Jason Bosco on building a profitable search engine serving 10 billion searches without VC funding

Dev Propulsion Labs

Jason Bosco, CEO and co-founder of TypeSense, shares how he and his co-founder built a profitable search engine serving 10 billion searches monthly without taking VC funding. From Dollar Shave Club VP of Engineering to bootstrapped founder, Jason reveals the unconventional path to building sustainable developer tools.

Key insights from this episode:

"If it is hard for you as a founder to convince someone to pay you, it's never gonna get easier from there." Find what people are willing to pay for early - don't build first and monetize later.

"We're opinionated and we want search to work out of the box right from the get-go." TypeSense chose simplicity over configurability, targeting 80% of use cases with zero-config search versus Elasticsearch's thousands of parameters.

"We don't want the gamble on TypeSense the company to end up affecting TypeSense the product." Jason explains why they chose profitability over VC funding to build a multi-generational product without the pressure of 10x returns.

"Doing dev tools in closed source is like playing it on hard mode." Open source creates better feedback loops with developers, leading to faster product iteration and stronger community adoption.

Links:

- TypeSense: https://typesense.org/

- TypeSense Cloud: https://cloud.typesense.org/

- Jason Bosco on X: https://x.com/jasonbosco

- Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians

- Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en

Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools