1) Using all the knowledges and skills I developed during 5 years as an employee to finally build my own SaaS is a very great feeling.
2) Building a one man SaaS forces you to leave your comfort zone. I've learned new languages/frameworks. I've learned about security and infrastructure (I use a dozen of AWS services, I've never touched AWS before that). I've written a CLI to deploy my front-end on S3. I've learned how to integrate a billing system. I've learned to study my market and my competitors, to make a roadmap and prioritize the tasks, to find a good domain name, to find my first beta testers. I've learned how to create a legal entity in France and get some financial helps. I've never learned as much as in the last 5 months.
3) Being able to work when, where and how you want is an amazing thing. Not having to debate during long meetings and convince all your colleagues about every business, UX, technical or design choices feels so much more productive. Having to make all the tough decisions alone teaches you a lot.
Even if my SaaS doesn't become successful, I will regret nothing, it's the best experience in my career.
You say "polishing", which implies minor details. Could you cut a bunch of stuff, and release next week? The real adventure doesn't start until you've deployed. You might even find out that the polishes don't even matter that much, and something that wasn't even on your roadmap is everything.
Unless your previous experience was as the first engineer at a startup, your previous experience was probably preparing you to iterate on an existing product (late phases of phase 1 or phase 2), or a new product for existing customers. You had a base level of expectations. Previously, you were forced to released a polished version, but you had the resources to do it. In your new capacity, you (probably) don't have that. There's something to be said for just throwing out there a minimum version of the product, and polishing it later. You'll save weeks of wasted effort probably.
Actually the app is online since 1 month. It was necessary to integrate with AWS, test everything in prod and let people play with the product. I deploy new commits every day.
When I said "I'm polishing for the release", I was referring to:
- make a minimal website to present the product (right now I don't even have a white page but a "Could not resolve host")
- finish to integrate the payment system
- fix some bugs I don't want to have for the public release
One of the best comment i had read regarding launching. Lots of people often under-estimate our past experiences here. Almost all of the s/w job teaches us to release a bug free, polished version . But to launch a side project, you need to overcome your urge to release a polished version, and launch a barely working version to get feedback and iterate. It is one of the major reason of mine to never release a side project till now !
This is another attempt to shell shovels during a gold rush, where the HN audience can play the role of the starry eyed rubes dreaming of easy riches. There is no substance here, just a totally unsupported claim that building a SaaS app (of all things!) will bring profound personal meaning in your life. The only reason this post exists is to get people to sign up for his community thing.
If anybody wants real advice, I got some for free: less talk, more product. You don't need any of the services people are trying to sell you. Build a product. Add Stripe. Profit. Not exactly rocket science.
> Build a product. Add Stripe. Profit. Not exactly rocket science.
I don't think you realize just how much of a naive statement that is.
That is honestly, genuinely, terrible advice that does not take in to account that building a business means building a BUSINESS not building software.
They are two very different things.
The idea that you can "build it and they will come" has been proven to be a fallacy many many times over.
With regard to your other comments - Yes - I wrote that post with the express purpose of drawing attention to my product. That is called marketing and that is how you build a business.
The trick is to always try to give value while you do that, and from reading the general tone of the comments here I believe that aim was achieved.
> building a business means building a BUSINESS not building software
This has been my biggest reality check. Building software is easy. Do you know how much of a pain in the rear it is to, for example, open a bank account for a registered company? I didn't! It's not hard as such, just not something I've done before.
The idea was to open a braintree account. The reality was I had to open a bank account for the business. To do that I had to get a passport (never been out of the country - it involved visiting passport interview office a few cities away to prove I'm me). I then had to write up a bit of a business plan so that I had numbers to give the bank.
Then braintree wanted a bunch of info to open the account, this involves bank statements to prove I have enough liquid cash to cover chargebacks and refunds. Now I had to look at what a director's loan is (UK) and how to use that so I can put enough cash in the bank to prove I can cover chargebacks.
