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

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41–50 of 174 posts

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

#46
post #36

Is it me or is it nuts to be paying $1,600 a month on servers when you have just over 1000 users? Seems like something that could be run on a $50-$100 VPS.

Yeah there's definitely some weird engineering decisions there. I think maybe we just don't have all the information. But I guess this is another example of why that stuff just doesn't matter when you're growing your business.

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

#47
post #33
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…

> Am I missing something about this product in that it measures anything related to code quality? I think it is just a tool to be used as you desire. It can certainly be misused, like any tool or method, and promote bad results. If you have someone wanting to measure you by time alone you have bigger problems with that decision maker than just this specific tool being put in place. I was in a fitbit group challenge w…

Can you think of any way to use this tool correctly?

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

#48
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…

My read is that this isn't a productivity tool at all. It's a way to capture who to bill for your work (Billable vs. overhead time). "generate and send PDF invoices pre-filled with your coding activity." is in the future roadmap. And the pain of keeping track of billable hours is what drove him to write it to start with. Keeping track by program used is a nice-to-have, because then someone on the team could notice "h…

Feel kind of silly for missing that use case. Could be especially helpful on consulting based teams, for sure.

I'm rather consoled by these responses that the expectations for the tool are lower than what I expected. It does one simple thing very well it seems. Some need that data, some don't, but no one here is purporting it to equate with code quality or productivity.

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

#49

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…

Audience size usually correlates pretty well with time + money invested; if there are any shortcuts there's not much incentive to share them here.

If you're looking for a free source of relatively fresh ideas, try https://www.julian.com/learn/growth

Do you do content marketing (blogging) to an email list?

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

#50
post #36

Is it me or is it nuts to be paying $1,600 a month on servers when you have just over 1000 users? Seems like something that could be run on a $50-$100 VPS.

That's the number of users who are paying. He mentions that he has over 100K total users.

That raises an issue with this sort of model that I've never really understood: if only ~1% of users are paying, it seems like very small changes in conversion rate could make or break the business. Suppose the conversion rate goes down by just 0.3%. That would be a 30% reduction in revenue while you still have to run the infrastructure to support all the free users who didn't convert. Would the business still be financially viable? What's the best way to manage that risk?

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