Live data from Hacker News

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

indiehackers.com

81–90 of 174 posts

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

#81
post #3

Congrats on this, loved the quote. >> The best startup book is one you never open because you're too busy marketing and building your product

Interesting, No mention about the cofounder, Pyanka Sen Sharma. I saw her at the YC female founder conference on 2015(?) She seemed to be doing business development of the company.

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

#83
post #43

Friendly suggestion: make the pricing easier to find. Right now, the only link is in small print at the very bottom of the home page.

that is on purpose. first to hook you up = to sell you the product by letting it try it for free and to convince you that the product is worth to pay, then later ask you for money. nothing wrong with this, but personally i like to know the price upfront too. or at least a price range

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

#84
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a real risk. That's an outcome. A risk is something that LED to that drop in conversion. It could be a competitor coming in with the same feature set, or something else. But a drop in conversion is not a risk, it's an outcome.

The risk part is the small margin that means you can't survive small bumps that lead to a drop in conversion.

as the person who responded above me noted, that's not a small margin at all. That's a huge relative change.

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

#85
post #3

Congrats on this, loved the quote. >> The best startup book is one you never open because you're too busy marketing and building your product

This "I'm so busy hustling I don't have time to read no books" sort of machismo has become quite fashionable.

I believe it's a mistake because there's a balance.

No, you don't want to become the ineffectual intellectual, constantly learning but never doing. It definitely is easy to see books and learning as progress when you should to be out on the sharp end.

But there are techniques you might use and mistakes you might not make if you invest into learning about and from written material. It seems like a celebration of ignorance to act otherwise.

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

#87
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…

I don't think it's about quality or productivity, I think it's about predictability. Most teams have an estimation process where features are sized so that they can arrive at a product plan. Most teams also don't have a good way to loop back and see whether their sizing was correct or not. I've seen a number of teams that have a field in Jira for the number of hours/days spent on an issue. It's mostly filled out by developers guestimating based on their unreliable memory how long they spent working on it and they frequently forgot to fill it in at all.

This product seems targeted at that. It's automatic feedback on sizing/estimates and it's how teams get more accurate in their future assessments and how businesses get more predictable product plans that they can rely on to make business decisions. Productivity of a development team is almost a secondary concern to predictability. Delivering on-time, whenever that time is predicted to be, might be more important than delivering quickly since the business doesn't have to wait until product is done to start selling, promoting, partnering, etc.

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

#88
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

7% on hosting revenue sounds like a great accomplishment but what's relatively a good ratio to look at?

So what is normal in the SaaS world? I am at 5% today, and I try but not focus on costs. Around 5% it seems hard to care TOO much...

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

#89
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

While, as others have pointed out, that with 100k non-paying users the $1,600 figure makes more sense. Your example still makes no sense to me, what are you _actually_ doing with all that server power?

Can't speak for xstartup, but if the dataset is 100+ GB then EBS, S3, etc start to cost real money. I host an application on AWS for a single customer with 10 active users which costs about $1500/month because there are several TBs of data and the nature of the application needs a lot of CPU and RAM. In other words, it depends on the use case and data size.

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

#90

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.

There's also ManicTime, which has a Windows-based server component (optional) and tracking clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.
Post reply on HN