I’ve been bootstrapping for years.

Hey Kiddos,

Sorry if I left you hanging after my earlier missive, but I needed to get that out in the open and take some time to “get right”.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve done basically nothing (and it was everything I thought it could be).

Clocking in at 19,627 pages, these are the books that kept me from getting any real sleep this past year — and kept me sane while getting my SaaS thoroughly kicked.

If you’re looking for the “top business books” I read this past year that helped me grow my SaaS-based businesses, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Sure, I read some business books. But — like most of the business books I’ve read — I wound up questioning the cost of the book against the actual value I walked away with. …

An unconventionally epic bootstrapped startup year in review.

For most of us, 2017 was a year better left in the dumpster fire from which it was born (aka, “ 2016”).

For me, 2017 was something truly remarkable and special that I’ll soon not forget — just like how I’d imagine contracting a mild case of necrotizing fasciitis might be.

If “growth is painful”, then 2017 left me feeling a bit like a bootstrapped startup remake of House.

A recent Princeton study about how 400 of the top websites in the world use session replay tools seems to have caught the internet off guard. It turns out, pretty much nobody knew that businesses could (or do) record what their visitors and users do on their websites.

And that makes me sad.

Mainly because I wouldn’t think this type of thing should come as such a huge surprise to everyone when we live in a world where we teach robots how to do parkour:

But also because that means that businesses like mine…

If you didn’t know, we do things a bit differently here in Startup Land, including the way we sling code. Here’s where you’ve probably been going wrong (and what to do about it).

A word of warning: What follows may not be for you.

If you find completeness, clarity, and a sense of purpose in designing elegant applications featuring domain-driven design, layers of abstraction, IoC containers, dependency injection, RESTful APIs, mock objects, and automated build tools with CI and comprehensive automated test coverage, you may want to just turn around and slowly close this door behind you.

I’ll be honest — It’s been a dark couple of months at Tamboo.

And I’m afraid things just got even darker.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

After all, this time of year is always rather “dark”.

The skeletal fingers of trees once adorned with lush summer leaves tear the fabric of the cold grey sky as Halloween marks the death of summer and the beginning of days where darkness falls before dinner time.

But once your eyes learn to adjust to the dying of the light, there is often hidden beauty revealed.

It’s through this seasonal transformation, through…

Or — “How to Get Real Traffic and Real Customers in Just 1 Hour a Day!”

Wow, it’s been a while!

I know, I know!

In fact, it’s been months since the last installation of The Epic Guide.

All I can say is that I certainly hope that you’re all happy with yourselves.

It’s because of all of you super fans of The Epic Guide that I’ve had to basically go into hiding all summer long to focus on writing this damned book — while still running and growing Tamboo on top of it.

In the process of being around-the-clock…

Summer may be over, but things have been heating up over here at Tamboo! Here’s what you might have missed:

New This Month: Funnels!