (outsourcing design/packaging/fulfillment, streamlining costs, doing price elasticity experiments, polling customers and markets for product improvement).

I enjoyed seeing the inverted perspective that product/engineering is straightforward and low risk but things like optimizing fulfillment and operating costs is a new exciting endeavor.

One tip I suggest doing is leveraging google ads to figure out features that customers are willing to pay for before you build them... if they're clicking the ad they are searching for it and interested in buying it. Start a few very low cap campaigns calling out features you are thinking of building into the product, and see which one get's the most impressions and clicks per marketing dollar and focus on that. The added advantage is you know it will be easier to buy advertising for it once the feature is done.

> …but the reality is you're creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings - and you really should be looking at that increase in value vs your increase in profits.

Muslim here. I think this is completely immoral and I don’t want to ever participate in stock market if/when I found a company. I want my business to be valued with the actual value it provides to people (the amount they are willing to pay me for my products), not the hypothetical future money it may potentially provide to rich people who gamble with their money and the economy.

Uh? Islam says nothing about the stock market. Participating in businesses and having shares is completely halal, and encouraged actually. That's the good way of generating long term revenue, as opposed to lending or profiting from interests. The very first Muslims and the prophet himself PBUH were merchants and traders, and business owners.

I’ve met people that believe that any extension of credit that has a premium attached to it is against the rules. And that the very real fact that any transaction on a modern exchange involves the extension of credit with a premium, leads to a situation where the exchanges themselves are forbidden.

I don’t have any opinion on if this interpretation squares with their religion but it is certainly true that stock exchanges are run on extending credit and paying a premium for it.