How Minimalism can Help You to Bootstrap Your Own Business

Last Update: 28.06.2017. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning

It’s been now a few months that I quit my job and went on doing my own business. It’s tough so and totally different than being an employee. But, that’s not the topic for today. Today, I’ll show you what helped me the most with starting and going on my journey.

It’s minimalism., downsizing or however you want to call it. And it is not only for the extremists out there. But, let’s start at the beginning and see how you might benefit from it too.

Roughly a decade ago, I realized that this shit I buy does not make me happy. So I started to reduce my clutter step by step over a couple of years. Along with it, I changed my spending habits and started to only buy things I need like food or things I really love to have around me (it’s nice to have some decoration in your home). It even works as a family of three.

At that time, I didn’t even know it was minimalism and it wasn’t a fad yet with millions of YouTubers living with a single backpack in a shack. However, you don’t need to go extreme to see benefits.

The first noticeable effect was that my saving rate rose. Yep, I didn’t make more money, I just saved more so in overall I had more money in my pocket. I never calculated my saving rate but was roughly be around 40%.

However, I did not live frugally. I still ate out with my family, went on vacations like twice to Japan, etc. Probably, I could have saved even more but I still like to have some lifestyle :-)

In the same way, my monthly fix costs like rent, utility bill, internet, etc went down too.

Because of now low monthly fixed costs and the higher savings I could make, it made my decision to go solo much easier. As my monthly costs are smaller my savings can last longer and I have more room for experiments. I am not forced to get the next crappy freelancer job just to put food on the table.

If I had fixed costs of thousands of dollars each month and almost no savings, I had probably never gone out on my own in the first place.

Depending on your situation, you might get an even higher saving rate and/or lower fixed costs. If you ever have been thinking about going solo and bootstrapping your next Saas, etc, consider downsizing before.

However, another thing happened after a while too. My mind applied the minimalism concept to other areas of my life. All of a sudden I was more focused on the essentials; be it with learning or at work. I stopped chasing the frameworks and languages and focused more on patterns and concepts. And only a few at a time, the ones I could actually use.

This shift also made me notice much easier that business work did not focus on the essentials, benefitting the business, but rather adding features for the features sake or because one single unimportant guy in a 100 person company needs it once every year but nobody actually knows what he’s doing....

Anyways, it also made room for more creative thinking. My brain wasn’t occupied with shit, money or the latest gadgets. It had the free capacity to solve problems or generating new ideas.

I love those effects and they really help me in working solo. Especially the two money effects made a huge difference for starting a business and leaving the “secure” employee world.

What’s your opinion on it? Did you try minimalism already?