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

This video is a few years old now, but I found it interesting:

The long, slow, SaaS ramp of death

https://businessofsoftware.org/talk/how-to-negotiate-the-lon...

I started my current enterprise SAAS company 4 years ago. It took more than a year before we had our first customer (who left us!), 2.5 long years before we raised $350k on the promise of signing a big company. After 2.5 years "without a job" my whole family was pressuring me into just getting a job a tech company. "It was obviously not going to work if we hadn't succeeded by now."

But I knew we had something special in the tech.

That little bit of cash helped us hire a great head of sales with experience building companies like ours from the ground up. We couldn't afford to pay him even an order of magnitude less than what he would normally charge, but after seeing the product he turned down dozens (!) of offers from VC darling startups to work with us, for free, on the basis that we would pay him when the sales worked. For most of the next year and a half, we had steady linear growth, but it was enough to attract funding.

Now we've built a great team of 20 people and are on track to way exceed our numbers for this quarter. We still have a lot of work ahead of us.

If you know you have something special, then fight for it. It takes a lot longer than you expect.

What is your startup called?

Do you want to keep working on it?

Is there something else you want to do?

If you're still motivated and want to do it, keep at it. I don't think timelines for success (depending on how you measure that) are fixed.

If you're not motivated / want to move on, you probably should.

There are many things that might influence the result and therefore your decision.

I once worked for a product in the SaaS business and what helped us is understanding "where are our customers". So, where are _your_ customers? How do they come to your product, how do they discover your product? After having this answer we focused on improving that conversion rate (for us it was all about being first on google and having a high-converting landing page, but in your case forums might be a better place to look at. It all depends on the target customer)

Also, one issue I've often encountered is that knowing the customer and selling to the customer might be very different things. Did you only sell online? One great piece of advice is try to sell the product IRL and record the audio. After many failed and successfull attempts you'll have recordings of _what works_ and what doesn't work for the kind of customer. That information will be useful to convey the benefits into your landing page / homepage.

Back to your question: How much growth should you expect? It is a generic question. How many people are impacted by your product? How many have that specific itch to be scratched? How fast can you get to them? How good is your product at scratching the itch? The (partial) sum of these questions might lead to the answer. If you have many people impacted by your product, if the product scratch a big itch and you can reach all the people at the same time, chances are you're going to grow fast.

If you grow slow, is it bad? It might be bad if you're asking 5$/month for an extra. If it is 100$/month maybe a slow growth might make sense.

In the end, if I were in your shoes, I'll wait a year to decide if it's time to give up, but at the same time I'll set some monthly checks to see how growth is going, what are the feedbacks and how the community is reacting and test each month a different way to market the product. A good book on this is "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg

PS I also run a side business creating cosmetic products (not saas) and my growth has been relatively slow. The product (in my case) fixes a big itche and had no competitors. Reason for that is that achieving a stable efficient result is quite hard, but we somehow made it (bootrapped obviously). In our case slow growth was a good thing because it allowed us to fix the issues in the product before being too much known in the public.