We started Qubos LLC in 2024 with no outside funding, no co-working space, and no grand launch event. Just a registered LLC, a domain name, and the conviction that we could build useful software without asking anyone's permission.
Here's what the first year actually looked like — the good, the bad, and the things nobody tells you.
Start with a problem you have
Our first product, CalendarMe, came from personal frustration. We were scheduling meetings with clients and burning 10 minutes per meeting just coordinating times. That's not a billion-dollar market insight — it's just an annoying problem we solved for ourselves first.
This approach has a huge advantage: you're your own user. You know immediately when something doesn't work because it annoys you. You don't need user research to validate the core premise.
Revenue isn't everything early on
CalendarMe is free. We made that choice deliberately. A free scheduling tool gets adoption faster, and adoption creates word-of-mouth. Emailsdaily has a premium tier for the revenue. Having one free product and one paid product lets us grow an audience while generating income.
Keep costs brutally low
Our monthly infrastructure costs for both products combined are under $200. Vercel's free tier handles CalendarMe. AWS runs Emailsdaily's email processing. We don't have an office. We use free tiers of every tool that offers one. The goal is to never need revenue to survive — that removes desperation from decision-making.
Ship something ugly, then improve it
The first version of CalendarMe looked rough. The design was basic, the features were minimal, and there were definitely bugs we hadn't found yet. But it worked. People used it. And every week, we made it slightly better.
Waiting for perfection is waiting forever. Ship the thing.
The loneliness is real
Nobody talks about this enough. Working alone (or with a very small team) on products that might not work out is isolating. There's no team standup to energize you, no manager to validate your priorities. You have to be okay with long stretches of quiet execution.
What we'd do differently
We'd start writing content earlier. Blog posts, documentation, anything that helps people find us organically. SEO takes months to compound, and we started too late.
We'd also set stricter boundaries between product work and service work. Client projects pay the bills, but they can easily consume all your time if you let them.
The bottom line
Bootstrapping isn't glamorous. There are no funding announcements or TechCrunch articles. But there's a quiet satisfaction in building something real, on your own terms, that people actually use. That's enough for us.