Here's how Jim Raptis left the VC funding world behind and built a portfolio of bootstrapped products with $6.5k+ MRR

After successfully raising venture capital and exiting, Jim Raptis is breaking out of the VC world.

His plan is to bootstrap a portfolio of three products to $10k MRR, then put them on autopilot while he builds more.

He's currently at $6.5k MRR.

I asked him how he's doing it without the funds to back him this time. Here's what he had to say. 👇

Learning to code

When I was 18 years old, I studied electrical engineering.

I was planning to discover how computers worked, then learn programming. After a few months, I became frustrated that all the courses focused on theory, most of which was useless in the real world.

I wanted to learn practical skills, so I watched a ton of YouTube videos and took a bunch of courses to learn how to design. And I invested time on Stack Overflow and Github to advance my coding skills with up-to-date practices.

Then, I built a mobile app from scratch to test my skills. It was a silly metrics convertor, but it taught me many things.

That's how I like to learn. I solve problems after they come to my doorstep. For example, when I was building that app, I learned how to handle authentication after I decided to allow users to save their data.

That way, you don’t waste valuable time on theory. It's better to invest in the practical stuff. Especially when you're building multiple products, like I am now.

Securing venture capital

Soon after that, I cofounded a startup with three colleagues. In the early days, we participated in hackathons and VC pitching competitions and won a couple of them. That got us noticed by some Greek VCs.

Eventually, we started negotiating with two of them. It was a tough period, full of uncertainty because fundraising took months and we had to keep working on the product at the same time.

But in the end, we raised a pre-seed round of €300k from a VC and an angel investor in exchange for 20% of the company.

In my view, the business was successful, but we had to sell it due to pressure from investors, as well as a general loss of interest from me and my cofounders.

Sellers came to us and we sold it for a good amount. But we had to pay back the investors and split the remaining money between four cofounders, so by the time the money was in our pockets, it was only a small fraction of the selling price.

It translated to a couple of months of financial freedom.

Exiting another product

So, I used that time to build a few free design and code tools on my own, mostly having fun and tackling small problems that I was facing with freelance clients that I was working with to keep the lights on.

After a successful Product Hunt launch, I got an acquisition offer for three of my products — Wireframer, DesignValley, and CopyPalette — form a businesss who saw these projects as quality backlink opportunities for their SEO.

I sold the three tools for $5k. In retrospect, I could have asked for a higher price based on their SEO impact.

However, selling them for this amount of money increased my runway to six months. Plus, it was a huge boost to my confidence and peace of mind.

In fact, that's when I decided to abandon the VC world and focus exclusively on indie hacking.

Leaving the VC funding world behind

Venture capital and indie hacking are two completely different worlds.

With a VC startup, you must hit specific metrics and milestones every few months — metrics that might not even be relevant to your MRR.

That VC-funded product that I mentioned was quite successful and it could have been a life-changing project for a solo maker. However, it was not growing fast enough to provide high multiples for investors and support four cofounders, so they didn't see it in the same light and they pressured us to sell.

As an indie hacker, revenue is the most important metric. You can sacrifice vanity metrics and focus on profitability from day one.

And that revenue ends up with you. It’s a huge morale boost to know that if you 10x your company’s revenue, you 10x your own revenue as well.

Another big difference is how you handle money. In VC-backed startups, you’re forced to spend the funding amount as quickly as possible. As an indie hacker, you can afford to grow more slowly and, eventually, build a calm company.

His first bootstrapped SaaS

In my six months of financial freedom, I saw a beautiful geometric pattern in a Shopify promo video. Out of curiosity, I wanted to test whether I could generate the same visual result with code. Immediately, I jumped into coding, and I had a very basic MVP in a few hours using Next.js, Express.js, Heroku, Vercel, Figma.

As a designer, I knew the process of designing a pattern was extremely tedious, so I knew I had something valuable in my hands. The “real” validation came a few weeks later when I polished the MVP and soft-launched it on Twitter and Product Hunt.

People loved it, and MagicPattern became my first real SaaS. It was the first money I earned as an indie hacker, outside of the acquisitions. Such a thrilling moment!

After a year, I hit ramen profitability with MagicPattern and focused more on my indie hacking business and moved away from freelancing.

It’s still surreal that I make most of my money while I sleep.

A portfolio of bootstrapped products

Right now, I’m running three products as an indie hacker, and their combined MRR is $6500:

• MagicPattern:A collection of 15+ tools for designers & developers to generate unique graphics.

• BrandBird: An image editor to create beautiful graphics for SaaS founders.

• SuperMotion: A tool that turns images into videos to present your design work better.