I also registered the company far too early I believe, I had to do a tax self-assessment this month being a company director. I've never had to do that before, so that was another hurdle to figure out. I'm going to have to at some point before 2018 figure out how to do corporation tax and the likes as well as accounts. Either that or hire an accountant which is yet another interview and business plan scrutiny (first business plan I've ever written, so somewhat anxious I've done it completely wrong). Bear in mind all this doesn't even touch on advertising, marketing, landing pages, etc.
Except I have actually done it, so I know what it takes, and it doesn't take an extraordinary, gargantuan, effort. You do need to work on some non-software skills, but not nearly as much as some as the HN wisdom would lead you to believe.
There's actually one step before "build product" if you want to to play it a bit more safe and not gable on 4 years of your life. That part is "validate idea". I found this article https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstr... incredibly helpful, realistic and motivating in the sense that it sets realistic expectations.
While i also skipped that step and went directly to build the product, i was lucky that when i got to the step of validating the idea it turned out to be ok.
> If anybody wants real advice, I got some for free: less talk, more product. You don't need any of the services people are trying to sell you. Build a product. Add Stripe. Profit. Not exactly rocket science.
You're understating the effort of building an online business by a factor of thousand. Author's premise might not be widely applicable — that's debatable but don't make the mistake of assuming that you can just decide to build a product and rake $$$ in a jiffy. It takes a tremendous learning and an arduous effort to even hit few thousand dollars of stable monthly revenue.
No, there are many people here who don't know how to build a SaaS business and therefore believe it must be impossibly difficult. It isn't. Building a SaaS business is easier than starting almost any other kind of business. Running a restaurant is hard. Manufacturing is hard. Trying to make it as an independent artist is hard. Breaking through in Hollywood is hard. Writing a bestseller is hard. Selling software with a 98% profit margin is easy.
People have operated profitable businesses for centuries, so we pretty much know what works and what doesn't. I'm not sure I have anything to say that hasn't been said a thousand times before. I have no doubt that there's real value in business advice and coaching, but giving good personalized advice is hard. Just because my business works doesn't mean that I am able to distill exactly why. Not all good doers make good teachers, and vice versa.
Have you built a SaaS? I mean this genuinely, not as a jab - it seems like many commenters here who have built a SaaS agree that it was life changing and/or gave them a sense of meaning, so I'm interested in hearing other viewpoints from those in the same position.
You value your anonymity just like I do, and I have no interest in giving it up. People want to be lied to and want to believe that one more business course or one more networking event or one more book will finally give them the success they crave. So there are hucksters that meet this demand and sell people false hope. There is always a new angle, or a new set of buzzwords, or a new methodology that promises uncharted opportunity. The only thing I can do is tell people to stop and think carefully about what they're being sold.
You're not anonymous because you're selling something.
You're selling startup expertise even though your SaaS -- according to your own numbers -- never made more than $37,000 in annual profit. Although I'm happy for you, I don't think that qualifies you to give people advice on how to run a SaaS business.
I'm sure you mean well and perhaps you'll become a great startup coach. Still, I have serious reservations about people who start teaching prematurely.
The VAST majority of startups never make $37,000 in a year. I wouldn't be so quick to look down my nose at someone who has indeed been successful at taking "nothing" and making it into "something" and getting someone else to give them money for it.
Selling shovels seems to be the next logical step for many after an exit. I can understand the feeling, but I'm conflicted.
Somehow, people want to share their experience and genuinely help others. And often, slapping a price tag on their advice makes it more valuable than if it was given for free.
On the other hand, the whole "I teach you how to make money" smells like a big scam. I wonder how many people really became successful because of doing a course and not despite of doing one. My gut feeling is, the majority of successful solo founders simply did what you said: build a product, somehow get the word out, profit.
I think this falls into the "blind leading the blind" category. When 37signals tells people what to do there is self-interest involved, but they also have real insights to share. When people are in the business of giving advice be very skeptical.
