The rise of the one-person unicorn
I've been a solopreneur boostrapping waiterio.com for 6 years and then 2 more years with 1-3 fulltime team members with a 20k MRR after 8 years.
I've chosen the bootstrap SaaS path after working 1 year in Silicon Valley. I thought all my life my dream was to build incredible stuff in Silicon Valley, then I got there and I didn't like it enough. When I was there I felt lonely and tired and sad. Despite having rare skills as Android and iOS developer 10 YEARS AGO my manager assigned me to build landing pages.
This was after not passing hiring interviews for Facebook/Google but still getting in one of the big ones.
I felt unappreciated and pushed to work a lot on something that wasn't even my specialty. The Silicon Valley is/was a sausage fest and it was very hard dating.
When I pitched at events I felt I wasn't being considered at all. I was and I am too afraid that the fact I am Italian and/or a pragmatic and nerdy developer with no salesy wowing pitch skills would let others with little technical skills and a big mouth take all the venture funds.I left the Silicon Valley and started to work on waiterio.com while travelling the world.
I lived in 10+ countries for 6 months each, I saw the world, met a lot of interesting people and found love.