Both MagicPattern and BrandBird are B2C SaaS businesses that make money from monthly and annual subscriptions. SuperMotion uses one-time purchases to allow users to unlock full access to the product.

Juggling three products

People always suggest focusing on a single product and growing it as much as possible. But, in my case, that would be a disaster. I easily lose interest.

Switching my focus between multiple products keeps my interest alive and helps me avoid burnout. Also, it’s a fantastic way to come up with new creative ideas.

To juggle everything, I divide my working days into blocks and dedicate each block to a specific task. Important bugs and easy feature requests take priority on my todo list.

After each block, I take a short break, and then I’m able to switch my context and focus on the next task. Each task can come from any of my products.

Surprisingly, support bugs are very few. At most, there are 2-3 requests per week, including admin requests like refunds, password changes, etc.

Then, I have plenty of time to work on larger features that are on my backlog. For more complex features, I usually dedicate an entire week, and I split them into smaller tasks.

Growing bootstrapped SaaS products

Building in public on Twitter was the best decision I made for my indie hacking business. I was "lucky" because I was on Twitter when the build-in public movement was just starting out, and it pushed me to ship more consistently.

I've also benefited from Product Hunt launches, SEO, product-led growth, and lifetime deals.

Building in public

Building in public has been huge for my products. For BrandBird, specifically, about 60% of my sales come from my audience because its target customers are my exact audience.

When I joined Twitter, I used to post multiple times every single day about anything. But the turning point in my growth was when I narrowed down what I shared. Now, I only share build-in-public updates and SaaS design tips.

Other than that, consistency is by far the most important factor.

I always recommend content creators to find their area of expertise and a type of content that’s easy for them to create daily.

People often worry that copycats will come from building in public. And they're right. Copycats used to bother me a lot in my early days. One person literally copied and pasted all of BrandBird, right down to the UI elements. I stressed that they’d steal my traffic.

But over the years, I’ve realized that copycats are harmless. They usually copy you for a few weeks or months, then abandon their project due to a lack of interest.

And in the meantime, it can be a good motivation booster.

Product Hunt

When it comes to Product Hunt, building in public helps because creating a buzz on social media is important.

I always announce the launch a few days earlier and give sneak peek of the product to make my audience curious about the upcoming release.

It’s also critical to support other makers with their launches. That it makes it easier to ask for their help on your own launch — and often, you don't even have to ask.

Here’s a short list of other must-haves for launching on PH:

• Add the PH widget on your website

• Send a message to your email list

• Be extra active on social media during your launch day

• Be kind and respond to everyone

Technical SEO

MagicPattern’s traffic is mostly from SEO and word-of-mouth.

When it comes to SEO, I optimize all the basic metatags. And I invest heavily in UX and site speed.

Free-tool SEO

Creating tools and articles that provide real value is also important. If you do these things, good rankings will eventually start coming in.

For example, I have a free SEO tool that I built in just four hours. The next day, I launched it on Product Hunt, mostly for fun. I didn’t expect it to have any success, but it went viral as people started talking about it on social media.

To this day, I get notifications about mentions of it on social media. It still brings a ton of SEO to MagicPattern.

Product-led growth

It’s important to create viral loops that make it incredibly easy for your users to share your product with friends or on social media.

For example, BrandBird uses a subtle watermark on exported images by free users. People share their beautiful images on their social media accounts, and their audience can immediately identify that the graphic was created with BrandBird.

Lifetime deals

Lastly, I leverage lifetime deals every time I launch a product. LTDs make it easier for early adopters to buy it, and that means I get valuable feedback and — hopefully — validation.

In the early days, the MagicPattern LTD sold at only $39. People who bought it back then are still thanking me. I did the same with BrandBird and now with SuperMotion.

SuperMotion will continue to be sold as an LTD because it isn't a need that recurs often. But I plan to also test subscriptions with a different type of offer.

Bootstrapped goals should be smaller

So that's how I grew, but it's important to note that endless growth is not a sustainable goal for founders — especially indie hackers. I see people setting goals like $1M, $10M, or even $100M ARR for their businesses without caring about their personal freedom or mental health.

In most countries, reaching $5k MRR makes you financially independent and allows you to live a decent and comfortable life.

So rethink your goals. And work smarter; not harder.

Working 20 hours per day might increase your chances of success, but it doesn't guarantee it. And, at least in my experience it's that fun, 4-hour coding session that will still push the needle six years later.

Adding to the portfolio

From here, I aim to accelerate growth and hit $10k/mo. Then, I plan to focus on hiring contractors to run my business on autopilot so that I can add more products to my portfolio.

You can follow along on X or my site. And check out MagicPattern, BrandBird, and SuperMotion.