I feel compelled to speak up in defense of this guy. Fundamentally, all businesses are in the business of "selling shovels to gold miners". No one business offers a complete solution or path to riches. The task of the entrepreneur is to integrate the various products, services, financial capital and labor available in a market – package it in a unique (or commodity) way – and sell it.
There is a tremendous need in the marketplace for services that teach business skills. I'll tell you why: because I've worked with enough MBAs to know that the ones worth their salt didn't need the MBA and didn't learn anything valuable from it, and the rest simply developed their interpersonal networks to improve their skills at "leading through politics" – a recipe for mediocrity, certainly not a path to riches. Definitely very little in terms of practical, actionable, best practices, entrepreneurial "business sense" is dispensed through the majority of traditional educational programs
Agree completely. I'm primarily in sales and have owned businesses in the past. The number of web developers and designers I work with who have amazing talent and skill and absolutely no business acumen is staggering.
Business-wise SaaS seems vastly superior compared to traditional one-off software selling but lately, I have begun to recognise the areas where the latter excels. Selling SaaS is hard. You have to care of support, billing, failed charges, churn and thousands of other little things to get it off the ground. In comparison, selling small apps, plugins, and desktop software — while may yield lower revenue per month — is something more doable as a side-project. You can bank on platforms like Fastspring and App Stores, ship your product and expend less hours fighting fires.
If my memory serves right, Eager Apps, one-man company behind Postico, makes around $10K / month selling a Mac App for Postgres administration.
I think being entrepreneur is vastly more fruitful and less stressful with small stepping stones and for a start, it's a better to sell small things on side then dive into growing the $10K Month SaaS.
I think you're overstating the enormity of building a SaaS. "Support, billing, failed charges, churn, and thousands of other things" are easily managed when there is 1 customer. 2 customers is a little more difficult. 3 even moreso. But most SaaS founders I know of would agree that in the early stages, the "I am not sure if this is actually going to work" stages, managing things that become a headache at scale is actually quite manageable.
You don't start with 1,000 clients thankfully. You start with 0. And then 1. And so on and so forth.
because not everyone has the ability to build a SaaS, I would encourage everyone to try and build something using the skills they do have and then fill in the rest later.
I started WP Extra Care (www.wpextracare.com) because I love WordPress but my skill as a developer and designer was mediocre. So I thought "I know a lot more about security for WordPress than most people, I'll offer that up." Now I've been able to add in extra skills that have been fun and also allow more of the business to run on auto-pilot. "Can you help us setup backups to AWS instead of them running on our production server?" "Yeah, I can help with that on Monday" :spends weekend learning:
TL;DR - build and launch what you can. Listen to customers and learn how to do what they will pay for. Then try learn that. You'll come out on the other side having gained both money and knowledge.
As a one-man SaaS bootstrapper myself, I definitely agree.
I'll add that shipping a working SaaS (= functional & bringing at least some profit) increases your personal experience by quite a lot, making you more employable than ever (either as an employee or a consultant).
So I can definitely encourage solo developers to try out that adventure :-)
People get dreams of making money from the internet, until a year or so later when they realise they are not getting anywhere. At this point they step up to the next level, of trying to build mailing lists of their former self, to try and sell them the secrets to making money online.
Hey Justin, used to listen to you on techzing years ago. Congrats on the sale, was it pluggio?
Nugget looks like it's off to a great start. Subbed. Good luck with it. Don't mind these guys, the corporate 10-8 breeds stress + suspicion and jealousy of anyone doing it different and gasp happy about it.
Been thinking of building a saas, can anyone vouch for their track record?
This could be legit but could potentially be simply another sass to make money. ;)
Our track record is terrible if you mean revenue generating saas apps. In fact in six months we currently have zero members of more than 250 that have achieved any revenue.
But, that is because all of our members are starting from pre-idea.
