On the show today is one of the best bootstrappers in the business: Paul Farnell of Litmus.com joins me and shares some great stories.

Highlights

• “My parents didn’t want me to have a games console; they wanted something that I could create things on. My first computer was an Amiga.”
• “I was inspired by my dad. I started publishing a magazine myself, and distributing it in my middle-school. We even sold annual subscriptions! (mostly to teachers, because they had more money)”
• “When I was 12-13 years old, I started building different software products. The first was “Instant Theme Creator”. It sold for $19 (although it was always advertised for $29). It was listed on Download.com”
• “I’ve always liked the validation of someone finding enough value in something that I built they were willing to pay for it. I didn’t want to just make a magazine that people would read, I wanted to make”
• “There are so many hacks that we technical people do every day. We don’t always think that if we could create systems for other people; make these hacks into products” – Justin Jackson
• [Did you enjoy business school?] “No. I didn’t enjoy the courses (or find it applicable). But it was time well spent: because I had the freedom to build Litmus.”
• “I was so impressed with the design, usability of 37signals.”
• “I built the first version of Litmus in a weekend. It was initially called SiteVista.com. It was running a couple of old desktop machines in my dorm, on the college’s internet.”
• “It was incredibly exciting to see people using the product. You would literally see customers using the product, because they were testing web pages on the screens underneath my desk.”
• “It did cause some trouble: my girlfriend would get woken up by the machines under my desk.”
• “We programmed the original app in VB script.”
• “We launched with under 100 people.”

Show notes

• Paul on Twitter
• Paul’s blog posts on Litmus
• Peanut Software archived page
• Paul’s presentation at FOWD

Sponsors

• Our premium sponsor is Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is agile project management software with one goal: to help you ship more stuff. You can try them out for free at  www.sprint.ly. You can also thank them on Twitter:  @sprintly

Shout outs

• Shout-out #1: Kyle Fox’s blog post on product management. I’d like to give a shout-out to Kyle Fox who’s written a great blog post called “ Multi-tasking is the heart of product management” Go to kylefox.ca to see that!
• Shout-out #2: Product People newsletter
• Shout-out #3: Save 10% on domains at Hover.com
• Shout-out #4: Get $25 off at Ting

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