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Ask HN: What's the hardest part of building a SaaS that users keep paying for?
21–24 of 24 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest part of building a SaaS that users keep paying for?
#22My app MacroCodex.app has 10K+ active users.
My tip for you is, let users use it for free and figure out how they are using it.
After that build things to solve their problems and eventually they'll pay for things.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest part of building a SaaS that users keep paying for?
#23[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest part of building a SaaS that users keep paying for?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are thinking about this wrong. Don't approach a business from a UI and code first attitude. You need to focus on solving a problem well. The other stuff will come once you have paying users. Take OpenAI as an extreme example. The UI was basically a POS and it was difficult to even navigate to ChatGPT when they launched. It was just such an awesome service that people paid for it and used it. Focus on the…
You’ve hit on something that I think deserves to be called out more directly — all of the things you pay for have significant non-software aspects. It is pretty hard to make something people will pay for without tackling some hard problem outside of the software itself, unless your software is very niche. Looking at your examples - ChatGPT, you need some way to get an otherworldly sized dataset before you can train a…
Exactly. Wood Mackenzie has insane amounts of data sources: infrared cameras pointed at most storage tanks in North America, cameras counting the movement of rail cars, drones have been flying over tanks measuring roof levels on tanks for years, thermal tracking of crude oil pumping stations, production by field for years, hoards of data they've accumulated over decades and the list goes on. The website/apps are pretty to deliver the service but that isn't what really matters to solving my problem and providing value.