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> At least you got funded. I'm still bootstrapped, spending my own money for the privilege. :)

The best move my founder and I ever made, by leaps and bounds, was to not take any outside investment. If you can manage your cash flow and not get over excited about rocket trajectory growth, bootstrapping has its benefits; for founders especially.



I’m making $200 a month off of it, and I live in San Francisco. Needless to say, I’m practically fully funding it out of my savings. It’s this, anyway, it was on the front page a few weeks ago: https://getaether.net

Basically, a passion product, something I want to see exist. It has the chance to sustain me eventually, but I think I’ll run out of savings long before it comes there, unless, I don’t know, I make a business version and sell B2B...


How do you make money off that? I always wonder what gives people confidence to make something new and untested vs picking an existing in demand product and improving it, sell b2b to people who actually pay for services.. don’t mean to downplay your project, just curious why you didn’t go b2b route?


The design and engineering challenge was interesting (I’m a product designer and an engineer) - and I had come out of a job I had not liked very much.

Honestly, I think that explains a lot of the side/full time projects here.

OTOH, if you’re looking for a ‘Slack, but for async discussion’ app for your startup, hit me up for the B2B pilot. I have not much time left on my savings, but I’m working towards launching a B2B version of the same app.


Researching Slack-Alternatives I actually at least subscribed to some newsletter of yours which arrived a few days ago.

I think to make money you need to focus on B2B, but it seems like a tough market right now. Anyways you'd have to focus your landing page on that.

Privacy? meh. Compliance stuff and no US servers or any 3rd party servers you'd need to make contracts with? Yay!

The 6 Month content limit feels off for B2B.

How does it differ from slack usablility wise?


Interesting - that might have been something else because I don’t market this as a slack alternative, and I did not send a newsletter a few days ago either. I sent one yesterday though.

For the B2B version the content limit can be set as a compliance thing, to however many months you want, or be disabled completely.

Compliance is even better: I can run it on premises, in any server you own, or in any AWS region you want, with no dependencies, no third party contracts, and I can guarantee I will see none of your data, you hold the content encryption keys.

Business version will have its own landing page, with its own benefits, etc. For example, that version isn’t P2P. It’s also not a Slack alternative, in that it doesn’t do chat, but longer form communication. In practice that means it takes place of email groups at your company.


Sounds really interesting. I just thought it's yet another slack/IRC, this time with p2p.

I just misjudged time and maybe timezones made it the day before yesterday for me :). I meant your recent newsletter.




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