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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

#51

Post by eastbayjake »

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…

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) had a great post last week about getting your first 10 users, much of that post dealt with the importance of direct marketing / sales calls: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534034

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

#52

Post by Domenic_S »

rubidium wrote: post #37
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…

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…

> "generate and send PDF invoices pre-filled with your coding activity." is in the future roadmap.

I love the guy's success but man do I hate this idea. I'm billing for more than time in vim. If you're my client and I'm answering an email from you, I'm billing you for that. If we're on the phone, the clock is running. If we're on a Hangout, you're paying.

Could you imagine if your employer only paid you for time spent in an editor?

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

#53

Post by basseq »

jonas21 wrote: post #50
kasbah wrote: 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 infras…

Very small absolute changes in that metric are very large relative changes. A conversion rate dropping from 1% to 0.7% is—as you point out—a 30% change in that metric. Or, put in different terms, a drop from 1,000 paying customers to 700 is material and more than a "very small change".

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

#55

Post by j_s »

j45 wrote: post #8
khaledtaha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that makes for a great anecdote, there are action-oriented people should not be heeding that advice. An appropriate balance between rational ignorance and analysis paralysis must be struck. Otherwise, it's left to others to deal with your predisposition towards an extreme.

It can also be taken as you will read what you need to when you need to be solving it - instead of reading in advance.

Sharing progress with mentor(s) who can point to resources at the right time makes this easier.

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

#56

Post by whymsicalburito »

ejcx wrote: post #19
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.

That's what people have said about passwords with password managers, private keys with keybase, their servers and legal documents with AWS and docusign, their banking with online banking, etc etc. The list goes on and on. This kind of thing doesn't stop people. I think it just means you end up with fewer good products to use.

It literally just did stop me from using this product... Just because some people choose to trust some companies with some of their data, doesn't mean that it isn't a valid issue.

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

#57

Post by xstartup »

kasbah wrote: 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.

We are paying $5000 per month to GCP and $1000 per month to Amazon, we've 300 users paying $300 a month each. Stack : Ruby, Go, PHP (for some integration), JavaScript (Stuck on Angular v1)

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

#59

Post by actionscripted »

kasbah wrote: 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.

We don't know the full stack powering this and there are 100K users/month.

There have been a lot of great points in reply to this and I would like to add that part of this cost may be to help perception. A service like this that feels/is slow can die pretty quickly if the perception of the service is that it doesn't work as well as it should.

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

#60

Post by chriswarbo »

oblio wrote: post #12
iopuy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh Ycombinator, such a bastion of encouragement you can be. Check out the top comment dropbox received when it debut on Ycombinator. "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It's nothing new, that's how we get cute quotes, such as: * the one misattributed to Bill Gates, about 640k of RAM being enough for everyone * the one by Thomas Watson about the worldwide computer market needing only 5 computers * or more recently, the Commander Taco quote about the iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." Hindsight is funny :) Edit: Oh, and I have to tell BrandonM, if he's still around: i…

> * the one by Thomas Watson about the worldwide computer market needing only 5 computers

The interesting thing is, the context of that quote is building-sized computers being accessed by terminals over the phone network.

Fast forward to 2017 and we have terminals (smartphones) accessing building-sized computers (datacentres) over the (wireless) phone network.

We can be more charitable by treating all of a company's datacentres as one big, distributed computer. In which case, what's the world market? It's easy to pick 5 that cover a big chunk of it; e.g. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon :)

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