This may not qualify as SaaS but I built makerpad.co to show people how to build products/businesses without code. Currently $27k over the last month. One person, not my full time gig. Wtf am I talking about?! I’m basically showing people the power of not needing to code to build something. I built an Airbnb “clone” by linking webflo, Airtable and zapier. Basically trying to show people they can build their first ver…
I just looked around. Great content! But how do you monetize a site like this?
Companies paying to be listed and collab on some content (not yet released)
> I'm doing ~$30k/month and it's almost all profit since I don't have an office or any employees. Awesome job. I am really surprised with that kind of revenue you don't spring for an office or dedicated office space at WeWork. You might as well spend money on your business, either that or you paying taxes to uncle sam (assuming you based out of the US). I try and buy a new MacBook Pro each year, might as well get a h…
I’m not sure how the US tax system works, it seems doubtful that if you spend money on an asset you can deduct the full amount from the tax you pay? In Australia you would basically deduct the purchase price of a MacBook Pro off the total profit you calculate tax on so it ends up being around a 30% discount on the MacBook Pro. If it’s similar in the US at all spending profit pointlessly would just be throwing money a…
You are right, of course it's not 100% deductible. I am not advocating spending wildly on things you don't need for the business. If you have lots of revenue and not a lot of expenses, it makes sense to splurge on physical assets you can use and then expense and in the future sell. I.E. computers, networking equipment, storage, monitors, etc. Furthermore, it also make sense to spend on things that can help you grow the business like advertising, marketing, office space, employees. Again, better to spend and get the tax deduction, and have the resources that grow the business.
Yes, PartsBox is (Electronic parts inventory & production: https://partsbox.io/ ). Some key points I would have told my former self: * Do not expect any kind of explosive growth, especially in B2B. Expect linear growth. Search for "slow SaaS ramp of death" for a pretty good description of what to expect. * Marketing is a huge problem. If you look around, you will see lots of marketers talking about marketing. In. Sho…
> Anxiety eats at you. No matter how good you are at keeping it at bay (I was pretty good), it will eventually catch up with you. I still don't have a good solution to that.
Same feeling here.
Something that works pretty well for me is having a mentor a generation older than me, who has been running a business for decades. I tell them about my anxiety, ask them if they had it, and listen to how they dealt with it.
Strangely, every time I have that conversation the anxiety drops significantly for a while.
Anyone have other techniques for dealing with the startup anxiety they can share?
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 m…
Thanks for sharing your experience! I've been thinking about adding a credit system to my PDF generation product [1], so that people can perform one-time batch jobs, or for companies that have very seasonal workloads. I agree that recurring revenue is the best, but there's also nothing stopping people from suspending their account if they don't need it anymore. I haven't had anyone do that so far, so maybe this would be the wrong direction.
Key Values ( https://www.keyvalues.com ) is a one-woman show (oh hi!). I started Key Values as a side project two years ago, but it quickly turned into my full-time passion and business. I'm doing ~$30k/month and it's almost all profit since I don't have an office or any employees. I recently talked to Courtland of Indie Hackers (already mentioned in the comments) about how I got here: https://www.indiehackers.com/po…
I have a feedback for you - would be great if you can add filters (separate from the value filters) e.g. I selected my priority values and then wanted to filter the results with only remote jobs but no such option was available. Similarly one might want to filter the results by location etc.
Key Values ( https://www.keyvalues.com ) is a one-woman show (oh hi!). I started Key Values as a side project two years ago, but it quickly turned into my full-time passion and business. I'm doing ~$30k/month and it's almost all profit since I don't have an office or any employees. I recently talked to Courtland of Indie Hackers (already mentioned in the comments) about how I got here: https://www.indiehackers.com/po…
It may just be that all companies select the same values, but even deselecting basically everything I still get +/- 80 results.
I think in the beginning nothing is selected.
For example selecting „work life balance“ gives me 7 results.
Running a 1-man SaaS as a side-project has been one of the best things career wise. It helped me gain a different perspective on software (design, devops, sales, support etc.) in general. Being able to bring some of that experience into my day-time jobs was really rewarding.
The Saas i'm running is Gridoc (https://gridoc.com) - it pays for the car and a few bills. I'm pretty sure it could be doing better but it has been on auto-pilot for a couple years now (started a family).
I’m not sure how the US tax system works, it seems doubtful that if you spend money on an asset you can deduct the full amount from the tax you pay? In Australia you would basically deduct the purchase price of a MacBook Pro off the total profit you calculate tax on so it ends up being around a 30% discount on the MacBook Pro. If it’s similar in the US at all spending profit pointlessly would just be throwing money a…
You are right, of course it's not 100% deductible. I am not advocating spending wildly on things you don't need for the business. If you have lots of revenue and not a lot of expenses, it makes sense to splurge on physical assets you can use and then expense and in the future sell. I.E. computers, networking equipment, storage, monitors, etc. Furthermore, it also make sense to spend on things that can help you grow t…
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…