Live data from Hacker News

Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

indiehackers.com

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#31

I don't want to hear about the first dollar you made. I want to hear about how you went from $40,000 to $80,000 MRR. That's the key area. This post is just an ego stroke for a guy who made $1.00 ($.96 after fees).

Thats relatively easy compared to getting your first dollar. Having 40k in MRR suggests you already got a decent userbase to sell more products/services or retarget to. You can also get PR easier than a no name startup with 0 customers.

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#32
post #2

I'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…

Do you only consider a project a success when other people are using it?

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#33
post #7
post #4

I'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.

The first $1 is easy.... If you're struggling to attract a single customer you seriously need to re-evaluate what you're doing. As mentioned earlier in the comments; doubling from MRR from $40,000 to $80,000 is a way bigger challenge than making that first buck.

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On vitamins vs painkillers: conversely, do you think if you are able to build a vitamin product that does make your worklife better/easier, wouldn't it be a harder barrier to entry for newcomers? i.e., greater entrenchment? I'm currently doing customer development on such a product. I've burned my fingers previously building nice-to-have products and don't intend to repeat my mistake. With this one, I'm validating th…

First let's level set: the benefit of taking vitamins is that if you take them regularly, at some point in the future you will be better off than you are now (in other words there is no immediate perceived benefit - it requires an investment). Alternatively, a painkiller has immediate physiological benefits. Assessing a service as a painkiller vs a vitamin is not totally black and white - generally I would say a serv…

hey, thank you for taking the time to write back such a lucid (and educational) response.

I will take you up and reach out to you. I'm not selling anything yet but would love to get feedback from you on my hypothesis.

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#35
post #2

I'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…

Any recommendations for quick and effective landing page solutions? I assume something like MailChimp for email sign-ups?

https://launchrock.com is the classic tool for this.

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#36
post #22

In 1998, before people had much of clue about what represents success and how big things can get given time, I built a software product and posted it to the net. Within a week or so there had been a handful of sales at $100 each. That looked like failure to me at the time - "that's a trickle of money - extrapolating maybe $25,000 per year? Not enough to pay my bills. I need to get a job". Today that sort of start loo…

The internet is becoming a bigger and bigger playground. Even getting that first bit of attention is extremely meaningful now. There are so many different services and other attention-suckers out there at this point that everything really does matter.

What type of software product did you make back then that warranted $100 sales?

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#37
post #2

I'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…

Any recommendations for quick and effective landing page solutions? I assume something like MailChimp for email sign-ups?

Email signups don't really validate your idea anymore, even if they manage to get you some emails.

There was a post a while ago on Reddit where someone built this little project:

https://fauxbuy.com

Basically lets you add a fake buy button easily and emails you when someone attempts to buy.

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#38
post #9
post #4

I'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...

This is consumer product with a really low profit margin, which means he'll need a lot more than 100 customers paying $1 each to have a sustainable business. At $1, the product might as well be free. Imagine if this article was retitled "What actually goes into getting your first user." Would anyone care then?

Regardless, it would be much more interesting to hear why the customer took out their credit card and entered their payment information. Unfortunately, that's not what this article is about.

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#39
post #4

I'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…

There are a lot, lot, LOT more people trying to get to dollar #1 than any other phase of the process. It feels good to read about someone else going through the same struggles as you, especially if they're willing to share behind-the-scenes information (i.e. how many hours they worked).

Is this enough data to produce a valid scientific experiment? No, but that's a high bar that would disqualify pretty much every conversation anyone is having anywhere about anything :-D

Re: Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

#40
post #28

Took a look at the site https://www.placecard.me/ and went through the flow of making a card and couldn't see a single place to pay for the template or order prints. Its possible I hit some kind of A/B test but i think the call to action might be buried too deep in the process.

It should be the case that if you pay for a template you get a preview link where the PDF has a watermark on it, and the only way to remove that watermark is to pay. I agree it's way too many steps and am trying to figure out how to make it easier and more seamless without delivering people something they don't actually want.

Maybe having the cards on the front page might help. You've invested a lot of screen realestate on explaining the product. You could probably make this https://www.placecard.me/try/ your homepage, have the instruction in the banner and have the product in front of the user right away.
Post reply on HN