To get some revenue you need to build an audience that are willing to pay you for what you have made, or are about to make.
The best path to get to that place is to pick an audience to serve and then to run customer development interviews.
Then, based off of those interviews you can discover a pain point that the audience really wants to pay to get solve and then you can launch.
So, if your measure of success is, are we helping founders on a day to day basis with that process?
Then yes! We are doing tremendously well! We have quite a few founders who are running customer interviews and making some amazing headway on building a real business.
All the focus at this point is on teaching and supporting cold outreach and audience building and getting founders to a place where they have a validated low risk business to get started on.
Building a SaaS, or even starting to build one, is very rewarding. Out of my projects, nothing has become profitable (but it's not about becoming profitable in the short-term, at least for me), but wearing 100 hundred hats teaches you a lot. I think you will grow a lot faster as a developer/entrepreneur by just throwing yourself in the chaos. So whatever your idea is, I'd say go for it!
I've been signed up for a couple of months now. It was ~£40/month when I signed up, and it was just the daily idea in your inbox and a community, pretty much. I wasn't planning to stay for that long, maybe a couple months at most.
I wasn't even going to really partake in the community, I was just going to take an idea that I really wanted to work on, tell people I was working on it and then put my head down and do it. I don't even know how it happened, but I got sucked into the community, and I've gotten further with the idea I've been working on than any other (which were, to be fair, half-hearted attempts).
Justin and Brandon have really guided me through the process; I also feel like having the community to keep me accountable during the cold outreach stage (which I wasn't a fan of) has kept me going. I've tried a cold outreach approach before, but had very little response. Just the help that Brandon gave me that got me over that hump alone is probably worth what I paid. I can now do that myself in future any time I want if I have to start all over again. To me, that's invaluable.
Justin, the guy who runs it, says they haven't had any successful businesses come out of it yet (though a handful have gone past the build, even launch, stage), but it is itself a fairly new business to be fair. So I can't really vouch for their track record, other than to say that the business he built before this took 3 years to reach ~$3k revenue and this one took 3 months to reach the same.
Now, it's $19/month (what, ~£15?) and it's got so much more. Justin's planning to build a third business completely from scratch and vlog and document the process as he goes, which I'm really looking forward to (should be starting very soon).
I've been looking for exactly that kind of material before (these new improvements came from customer feedback, so he's very clued up on what his customers want too); before I was worried about users and I was still learning to program, I was following Carl Herold's Livestream Startup (until he ended up getting arrested). There's practically nothing that gives you that level of openness (although Matt Bearman's Bugmuncher blog is really great as well).
Anyway, this ended up a lot longer than expected, but that's my… review? All in all, I think it's definitely worth it, especially with the price drop and all the new 'features', so I'm staying on for the foreseeable future. Take that as you will.
I guess the clearest way to say it is that I've been recommending it to a bunch of friends (including my best friend, who's now signed up) with enthusiasm. Honestly, at ~£15/month, there's no reason not to sign up for a month just to try it out, especially with the 30-day money back guarantee (ha, had to check that one).
Well there's certainly much romanticizing and exaggeration going on there. After all he's ultimately promoting his own website. I'd say it's not all that rare at all that one person builds a website and successfully turns a handsome profit. Or, even if not for a handsome profit, at least make it functional and learn a lot in the process. It's mostly just software engineering, on a popular framework, with tons of examples and libraries to rely on after all, and in many cases the service itself could actually just be dead simple. Of course to earn a lot might require some more UX, marketing and luck, but my point is, just "building" one is definitely not that comparable to marathon no matter how you look at it.
While Im in agreement that finishing anything you set out to do adds or creates to a sense of accomplishment, this type of advice seems to prey on people who are looking for one.
So often you end up hearing things like "upset? Aimless? Start a company!" Dont do that. Building a project or something as a learning experience is great. But dont put your hopes and dreams into something like this. Dont pray itll lift you out of depression. It wont.
