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Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

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Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#191

Post by aacook »

mi100hael wrote: post #156
aacook wrote: post #137

Go for it! I'm working on NanaGram ( https://nanagram.co ) solo and bootstrapped. Although I'm not making a full-time income yet, it's generating a profit. It's mostly automated. NanaGram is the 3rd greatest generator of happiness and fulfillment in my life (after my wife and my dog). I get a constant stream of good vibes from customers, most recently voicemails from grandmothers! ( https://nanagram.co/blog/feedback-…

Happy customer here :) I recently visited my grandma and found a drawer full of envelopes with every photo we've ever texted.

Horray! Thanks for being a customer. <3 Reply to the latest email and I’ll mail your grandma some stickers tomorrow.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#194

Post by davej »

throw03172019 wrote: post #177
davej wrote: post #24

I'm close with ToDesktop ( https://www.todesktop.com/ ), I've launched quite recently so expect to be there in the next month or two.

Was really impressed with the flow but I hate being so tied to this. For example, what happens if you go out of business? Now we have 10,000 users on an app we can’t update, etc.

That's actually one of the great things about being bootstrapped and profitable. I can grow naturally and I don't need to scale rapidly and hit huge customer numbers to keep VCs happy.

I'm in this for the long run. Even if 90% of my customers left me tomorrow then I would keep this going as a side gig.

I'm also able to facilitate customers that want to move off the ToDesktop platform to their own (i.e. built in-house) desktop app. Just send me on your binaries and I'll push an auto-update to your customers that gets them onto your new desktop app and your new auto-update platform. I charge $200 once-off for this currently and this feature will never be priced to force people to stay on the platform. The only reason for the charge right now is that it's a manual process so I charge consultancy rates.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#195

Post by azhawkes »

plasma wrote: post #165
azhawkes wrote: post #154

I'm the solo founder of Loadster ( https://loadster.app ) which has been profitable for a while and is now making me pretty close to a comfortable living. I really enjoy the freedom and variety that comes with running a SaaS, and while the grass is always greener on the other side, I think I'm pretty much ruined for a regular job at this point. So beware! One piece of unsolicited advice: if I were to start all over a…

Hey azhawkes; I've used loader.io and a few other services to do load tests. For all of them, I wish I had a "pay for credits" model, where I could just pay for each load test I ran, instead of a subscription. Load tests for me were infrequent and feature/ad-hoc/test-case specific, so I wish I had a billing model that fit my use case. Wish you the best!

Thanks!! The Loadster Fuel option is just that, where you buy a bunch of "fuel" (credits) and use it whenever you need to run tests. Each unit of fuel is enough to run 1 virtual user for 1 hour and it never expires.

Loadster's revenue split is something like 70/30 between MRR and Fuel. As the founder, of course, I love MRR, but many customers are like you and load testing is an occasional activity where it wouldn't make sense to have a recurring commitment.

I do always wonder how much friction it causes having two separate pricing models... pricing is hard.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#197

Post by luminati »

enraged_camel wrote: post #104
luminati wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^^The incentives are misaligned among recruiters, candidates, and employers when recruiters only want to place someone just long enough to hit the 90-day mark. Precisely! That's why I think Triplebyte.com is such an overrated company. Behind all their new-age silicon valley spin, they are nothing but an old-school scheming recruiter, charging $10K++ per hire. Think of about it - it's the ultimate rent-seeking industr…

$10k per hire sounds like a lot, until you realize that engineers add hundreds of thousands of dollars in value to their companies per year, if not much more. And good hires are worth their weight in gold. So clearly, Triplebyte’s success is at least to an extent the result of their delivering value to their clients.

you're attacking a straw man. I didn't deny the worth or value of a good engineer. "And good hires are worth their weight in gold." => So don't they deserve a chunk of the 10K triplebyte gets, considering triplebyte is just a middleman. Also wasn't the internet supposed to get rid of the middle man or drastically minimize the rent they seek?

I really like what key values does - I think it's a very sustainable way of doing it (both the incentive structure and the philosophy itself) and wish the very best.

I don't wish triplebyte, recruiters, and other rent-seeking middlemen well.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#199

Post by hliyan »

pplante wrote: post #48
pawurb wrote: post #17

I am running https://abot.app currently at $1500 MRR and growing. Still at full-time job apart from that.

I understand the context, but that logo doesn't give me a lot of warm feelings. I would likely skip the product just on that regardless of how awesome it might be.

Agreed. I too would like to try this with the team, but please consider a different logo...

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#200

Post by docsapp_io »

I am working on SaaS DocsApp (https://www.docsapp.io/) solo and bootstrapped. DocsApp is a platform to manage your product documentation. DocsApp now is profitable and growing. Currently I am focusing on marketing to grow more. DocsApp was born as a result of frustration to building documentation for Product/SaaS.

I have been working on DocsApp for 3 years and only now start profitable. The hardest problem I faced was marketing and sales. Development is only 30% of the work.

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