421: Why You Should Never Start a Software Business

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Now here's the thing. I'm about to share all the reasons why you should never ever start a software business. And, yes, I'm fully aware that I'm talking to an audience of software founders mostly, but it's somewhat sarcastic. It's kind of an ironic twist on all these great things about entrepreneurship. Here's what I've realized. Talking about the problematic sides of entrepreneurship might actually help somebody who already has this mindset to say, yeah, I'm gonna do it anyway. Or somebody who's on the fence to reconsider, maybe taking it slow and starting it as a side project instead of jumping in full time. And if you're a founder who's already on the journey, well, I'm just gonna share the little things that I've realized along the way so that maybe you can recognize them at an earlier stage and prevent some of the damage. A quick word from our sponsor here, paddle.com. If you do for some reason choose to actually start a software business, I highly recommend looking into paddle.com. I use them as my merchant of record for all my software projects. They take care of taxes, currencies, they track the client transactions, they update credit cards, reactivate accounts when they're kind of not paying and stuff. It's really helpful and that means that I can focus on dealing with my market, my competitors, and not with banks and financial regulators. Don't have to deal with that. So if you would rather just build your product, check out paddle.com as your payment provider. So let me now get into the mindset here. Why should you never ever start a software business as a solopreneur or as a bootstrap founder? Well, first off, it can get incredibly lonely. Software entrepreneurship means that you're going to spend most of your time with your code, with your product, and with making sure that it runs, and making sure it provides the value that people may or may not pay money for. You're constantly going to be interfacing with computer systems all the time. And when you then rarely interface with your customers, it tends to be in a negative context. Sure, you can have a nice conversation. I try to have this all the time with my own customers. You could turn a bug report into a really friendly interaction with a prospect or with a customer. A complaint or help request, you can always kind of turn that into something positive if you put the energy in, but it starts out as a point of friction, as a point of a challenge. So any human interaction that you're likely going to have with your customers is going to be one of being challenged, of somebody seeking help, or and this might be even worse when you come from a technical perspective, somebody who's not interested in your product. You try sales outreach, you try marketing, people come in, they …