The best you should seek and hope for is to advance your knowledge and understanding and take pride in that accomplishment.
I think putting your hopes and dreams on something like this - your own fortitude, determination, creativity, and aptitude - is EXACTLY what you should do.
4 years of one's life just for a 100k exit? Honestly that's the kind of thing that I got into software to escape.
Edit: I mean this literally. I spent three and a half years building a brick and mortar educational business that exceeded the success of the one in this article by some margin. I left that business to learn web development skills because of the slow painful growth in a shrinking offline market.
Perhaps, this makes me an unreasonable person but I truly did get into software to escape that. I want to either give far more to the world in terms of impact or earn enough to fund someone else who can.
Well, that was a first attempt. A lot of people spend a lot longer than 4 years not making a first attempt. Then, when you know how to do something you can be faster at it next time round. But, in all honesty, I don't know anyone who built a business in time less than 3-4 years.
4 years earning an above average household income while working for yourself from home, followed by selling at 28x monthly revenue, which will be taxed as a long-term capital gain instead of income. There's not much better you could ask for....
As a software developer, if you have an appetite for risk; you're always better off doing recurring (well paid) contract work for some big corporation than playing the start-up lottery.
This 100K exit is actually quite an achievement I think.
This is so true, and it made huge differences in my day job as it helped me see the bigger picture. It also meant that my contributions in board meetings and such were able to shift outside of the usual CTO role.
I've built my first SaaS (https://www.unfollow.io) and even after three months gaining users is still a hard challengef for me. But all in all the experience and the feeling after the release was totally worth it, even if it turns out not to be profitable in the long run.
If anyones interested in talking about the project hit me up @ [email protected]
I am doing a one-man SaaS project also. It is extremely hard. Yes it is rewarding but it is also soul-crushing and stressful and most probably will not go anywhere.
> I have so many things I would comment on this but this being HN, I know better..
I think it would actually help everyone if you were to comment.
As a guess: you wanted to be negative because it sounds like a sales pitch ("get rich quick")? In that case, I kind of agree with you, but people seem to like the article, regardless :)
Marketing is about pointing out the end result before the action. In your case, you point out a friend made "millions" and then speak for his weakly biased advice to "do SaaS" as if that's going to net someone the end result of millions. The reason it "feels" that way is because it is that way on your site, even if you rationalize it otherwise.
Your current business sounds like "selling equipment to pan handlers coming to the gold rush." So is there real good to be found, outside of selling to the people looking for gold?
Sorry if the gold rush analogy was cryptic. Another analogy: before the dot com bust, a lot of revenue came just from startups buying ads on each other's sites with VC money. When that dried up, turned out a lot of those start ups weren't actually viable.
So with your business catering to other SAAS businesses, made me wonder about the viability of single person SAAS businesses catering to other kinds of people.
while virtually all business can be summed up as "I am selling you a tool so that you can attempt to use it to make money/achieve happiness quickly", I think the author has done a good job of being forthcoming in his data and what value he could offer a potential customer
1) Using all the knowledges and skills I developed during 5 years as an employee to finally build my own SaaS is a very great feeling.
2) Building a one man SaaS forces you to leave your comfort zone. I've learned new languages/frameworks. I've learned about security and infrastructure (I use a dozen of AWS services, I've never touched AWS before that). I've written a CLI to deploy my front-end on S3. I've learned how to integrate a billing system. I've learned to study my market and my competitors, to make a roadmap and prioritize the tasks, to find a good domain name, to find my first beta testers. I've learned how to create a legal entity in France and get some financial helps. I've never learned as much as in the last 5 months.
3) Being able to work when, where and how you want is an amazing thing. Not having to debate during long meetings and convince all your colleagues about every business, UX, technical or design choices feels so much more productive. Having to make all the tough decisions alone teaches you a lot.
Even if my SaaS doesn't become successful, I will regret nothing, it's the best experience in my career.