Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
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Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
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Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
#2I've crashed and burned on SaaS enough that I'm very into the landing page approach -- don't build the product, but convince people you have so that they can click the "buy now" button. That way you feel more confident that the market exists while you're actually building it. After all the projects I've failed at, nothing is harder for me to do than spend 200+ hours on something without having a clue whether it will reap benefits or not. Corey spent 100 hours trying to gather traction. He could have potentially skipped the 100 hours it took to build it and instead just tested the sales side.
There are people who can know where a market is and confidently blaze straight into it without any validation. I think I'm just not that genius or lucky.
Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
#3I've crashed and burned on SaaS enough that I'm very into the landing page approach -- don't build the product, but convince people you have so that they can click the "buy now" button. That way you feel more confident that the market exists while you're actually building it. After all the projects I've failed at, nothing is harder for me to do than spend 200+ hours on something without having a clue whether it will…
I'm curious, if you're willing to share, what were the projects you worked on that failed?
Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
#4I'm not sure why this is on the front page. I mean, $1 that you just made yesterday doesn't really indicate product/market fit, nor seem very noteworthy in general. If anything, it seems more like a midway point in the journey of what you might expect to get there. You might have to pivot several times after realizing traction is not stable or perhaps not scalable vis a vis marketing efforts, as has been my experience. Kudos to building something though.
Edit:
I get the point others are making about celebrating a milestone and your first sale being the stepping stone to the next, but I don't think it addresses mine:
Is $1 that you made just yesterday really enough data to demonstrate to others what to expect? Is there really any conclusion that can be drawn from such a small experiment? Maybe it's just me, but I feel like there would be much more interesting insights to discuss after waiting more time or when more sales occurred.
Honestly this looks more like an SEO piece given the keyword rich external links in the article from a high PR domain and boost from HN. The author has mostly just submitted his own articles on HN to boot.
Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
#5I'm not sure why this is on the front page. I mean, $1 that you just made yesterday doesn't really indicate product/market fit, nor seem very noteworthy in general. If anything, it seems more like a midway point in the journey of what you might expect to get there. You might have to pivot several times after realizing traction is not stable or perhaps not scalable vis a vis marketing efforts, as has been my experienc…
It's one person describing what it took to make their first sale. Maybe that information doesn't have value to you, but it does to other people who are considering doing something similar.
Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
#6I've crashed and burned on SaaS enough that I'm very into the landing page approach -- don't build the product, but convince people you have so that they can click the "buy now" button. That way you feel more confident that the market exists while you're actually building it. After all the projects I've failed at, nothing is harder for me to do than spend 200+ hours on something without having a clue whether it will…
I'm curious, if you're willing to share, what were the projects you worked on that failed?
I built a competitor to Reddit and Digg (at the time) called RatherGather that had some differentiators that ended up not mattering to people. I wish I understood Metcalfe's Law better at the time.
I built a mobile game called Roaring Racers where you had to use your voice to make your car move (roar louder, go faster).
I built a stickers app for iOS stickers launch that allowed you to import anything. This one wasn't a total dud, but the way Apple positioned the store, the traction wasn't at a scale that made it worth my time.
And then of course there's the laundry list of companies that I've been employed by and built products for where months into it I discovered nobody in the company had really done any market testing, but they got clearance to build something for $XXX,XXX anyways.
9/10 startups fail, so just by nature of that fact, most of us spend our time working on building tech that never really "makes it".
There have been great successes too, but you asked about the failures.
Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
#7I'm not sure why this is on the front page. I mean, $1 that you just made yesterday doesn't really indicate product/market fit, nor seem very noteworthy in general. If anything, it seems more like a midway point in the journey of what you might expect to get there. You might have to pivot several times after realizing traction is not stable or perhaps not scalable vis a vis marketing efforts, as has been my experienc…
The first dollar is usually the hardest though. This is a true account of one person's experience and I think a lot of people don't understand what that feels like. 200+ hours to cheer for $1 and some people don't even get to the dollar.
Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, if you're willing to share, what were the projects you worked on that failed?
I built a competitor to Reddit and Digg (at the time) called RatherGather that had some differentiators that ended up not mattering to people. I wish I understood Metcalfe's Law better at the time. I built a mobile game called Roaring Racers where you had to use your voice to make your car move (roar louder, go faster). I built a stickers app for iOS stickers launch that allowed you to import anything. This one wasn'…
Edit:
I forgot one that is fairly recent too. I built a Windows app that allowed you to watch Twitch picture in picture while playing a game. Sold one copy before shutting it down.
Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
#9I'm not sure why this is on the front page. I mean, $1 that you just made yesterday doesn't really indicate product/market fit, nor seem very noteworthy in general. If anything, it seems more like a midway point in the journey of what you might expect to get there. You might have to pivot several times after realizing traction is not stable or perhaps not scalable vis a vis marketing efforts, as has been my experienc…
That "Zero to One" customer is a big deal. You can now ask that customer why did they buy it in the first place? Why did they take their credit card out of their purse/wallet, type their info in, and click buy? What would keep them as a customer, etc.
The next step is to get to 10 customers, then 100...
Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
#10I've crashed and burned on SaaS enough that I'm very into the landing page approach -- don't build the product, but convince people you have so that they can click the "buy now" button. That way you feel more confident that the market exists while you're actually building it. After all the projects I've failed at, nothing is harder for me to do than spend 200+ hours on something without having a clue whether it will…
I think the second/third/forth SaaS site won't take 200 hours once you get in the groove.