Tracy Osborn

Tracy Osborn is a designer, developer, author and self-described entreprenerd who now lives in Toronto. She has a degree in Art and Design from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and worked as a web designer before teaching herself Python and Django in 2011 to launch her own startup after being turned down by Y Combinator.

That startup was WeddingLovely, a wedding vendor marketplace and planning app launched in January 2011. It joined Designer Fund and 500 Startups later that year, then swung between bootstrapping and small angel rounds, a path she later said she regretted. She ran it largely solo for years with thousands of vendors across several properties, reported $62K in revenue in 2017, tried to sell it, and shut it down at the end of 2018.

Along the way she turned her experience of learning to code into the Hello Web Books series: Hello Web App, which teaches non-programmers to build a Django app, a follow-up on intermediate concepts, and Hello Web Design, a design primer for non-designers. All were funded through Kickstarter campaigns, and she spoke at 17 conferences in 2016 alone.

In 2019 Tracy joined TinySeed, the accelerator for bootstrapped SaaS companies, as Program Manager, and she is now General Manager of TinySeed and MicroConf. She has written candidly about the dangers of barely profitable bootstrapped businesses and the job hunt after leaving self-employment.