SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months • Hacker News Board

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#61

Post by gloverkcn » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

jason-grishkoff wrote: post #46

fiatjaf wrote: post #45

The guy had a very successful music blog and used that to kick off the network effect needed to make SubmitHub work. There is zero chance SubmitHub would work without the music blog, so unless you have a very successful blog yourself this article will not help you in any practical manner.

I'd like to think that the part about launching and iterating -- getting your product out there rather than trying to make it perfect before launch -- is quite a useful tip for solo founders (and small teams). But, to each their own!

If you look at any marketing funnel, the first hurdle is awareness. Getting people aware of a saas product is very difficult. Getting them to try it is even harder.

Having the blog provided both a vehicle to get the target market aware, and the credibility that the product is worth trying. It's really smart to be an active member of a community, and then provide services to the community. It's also very difficult, and takes a lot of effort. I think the post you responded to is someone who understands the amount of work you had to put into your blog to make it successful.

I don't think this is a negative, but a really good take away for new entrepreneurs.

- How will you market and sell your product? The "If you build it, they will come" tactic doesn't work.

- How do you know it's a problem people want solved?

- How do you know your solution adequately solves the problem ?

Your approach answered all these questions and you got to work on something you're passionate about.

Congrats on the success!

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#62

Post by reagan83 » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 9:51 PM UTC

I ran my first startup with Jason 15 years ago. Since then, he's gone on to do some amazing things and seeing him on HN today makes me realize:

1) how lucky I was to work with him for those 2 years. 2) how small our industry is.

Congrats Jason on the well deserved success.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#63

Post by billmdsf » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

teh_klev wrote: post #44

hnsummarizer wrote: post #10

Tldr: "I was born in South Africa and moved to California just before the start of high school, graduating from the University of California, San Diego in 2007 before working a corporate job in DC that ultimately landed me a sweet gig at Google. My responsibility once there was to figure out how much to pay the company's executives, which meant I was lucky to enjoy face time with many of the top brass.,One of the big…

Please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607103 Continuing to post TLDR summaries will likely see you end up with ban.

Hello, it's the face behind the bot :). As some of you have guessed, I wrote an automatic summarizer to provide a little more context to hn articles because I often find myself wanting to know a little more before clicking the link.

It makes sense that the HN community would want to push for reading the full article and against tldr culture. This was just a fun little side project I built yesterday, and I’ll be thinking about that and any other feedback I receive before making improvements. Thanks for your comments!

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#64

Post by paulsutter » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

fiatjaf wrote: post #45

The guy had a very successful music blog and used that to kick off the network effect needed to make SubmitHub work. There is zero chance SubmitHub would work without the music blog, so unless you have a very successful blog yourself this article will not help you in any practical manner.

Or maybe the lesson is to develop a following first before developing a product. The music blog didn't happen by random chance, and his overall approach seems better than developing a product and hoping for a following.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#65

Post by dpweb » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 10:13 PM UTC

fiatjaf wrote: post #45

The guy had a very successful music blog and used that to kick off the network effect needed to make SubmitHub work. There is zero chance SubmitHub would work without the music blog, so unless you have a very successful blog yourself this article will not help you in any practical manner.

Not sure that is true. It's cheap promotion for musicians who have zero contacts. 40 bucks to get featured on 40 blogs, its a decent deal just to get the back links. Look at the sites where people pay for likes or plays or comments. They can be popular without any kind of existing popular service feeding them. This site is in no way like buying likes, as the blogs can and do reject, but it's a service one can see catching on. Not everyone wants to schmooze blog owners.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#66

Post by godzillabrennus » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 10:24 PM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #64

fiatjaf wrote: post #45

The guy had a very successful music blog and used that to kick off the network effect needed to make SubmitHub work. There is zero chance SubmitHub would work without the music blog, so unless you have a very successful blog yourself this article will not help you in any practical manner.

Or maybe the lesson is to develop a following first before developing a product. The music blog didn't happen by random chance, and his overall approach seems better than developing a product and hoping for a following.

