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Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

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Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#21

Post by throwaway2016a »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #17
throwaway2016a wrote: post #14

Congratulations. I'm not sure if the actual author is on this thread or this was posted by someone else but maybe someone can answer... One problem I have bootstrapping my SaaS is that I have no money to market. I can tweet and do direct marketing but that is slow and time consuming. Any recommendations from the crew on HN with how I can market to a large audience without needing a huge budget to spend on Adwords and…

Affiliate marketing might work, depending on your SaaS. e.g. this is what drove convertkit to 600k MRR > Once we hit about $20,000 MRR (through direct sales and word-of-mouth) we added an affiliate program. That worked exceptionally well because bloggers — our target market — are used to using affiliate programs to generate revenue. Also, if a small business owner loves your product they might tell 2-3 friends. But i…

Thank you for the suggestion.

> "Once we hit about $20,000 MRR"

Interesting. I wonder why the $20k MRR... I have $50 MRR (dollars... not thousands). But I don't see anything about affiliate marketing that would prohibit starting early.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#22

Post by azag0 »

whymsicalburito wrote: post #15

This seems like it would really help solve my time tracking needs at work, but having this sending that data to their servers makes it a non starter. Time tracking is my #1 pain point at work right now and would signup today and pay if an offline version was made available.

Have a look at Qbserve.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#23

Post by amorphid »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #14

Congratulations. I'm not sure if the actual author is on this thread or this was posted by someone else but maybe someone can answer... One problem I have bootstrapping my SaaS is that I have no money to market. I can tweet and do direct marketing but that is slow and time consuming. Any recommendations from the crew on HN with how I can market to a large audience without needing a huge budget to spend on Adwords and…

It isn't easy. Welcome to the grind! Figure out how to market without spending money. SEO, a few emails, word of mouth, social media sharing, etc. If you're product can't grow this way to the customers you serve, maybe find a new product or find new customers.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#24

Post by p0nce »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #20

> I don't use paid advertising, because past Facebook ads resulted in mostly fake signups that never installed a plugin. Is this still generally true in 2017?

Don't know for the market in general, but the efficiency of Facebook ads seems to be slowing a lot for us.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#25

Post by startupdiscuss »

ballenf wrote: post #18

Be careful what you measure, because you will get more of it. I don't think # of seconds editing a file is a good proxy for measuring bug free and understandable code. But if you want more # of seconds with files open and being edit, this is your tool it seems. Am I missing something about this product in that it measures anything related to code quality? If a company relies heavily this tool to measure its devs prod…

unless you reward people for spending less time in your files?

Or time spent vs feature complexity?

Or maybe it just shows you what is actually done. "Oh, we spend all out time in the file on data import - let's revisit the architecture"

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#26

Post by flanbiscuit »

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #2

Wakatime's HN launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227

Top comment is asking for an unhosted (local) version. I'd be interested in something like that as well since I work with sensitive HIPAA related stuff that I can't send off to someone else's server.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#27

Post by albertgoeswoof »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #21
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affiliate marketing might work, depending on your SaaS. e.g. this is what drove convertkit to 600k MRR > Once we hit about $20,000 MRR (through direct sales and word-of-mouth) we added an affiliate program. That worked exceptionally well because bloggers — our target market — are used to using affiliate programs to generate revenue. Also, if a small business owner loves your product they might tell 2-3 friends. But i…

Thank you for the suggestion. > "Once we hit about $20,000 MRR" Interesting. I wonder why the $20k MRR... I have $50 MRR (dollars... not thousands). But I don't see anything about affiliate marketing that would prohibit starting early.

I would postulate that it's just that they didn't think of the idea before. Affiliate marketing is nice because you are promising a share of revenue on conversion, so it just hits your margins a bit.

It's not so nice because it can screw consumers over a bit (e.g. try and find a non-biased review of an affiliate marketed product such as convertkit)

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#28

Post by shostack »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #21
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affiliate marketing might work, depending on your SaaS. e.g. this is what drove convertkit to 600k MRR > Once we hit about $20,000 MRR (through direct sales and word-of-mouth) we added an affiliate program. That worked exceptionally well because bloggers — our target market — are used to using affiliate programs to generate revenue. Also, if a small business owner loves your product they might tell 2-3 friends. But i…

Thank you for the suggestion. > "Once we hit about $20,000 MRR" Interesting. I wonder why the $20k MRR... I have $50 MRR (dollars... not thousands). But I don't see anything about affiliate marketing that would prohibit starting early.

If you are really small, your struggle with an affiliate program will be convincing affiliates you are worth promoting. They want to see a strong EPC number and ideally a recognized brand.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#29

Post by wastedhours »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #21
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affiliate marketing might work, depending on your SaaS. e.g. this is what drove convertkit to 600k MRR > Once we hit about $20,000 MRR (through direct sales and word-of-mouth) we added an affiliate program. That worked exceptionally well because bloggers — our target market — are used to using affiliate programs to generate revenue. Also, if a small business owner loves your product they might tell 2-3 friends. But i…

Thank you for the suggestion. > "Once we hit about $20,000 MRR" Interesting. I wonder why the $20k MRR... I have $50 MRR (dollars... not thousands). But I don't see anything about affiliate marketing that would prohibit starting early.

Not sure it's a case of waiting, but that they just didn't add the feature until then. If you're heads down on sales and development, guessing they just didn't have the scope/implementation to do it then.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#30

Post by muse900 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #14

Congratulations. I'm not sure if the actual author is on this thread or this was posted by someone else but maybe someone can answer... One problem I have bootstrapping my SaaS is that I have no money to market. I can tweet and do direct marketing but that is slow and time consuming. Any recommendations from the crew on HN with how I can market to a large audience without needing a huge budget to spend on Adwords and…

The OP is the actual guy behind wakatime.
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