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Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

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Re: Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

#11
So, to get an idea of what order of magnitude you're dealing with, you'll want to run two experiments, at a cost of, say, $1000.

First experiment is to see how large a customer base there is. You want to see how often people are looking for a product like yours or your competitors. Make an Adwords campaign with the right keywords, bid high enough to always be shown first, and then run this for a while to get an idea of what the search traffic is like.

Second experiment is to see what portion of that customer base you can capture. So, continuing on from the previous experiment, you now want your site to be set up, and then measure what percentage of those searches result in people actually clicking on your site. And then what percentage of those clicks result in them actually putting in their credit card information and paying for the first month. If you can't have people signing up on their own, then give them a form to submit their information instead, and then make some estimate on what percentage of those will fall through.

Then, that gives you an idea of what your baseline growth is. And then anything beyond that, i'm sure you would've already hired someone who could give you way better industry expertise than you would find by asking HN.

Re: Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

#12
I hate to break it to you, but most startups take 7 - 10 years to reach their stride.

Your choice is to either slog this one, or use the experience and pivot.

BaseCamp - used Ruby on Rails consulting to promote and finance it

Digital Ocean - rode pre-AWS hosting craze

MailChimp - founders worked full-time until enough revenue, rode moderately-early email marketing craze

Are you riding a craze, and/or funded from side gigs?

Re: Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

#14
I'm not sure where the urge comes from to have your own business. I dream of that sometimes as well.

But to be honest, i still focus more on my carrier and it looks good. I don't think i would make more money as a business owner.

It still sounds great to have your own business.

But what is your motivation? Did you create that specific SaaS because you wanted to have a SaaS Product or because you like your SaaS Product/Idea and you use it yourself?

Do you dream of becoming another Zuckerberg? If yes, forget it.

Re: Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

#15
I've been running various online businesses, including SaaS, for eight years.

There is no general answer to your question. Are those 8 customers paying you hundreds of dollars each per month, or tens of dollars? What's the reason you haven't gotten more? Have you lost motivation to work in this space / on that project?

I was in a similar situation to you a few years ago. I had started a clone of patio11's appointmentreminder.org for the Austrian market. After 2 years, I had 8 customers and €2k monthly recurring revenue. But it was very difficult to get new customers. I decided to stop growing this business. Since then, I've lost 4 of the 8 customers, but those that remain now pay me more for additional services, so I'm back at €2k MRR. I'm satisfied with my decision.

Another project I worked on is https://fman.io, a desktop application. There, I wish I had stopped sooner. I spent 3,000 hours and made In general, I suspect most founders keep going longer than they should. The fact that you are even asking the question indicates to me that you are losing motivation. Maybe it is time to move on.

If you'd like to talk about more details privately, feel free to reach out by email. You can find my address at http://herrmann.io. Good luck!

1: https://youtu.be/I1K3IkOlaVw

2: https://youtu.be/NWCOwvp23uk

Re: Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

#16
https://a16z.com/2017/02/18/12-things-about-product-market-f...

"So what are considered some of the best tests for PMF? Rachleff writes that “You know you have fit if your product grows exponentially with no marketing. That is only possible if you have huge word of mouth. Word of mouth is only possible if you have delighted your customer.”"

Generally, if growth is slow, your product is not good enough, or rather there's no market for it. You should try different things until you get to a point where you have more customers than you can deal with. Slack originally worked on a MMO, then shut it down and worked on the messaging tool they used while building it.

Re: Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

#18
You should really, include a link to your product. It will give people an opportunity to give a better answer to your question. Additionally this post made it to the frontpage, it could be good exposure. You should always be pitching. Edit: grammar

Re: Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

#19

I've been running various online businesses, including SaaS, for eight years. There is no general answer to your question. Are those 8 customers paying you hundreds of dollars each per month, or tens of dollars? What's the reason you haven't gotten more? Have you lost motivation to work in this space / on that project? I was in a similar situation to you a few years ago. I had started a clone of patio11's appointment…

Thanks for sharing. About your customers (not limited to SaaS), are they local (Vienna, Austria) or from all over the world? As I have the feeling here b2b is still done door-to-door. But of course this might depend on the target audience.

Re: Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

#20

I'm gonna repeat what has been said but yes it really depends on your vertical. For example if we look at the companies that you quoted, they probably have had (and still have) completely different growth strategy. Moreover, it doesn't take as much time to build the MVP of Digital Ocean from scratch than it would take to build the Mailchimp's one. If you have customers you can talk to and if they are happy with your…

> Moreover, it doesn't take as much time to build the MVP of Digital Ocean from scratch than it would take to build the Mailchimp's one.

Shouldn't this be the other way round? The MVP of Mailchimp is a generic CRUD web app TM hooked up to a mail server, while the MVP of Digital Ocean needs something approximating a data centre.

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