Alternatively you can partner with a community and build a product for them on revenue share.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#67

Post by SwellJoe » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 10:31 PM UTC

XERQ wrote: post #53

jason-grishkoff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question! Before submitting to blogs, users are required to filter the list by genre. They can then sort by the # of fans that outlet has, or -- even more handy -- there's a notes column in the far right that gives some vital statistics. You can see it here: http://i.imgur.com/pqMky6h.png If you visit the "directory of blogs" page, you'll see a full selection of the filters: http://www.submithub.com/blogs

Have you considered charging by number of fans per outlet, instead of a flat $1/credit? Seems to me the value is in the blog's reach, similar to CPM in advertising. It goes against the simplicity of your platform, so you could make it very simple: $5 for high traffic, $3 for medium, $1 for low (or a variation of that).

I think there's a risk of this becoming a payola or pay-to-play sort of situation. I don't know that you're wrong, but it makes the model seem more predatory of musicians.

Here's what I like about the very small flat fee:

1. It is small enough for even modestly successful musicians to cover it. It isn't a monetary barrier to entry.

2. It is likely large enough to prevent the shotgun approach. This is one of the bigger problems of finding new talent for record labels and music writers, especially in the digital age when emailing or messaging someone a link to your song approaches zero cost...you can't realistically listen to every unsolicited track, so you have to filter somehow. This, at least, insures you don't get a bunch of stuff in genres you don't care about or know anything about. People have to choose a little more carefully.

3. It provides an incentive for writers and musicians to form a relationship so they'll work together again (with the blogger getting tipped again and the artist getting more coverage or useful feedback); it starts out as a monetary transaction, but once they've connected up and like each other, they could work toward building a scene (and the network that comes with that). In music, a scene is a force multiplier for everyone involved (e.g., Seattle grunge, Madchester, Atlanta dirty south).

Increasing the fee for big sites looks more like payola than merely a filtering tool to determine who has gone to the trouble to figure out the best handful of writers or labels to reach out to. If the profit of the site begins to come from the musicians they're reviewing, their incentives start to get lopsided in the wrong direction. I'm not saying all bloggers would do it, but there would be incentive to boost stats (with clickbaity stuff), and to get as many submissions as possible. Incentives should, IMHO, be directed toward increasing quality, maximizing the time a writer can spend on the artists they choose to cover, and providing the best feedback for the artists.

Anything that gives incentive to cheat the system will break it and reduce the quality of the network...likely even killing it. If there's even a slight notion that people are scamming musicians with this, it will (maybe deservedly) die.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#68

Post by swedish_coder » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 10:36 PM UTC

godzillabrennus wrote: post #66

paulsutter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the lesson is to develop a following first before developing a product. The music blog didn't happen by random chance, and his overall approach seems better than developing a product and hoping for a following.

Alternatively you can partner with a community and build a product for them on revenue share.

Interesting take on the concept. Do you have any experience with this? Know where I can read more about this sort of thing? :)

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#69

Post by pjlegato » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 10:38 PM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #64

fiatjaf wrote: post #45

The guy had a very successful music blog and used that to kick off the network effect needed to make SubmitHub work. There is zero chance SubmitHub would work without the music blog, so unless you have a very successful blog yourself this article will not help you in any practical manner.

Or maybe the lesson is to develop a following first before developing a product. The music blog didn't happen by random chance, and his overall approach seems better than developing a product and hoping for a following.

Then the article should be mostly about how he built the music blog, rather than eliding over that in a sentence.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#70

Post by csallen » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 10:39 PM UTC

jstandard wrote: post #58

hellofunk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculous. You make it sound like the efforts to start a business and do well, be profitable, were not impressive.

That's not his point. From the article's headline: "did it in under a year" The author is being very disingenuous with his headline.

SubmitHub as a product is 10 months old, and Jason's only been charging for the past 7 months. So saying that "under as year" is a "very disingenuous" timeline is... very disingenuous.

Yes, having a successful blog helped Jason identify and understand the problem, and it saved him from having to partner with someone else's blog. But learning to code was probably pivotal, too. Where do we draw the line?