141–150 of 164 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what if you can self-host the product? i found this to be a great way to sell my software i’d offer prospects a partner agency, which will do the hosting, while i’m building the product the customers get guarantees, while me and the agency share the profits
We need more info. Is it open source? If so, how's the community around it?
After the first time when users call for help they know they're going to talk to me and that I'll go click by click with them to get them up to speed or reproduce the issue they're experiencing, and that I'll address any issues they run into.
Truth is, I very seldom get calls for help, or bug reports, or suggestions for new features. I have a "News" page where I post what I'm working on, and a "Beta" app they can check out to test new features and check out design changes.
I develop on an Mac Mini and mostly use BBEdit, Fetch, and Firefox/Brave. Over those 20 years I've had to call BBEdit and Fetch for help a few times and their support has always been top notch. I doubt they have many employees or get many support calls. Their software is mature and does what it's supposed to do.
I've also tried to get support from Apple, Google, and Microsoft on occasion over the years and it's close to impossible to talk to anyone. The one time I talked to someone at Google about an Adwords account they were rude and worthless (that was close to 20 years ago). I don't recall ever talking to a person at the others, but I recall feeling lost when searching for help on their websites.
I reported an issue to the Opera web browser folks earlier this year. They didn't respond at all. They did fix the issue, but never made any announcement about it. That bothered me enough to download Brave and I've been using it since to test my work. I don't know that they'd be any better, but I haven't had an issue with their browser to worry about.
I have a "one strike and your out" approach to apps and services I use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
Sure - you were hosting your DB just fine with 100 customers using standard SSD, but now at 1000 you're blowing your IOPS budget and need to upgrade to premium SSD. The premium SSD costs twice what the standard SSD does for the same space - your usage will not have doubled.
Or - god help you, you were hosting your db just fine with 100 customers using a small VM, and to avoid having to think about it, you've decided to move from a self-managed db on a VM to something like Cosmos DB. No growth in usage at all from you, but your costs are about to shoot way up.
Or - I've added a customer in a region that has poor connectivity to my current region of choice - oops, setting up edge services closer to them is going to hurt. Now I'm sending data between regions, incurring all sorts of costs between services that I wasn't with a single region setup.
----
My experience with the cloud (and I've been a heavy user of both Azure and AWS, not as much GCP) is this: There are bands of costs, within that band, costs will tend to grow linearly as you grow.
The problem, is that you will outgrow the band you're in. There is a hard limit on something that you weren't thinking about (IOPS, for example) and once you hit that you have to jump to a different band with a new cost structure.
Usually, that means increasing base spend by a large amount compared to usage, and then getting slightly better cost/use at the new higher base.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
For 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It was just meant to give a little bit of my perspective and how it might factor into the question overall.
For 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…
Sometimes, even if the authors stop development on a project like that but have provided said ways of actually self-hosting it, it can still be used even despite the technology being dead for a while, until a migration path to something else can be found.
Corporations are likely to retire projects eventually, release new major breaking changes and deprecate old API versions, or get acquired and have degraded service after a decade or so. Individual developers are likely to have limited resources to allot to the project and limited capacity to maintain packages long term, with a few exceptions, as well as life circumstances or priorities shifting can have a way larger impact on the future of the project.
Thus, using any non-open-source package carries longevity risks, using any SaaS solution that cannot be self-hosted presents even larger risks. Many people don't care though and will still gladly use either. Something along the lines of: "Why care about where this will be in 10 years if I'll be at a different company in a year, but want to solve this problem now?"
It feels like a lot of startups people discuss here are really just set up to give an 'exit' to investors through selling to a bigger company (at which point the product probably dies).