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

The "long slow saas ramp of death" is real. Google it.

You can supposedly grow faster if you do marketing well. But from what you wrote I'd guess that you do not do marketing well. My adventures with marketing came down to the following conclusions:

* Spending money on ads is basically burning money and does not work for me. (tried Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook ultra-targeted ads, Quora). This became painfully obvious after I implemented my own conversion tracking, because I did not trust their metrics/analytics.

* You will find plenty of marketing experts all around you, but none of them will work for a commission, which speaks to how much trust they really place in their "skills".

* Since I am a solo founder, I eventually decided that I'm OK with my organic growth and I'd rather concentrate on making the product better. This helps in building bigger product value, improves customer retention, allows me to raise the ARPU, and in general works great. I just don't get the marketing-pumped stream of new customers. But I'm OK with that, especially at this point.

That said, I think I would expect more than 8 paying customers after a year. My ramp-up in the first year was slow (the product didn't have a lot of value back then), but it was quicker. I just checked, and I had 25 paying customers after one year from the first one.

- Very difficult to be successful if this is your side project, if you cant take the leap because of funding then try to raise money, your in a better position than most because you have a product and traction (although without knowing the domain hard to say if someone will be interested).

- If your thinking about giving up, perhaps your not convinced enough to go full time on it (fair enough) then look to potential sell it - OR - merge it with a complimentary offering. There are SO many SaaS products now (just look at ProductHunt) but very few of them I would say are viable businesses on their own right but put together that could be a different story.

You win your first one hundred customers one at a time, through massively high touch sales.

Once you've hit a hundred, you might start seeing some organic growth via word-of-mouth - maybe. But you gotta put in the sales effort to get there.

If you're an engineer with no sales experience this can be a painful lesson to learn!