Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#161

Post by swebdev » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 5:53 AM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #124

horsawlarway wrote: post #68

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, check AWS Cloudfront pricing.

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#162

Post by SkilledUp » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:24 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #13

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…

Good point you made. Where did the 30% come from?

Whilst I have not kept a list myself, I've seen SaaS products drastically change after acquisitions. Some SaaS products under new ownership stop serving small customers all together and focus on large enterprises. This is as a much risk as shut downs.

In terms of Bootstrapped SaaS, what I have noticed since 2004 is that bootstrapped does not mean the companies are operated by a single person.

As a bootstrapped SaaS founder, you can start building a team with revenues by hiring team mates. By doing this, you reduce the risk rate for your customers.

Until you have revenues to hire talent, you can also bring on free talent from companies like https://skilledup.life. This is my latest tech startup.

I have also been building subscription based tech products since 2004 with many failures and two Exits. I bootstrapped them all and continue to do so. The biggest issue I have during all these years is lack of capital to build teams.

I'm solving my own problem through SkilledUp Life. My team now includes 2 salaried staff and about 20+ Volunteers.

We are one solution. But there are many ways to de-risk a bootstrapped SaaS business.

All the best Manoj

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#163

Post by throwaway743 » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 5:08 AM UTC

buf wrote: post #82

throwaway743 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casting Call sounds like a cool service and the clients really interesting. Just a word of rec. On mobile (Android/FF) the post titles are vertically stacked, which is tough to read for people. If you keep the text horizontally aligned and rotate 90 degrees (or dont and make horizontal) it'd make it easier to read. Edit: Just checked out Closing Credits too. Super cool work

Thanks for the heads-up! Some of the site is just ancient and I'm doing a big rebuild right now. I've added a note to fix that. Cheers!

Happy to help and wishing you the best!

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#164

Post by Enhex » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 7:44 AM UTC

taylodl wrote: post #110

I 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…

so if they die you get their IP for free?

doesn't it put a big incentive to letting them die?