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

indiehackers.com

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

#111
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bigge…

This is so incredibly well put. I cannot agree more.

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

#112

SubmitHub founder weighing in here -- thanks for sharing, Courtland! If anyone has any questions about SubmitHub or Indie Shuffle (technical or business), feel free to ask :) Edit: in case you're curious, here's what the dashboard looks like for bloggers - http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png

How much does it cost you to run the service?

It's pretty minimal. The most expensive component is usually technical development, and given that I do all that myself... well, that's a big "cost saving" :)

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

#113
post #88

I think another important lesson to draw from this is that you should build things for domains and problems in which you have a legitimate interest/curiosity. That was something I took away from this that's difficult to accept, because it means you're probably going to be limited if you want to work solo.

If you're going to spend 8+ hours a day on something, you'd best enjoy the subject matter :)

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

#114

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.

Nice to from you Reagan! :)

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

#115
As seems to be common on Indie Hackers, the title is extremely disingenuous:

1) It took him 6 years to build an audience before turning it into a business. The title makes it sound like the entire process only took 10 months.

2) $46k/mo of what? Revenue or profit? If the latter, at least half immediately goes to the music blogs.

3) Where exactly does the $46k/mo number come from? It's only mentioned in the title and explained nowhere. Is it a projection, an average, the best month, ...?

Courtland, you have a great site and I really enjoy your articles. Please don't spoil your awesome content with vagueness and clickbait.

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

#116
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The app itself is the business, and is separate from his blog. (Although it works together with his blog and with many other blogs, his particular blog is not a necessity.) EDIT: To respond to your edit, I agree he was able to leverage his blog's popularity. But his blog is only one out of 231 listed on SubmitHub. Thus, his blog's readers account for what's likely a negligible fraction of SubmitHub's users. That's no…

Read the part about network effect. His blog is a small part of SubmitHub now, but it was crucial that he had his blog in there in the beggining.

Those network effects would've been the same if he'd launched SubmitHub on a different but equally popular blog.

Analogy: Let's say you invent a new and superior way to cook french fries. Is it crucial for you to own your own restaurant chain so you can demonstrate the fry machine in action before selling it to other chains? I would say it's not.

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

#117

1.) Build an audience (~6 years) 2.) Build your business (a few months...) That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover & Product Hunt: https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a... The title was "Product Hunt's Rise: An overnight success 1,834 days in the making"... Same exact story here except growing Indie shuffle took closer to 2,190 days!

It's funny how this blog post probably explains quite well how the indiehackers (the site this article about indie shuffle is hosted on) guy builds his community.

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

#118
post #117

1.) Build an audience (~6 years) 2.) Build your business (a few months...) That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover & Product Hunt: https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a... The title was "Product Hunt's Rise: An overnight success 1,834 days in the making"... Same exact story here except growing Indie shuffle took closer to 2,190 days!

It's funny how this blog post probably explains quite well how the indiehackers (the site this article about indie shuffle is hosted on) guy builds his community.

Quite meta! Would be nice to hear csallen's thoughts on it.

Once big difference I think is that csallen is focused on writing specifically for the Hacker News audience as a way to bootstrap traffic from an existing large audience. Product Hunt didn't really use that strategy from what I can tell.

Similarly to Indie Hackers, I wrote my Product Hunt article with the aim to bootstrap off of Ryan Hoover's large existing audience (40K twitter followers at the time, compared to my paltry 100). He was the first to tweet about it after I brought it to his attention and it spread organically from there (26K views currently).

My next Internet Archaeology article is already in the works and I plan to use the exact same strategy as before (bootstrap off of my subject's existing audience).

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

#119
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how this blog post probably explains quite well how the indiehackers (the site this article about indie shuffle is hosted on) guy builds his community.

Quite meta! Would be nice to hear csallen's thoughts on it. Once big difference I think is that csallen is focused on writing specifically for the Hacker News audience as a way to bootstrap traffic from an existing large audience. Product Hunt didn't really use that strategy from what I can tell. Similarly to Indie Hackers, I wrote my Product Hunt article with the aim to bootstrap off of Ryan Hoover's large existing…

Sounds good. I love your archeology work. Saves me a lot of time.It was a little too long for a coffee break read and now I'm behind my work schedule, though. Maybe you can split one article into smaller chunks, which may also increase your overall traffic. ;-)

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

#120
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does the google background and details about the job role there have anything to do with this?

It makes for an interesting story, isn't that enough?

yes that 1st paragraph was enough for me.. the rest was a downer
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