As a solo founder myself, yes.
If you ask for a feature, they tend to actually go out of their way to help, instead of having it rot on the backlog for a decade.
Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
121–130 of 164 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#122As a potential buyer, I would be concerned that a solo entrepreneur would get bored/leave/discontinue the service. This would typically lead me to prefer one-off purchases vs. ongoing SaaS offerings. This equation would change if my requirement is pretty ad-hoc to begin with, and I don't expect to require an ongoing service.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#123For your typical solo founder in their 30s, their odds of dying at any point over the next 10 years is something like 0.2%. And short of them dying, their business isn't going anywhere because keeping a SaaS startup online doesn't cost anything -- if you have the skills to do it yourself. Whereas the odds of a venture backed startup shutting down at any point over the next ten years is something like 30%. So from a r…
If it is working for you, that is great, but... Death is not the only reason people quit working on a project. They could get a better offer, their family situation could change, they could get sick or injured, or they could simply get sick of it, just to name a few. Also, keeping a SaaS online does cost money. And those costs increase as you scale. If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too…
I think that's why he's charging extra. If you are making a reasonable living from your bootstrapped SaaS, you'll probably keep at it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it is working for you, that is great, but... Death is not the only reason people quit working on a project. They could get a better offer, their family situation could change, they could get sick or injured, or they could simply get sick of it, just to name a few. Also, keeping a SaaS online does cost money. And those costs increase as you scale. If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too…
> If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too small for me to have confidence that you are sticking around. There's a lot of truth in this. Particularly since the free tiers on most cloud providers are explicitly designed to suck you in, then raise the rates tremendously as you scale. A business that might be fine with 100 customers on the cloud could struggle mightily to cover the costs of d…
Can you provide examples where linear growth in resource consumption does not reflect on linear growth in clouds? So far all free tiers that I saw were trivial in cost savings and anything after free tier was pretty linear (or even big scales allowed to save something).
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#125I treat solo entrepreneurs the same way I treat small companies that have a high probability of not remaining in business in five years: a risk. A risk doesn't mean I'm not going to do business with you, it simply means I have something needing to be mitigated. Typically I mitigate that risk via the use of an escrow service. If you're not familiar with escrow services they are a mutually trusted 3rd party. You provid…
This must be a huge contract otherwise I'd just charge you an insane premium if you asked me to do that, such a PITA
I think the idea is that it is the professional thing to do if you intend having clients that your business' demise will cause issues for.
ie. It shouldn't be at the suggestion or cost of a single customer, it is an accepted business cost to you.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#126This is a topic that I've thought a ton about, from the perspective of being an entrepreneur. I have a full time job right now but even for side projects or any product that I may choose to sell in the future, I've decided that it's not going to have a service at it's core. If it has a service component it can't be in the critical path for the software to work. I.e. I might host a gem server or something for paying customers but not an API server.
I just can't square my own working style, my need to do things outside of work, and my desire for ownership of the things I work on with the idea that I need to be on-call forever for a thing. It's just too much stress.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#127Asking about trusting a solo entrepreneur or solo developer is not the right question. These points are irrelevant.
What you need to show prospective clients is that your business is viable if you're not around: there's continuity and support.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused, where does the 2.1% come from. It does look like 0.001795 which is 0.2% for a 30 year old in the source you linked
The number you read is for dying within the next year. The OP said within a decade.
OP also said "in their 30s" not "at 30". So I'd use 35-45 rather than 30-40, which shifts it a bit.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#129I treat solo entrepreneurs the same way I treat small companies that have a high probability of not remaining in business in five years: a risk. A risk doesn't mean I'm not going to do business with you, it simply means I have something needing to be mitigated. Typically I mitigate that risk via the use of an escrow service. If you're not familiar with escrow services they are a mutually trusted 3rd party. You provid…
This must be a huge contract otherwise I'd just charge you an insane premium if you asked me to do that, such a PITA
Huge contract? Not really. Especially when many larger clients whom you'd love to have for a reference will demand it. Take care of it up-front and don't wait until you get into contract negotiation. If the client knows you don't have a software escrow service already in place they may ask for the moon. Head that off at the pass and have it ready to go from day one.
In fact having it ready to go might help you clinch the deal. If you're part of an evaluation and you're ready to proceed and your competitor has to go and get this setup - you're more likely to get that business. Likewise if you're the competitor who's been caught with their pants down then you're more likely to lose that business. Every salesman I know is always looking for something to give them an edge for closing a deal!
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#130For your typical solo founder in their 30s, their odds of dying at any point over the next 10 years is something like 0.2%. And short of them dying, their business isn't going anywhere because keeping a SaaS startup online doesn't cost anything -- if you have the skills to do it yourself. Whereas the odds of a venture backed startup shutting down at any point over the next ten years is something like 30%. So from a r…
If it is working for you, that is great, but... Death is not the only reason people quit working on a project. They could get a better offer, their family situation could change, they could get sick or injured, or they could simply get sick of it, just to name a few. Also, keeping a SaaS online does cost money. And those costs increase as you scale. If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too…
> Also, keeping a SaaS online does cost money. And those costs increase as you scale. If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too small for me to have confidence that you are sticking around.
Sure, it depends on what you are doing, but I imagine that for most paid SAAS models, the cost of cloud computing is a small fraction of what they bring in revenue. In many cases, so small as to be effectively $0. As an example, stack overflow gets hundreds of millions of visits a month, but is run on two physical servers (plus an additional two for backup). As a more personal example, I have a small SAAS side project and my server costs run me about 0.5% of my revenue (the rest is all profit other than the value of my time). I could probably get that down to 0.1% with some code refactoring, but even with the current code, I could easily 10x my number of subscribers and not increase server costs by even $0.01.
To add to this, in my experience, the companies I've worked for have tons of extra capacity with their cloud services. For example, using t3.large vs t3.small instances at 4x the price indiscriminately. Why? Because server costs are just a rounding error compared to paying a bunch of $100k+ salaries.