Bootstrapping 101

Building a startup while traveling through southeast Asia has its pros and cons. Currently, I’m in Bangkok, and spend most of my days enjoying the city. When I work on Klart.co I do it from various restaurants and cafes. I know there are some good coworking spaces here but I haven’t taken the time to check them out yet since I’m on a bit of vacation currently 🌴.

Anyway, what does this have to do with building a startup? Well, when you’re traveling there are so many distractions around you that when you work, you want to do stuff that matter.

You don’t want to waste your precious time traveling with bullshit that creates zero value.

Klart is currently still in the validation phase. I try to figure out what people like, what to stick with, and what to throw away. So even thinking about rewriting part of the app in React is what I call zero value and time wasted at this point. What I should really do is talk to people and think about distribution. I know this, but since I’m a software developer, I love coding, so it’s easy for me to want to rewrite the app in a new framework. Just for reference, Klart is just vanilla js now, but it’s plenty fast. To make the point clear. I don’t want to sit at a cafe in an awesome place and spend days rewriting some code in a new framework that none of my users will even notice. I want to create value when working. So if it’s not making the product better for my users in some way, it’s waste. All those distractions people talk about actually makes me think about how to create value, do less, and do stuff that matter.