passport-selfie.com

👮 Is it really that bad to manage your own infrastructure? The answer is more nuanced than a simple "Yes." Opting for a multitude of SaaS, Low-Code, No-Code, AI, Serverless, and Hyper-Scalable tools might create a bigger mess in the long run than a well-organized collection of a few VMs or containers managed by your team. In our experience, setting up CI/CD for all our apps on a slightly customized (and cheap!) setup resulted in the same velocity as using serverless tools. Small upfront costs and near-zero maintenance afterward can be the sweet spot for a bootstrapped business.

What would be your low-budget MVP stack? We started with a DigitalOcean droplet running Node.js 🏎️ & SQLite 🔥. For $4/month, we could scale from 0 requests and users up to hundreds per day. What made it possible: - The website is generated statically and deployed to the free Cloudflare Pages. - Async IO was great at handling occasional load bursts during experiments with performance ads and peak days in general. A few funky details: Node.js deployments were done _with downtime_. We used Docker Compose for conveniently shutting services down and up. Images were uploaded from the CI to the machine directly, eliminating any Container Registry requirements.

Making educated decisions is hard 😫 . Should we use Kubernetes? Which cloud provider—AWS, GCP, or Azure? How many cloud credits can we get? Should we outsource everything to third parties? There’s so much noise out there, and it’s easy to just go with what everyone else is doing. But being a small company with limited resources has its advantages. We’ve been optimizing infrastructure costs from the very beginning, through both our technology choices and careful provider selection. Follow passport-selfie.com on LinkedIn to learn more about our journey in bootstrapping a neat & sustainable online business 🚀 ! #sustainability #software #saas

This new feature you're building right now doesn't matter 🥸. Before PassportSelfie, we spent years developing both B2B and B2C applications at different companies. Yet, it's still surprising how little impact some of our most anticipated features actually had. A few of them hit big, but those were rare. What really made the difference was our relentless cycle of trying out new ideas, over and over again 🚀. #testing #software #ProductDevelopment

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It’s been over a year since we started, and wow, what a journey! We've learned a ton, had some amazing customer interactions, and saved thousands of people a lot of time. Now, we’re ready to share some of our learnings and observations. Being a bootstrapped startup, we’ve got a different take on a lot of things, and we’re excited to share our experiences with you 🚀.