Pocket. One-man team for at least the first two years.
Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
331–340 of 376 posts
Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
#332Pocket: one man team for at least the first two years.
Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't set up a corporation until you have either a reasonable amount of cash coming in or someone ready to give you a check. After that, I'd start with an LLC in your home state, unless you think there's a chance you'll take outside investment. If you do, conversion to a Delaware C-corp costs around $10K in legal fees.
+1 to this advice. Don't incorporate until you're already paying yourself a good salary. The wrong structure can easily cost you thousands per year in taxes and fees.
Would it be "piercing the corporate veil" to accept payments before incorporating, then moving everything to separate accounts afterwards?
Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how are you monetizing it? Is it ads or paid job advertisements or something else?
Companies pay a yearly subscription fee for content creation and listing their profile on Key Values. I never charge software engineers and I don't charge companies any placement fees for the engineers they hire through Key Values. Having a contingency model is definitely the more lucrative path, but I'm against it for two reasons: (1) I'm a dev, not a recruiter, and (2) I think placements fees are part of what's bro…
How did you solve the chicken-egg problem, where the site isn't valuable until you get a lot of viewers/postings? Thanks, and great site!
Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
#335Key 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…
This is great. In a mildly amusing side-note, in order to fill out my companies profile, my (barely profitable) side project is a perfect fit: https://forcerank.it lets you have your team rank all the values so you can see what the team actually thinks your values are.
Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
#336Yes, 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…
We're waiting for an on-premise version of PartsBox to be released :-) Is that wishful thinking???
Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
#337Yes, 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…
We're waiting for an on-premise version of PartsBox to be released :-) Is that wishful thinking???
I'm afraid so. On-premises is expensive (VERY expensive). I tried to estimate the necessary pricing for on-premises deployment and the final price was never attractive to customers. In all cases it turned out the need for on-premises deployment was not a business need (we must deploy this locally because of X and Y, which implies a value of Z in USD), but rather a point of view (I'd rather have this locally because that's what I prefer).
Why is it expensive? On-premises deployment means maintaining a separate version of the software, a complex arrangement to make upgrades, inability to fix potential upgrade problems by modifying the database, having to maintain deployment documentation, having to always have code that creates a database from scratch (rather than migrating an existing one), extending legal arrangements for third-party services, additional configurations that need to be tested and much more. It constrains development in many ways.
Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. I think only ~1/150 companies I talk to are actively hiring part-time engineers, so it's unlikely I'll add this category any time soon... if ever. (Sorry!) That’s sad to hear. I’m currently working part time (I value my free time much more than the money I would make) and it took quite a bit of effort to find a place.
What place did you find? (Or how did you find it, if you would rather not divulge names) I will be looking to go from full time to part time in s couple of years.
I spoke to employers of friends who were open to the idea. Small (but post-startup, I guess) tech companies that I found through my personal network. I also talked to a recruiter I know, but he didn’t have much luck finding anything for me.
Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's frustrating for people who experience voice quality issues because the problems are usually intermittent. This means that, by the time they contact their service providers, the problem is not occurring and they just get a lame 'have you tried rebooting your modem/router' response. VoIP Spear monitors 24x7x365 so customers can provide historical data to their service providers to show the issue occurred. Also, se…
So this is targeted at SMEs that don't have an in-house sysadmin/ops monitoring capability?
There are three targets for VoIP Spear.
1. Personal: Home users use VoIP Spear to monitor their VoIP service to provide information to their service providers about the problems they are experiencing.
2. SME: Businesses that have VoIP use VoIP Spear in the same way as the home users.
3. Service providers: Service providers use VoIP Spear because it is an inexpensive and cheap way to get data about the issues their customers are experiencing. Most VoIP service providers are typically unable to get any data about the quality of phone calls their customers experience.
Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
#340I co-founded Pigeon SMS ( https://pigeonsms.com ) with my dad just a couple of years ago and we reached profitability just a few months after founding. We provide business texting services to businesses of all sizes. Some of our customers include a city, vet clinic, glass shop, screen printing firm, boutique retailers, and on and on. Really any business can benefit from adding texting to their communications. My advi…
How do you market to local businesses? Aren't they the least technical people? Congratulations though!
It can be difficult for sure. Trial and error mostly.