Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

blog.inkdrop.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 123 posts

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#21

Post by Crazyontap »

I guess this applies to solo founders (like me) and micro teams but after making a decent livelyhood from SaaS too, my experience is that a lot of people confuse product and project.

I mean a project is something you do in your leisure time (like on a weekend) and it's meant more to show off your coding skills or scratching your own itch or maybe like gaining the pleasure a painter gains from drawing a picture.

A product otoh is a very different beast. It does need a project but that is like may 10-15% of it. The rest is a whole new world of selling, maintaining, growing which has things like content marketing, link building, SEO, optimizing Salescopy, sending out emails, building an affiliate program, recruiting affiliates, A/B testing, conversion optimization, reducing attrition, giving bonuses, doing discounts and coupons, cross-selling, upselling, funnels, analytics and a hundred different things.

The product makes you money, the project gives you pleasure of coding. For new founder and especially programmers trying to make a buck selling online services it can be a easy pitfall.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#22

Post by [deleted] »

jmduke wrote: post #3

This post resonates a lot with me! I've got a side project that's current bringing in around ~2-3K MRR ( https://buttondown.email ). I spent a long time daydreaming about having it hit four-digits in recurring revenue — it felt like such an accomplishment that if I were able to crack it, it'd be a dream come true. It's certainly not enough to live off of (especially living in Seattle), but it's a non-trivial amount o…

[deleted]

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#23

Post by privateSFacct »

jmduke wrote: post #3

This post resonates a lot with me! I've got a side project that's current bringing in around ~2-3K MRR ( https://buttondown.email ). I spent a long time daydreaming about having it hit four-digits in recurring revenue — it felt like such an accomplishment that if I were able to crack it, it'd be a dream come true. It's certainly not enough to live off of (especially living in Seattle), but it's a non-trivial amount o…

What the deliverabiltiy story of your app?

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#24

Post by kho »

jmduke wrote: post #3

This post resonates a lot with me! I've got a side project that's current bringing in around ~2-3K MRR ( https://buttondown.email ). I spent a long time daydreaming about having it hit four-digits in recurring revenue — it felt like such an accomplishment that if I were able to crack it, it'd be a dream come true. It's certainly not enough to live off of (especially living in Seattle), but it's a non-trivial amount o…

Hey Jmduke,

Others have pointed out about the free plan and I mostly agree with them.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is the opportunity to position your product as the alternative for people that think mailchimp is just too much. Tell me this on the headline. "The easiest way to run your newsletter." sounds generic. Maybe something like "Write and click send, that's all it takes. No templates, no extra steps."

Finding people that want to send a simple newsletter without all the steps of mailchimp should be easier. Tell your customers early that you will handle the migration part and you might find more conversions as well.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#25

Post by bredren »

Crazyontap wrote: post #21

I guess this applies to solo founders (like me) and micro teams but after making a decent livelyhood from SaaS too, my experience is that a lot of people confuse product and project. I mean a project is something you do in your leisure time (like on a weekend) and it's meant more to show off your coding skills or scratching your own itch or maybe like gaining the pleasure a painter gains from drawing a picture. A pro…

This makes some sense of it. The author has a project that happens to have some financial reward.

A startup SaaS is a product, and while a project can become a product, I think it is better to set out from the beginning as a product. And for projects to remain so and be treated that way as the author describes.

Projects are great, but revenue is the primary metric for most SaaS products, and and if you follow YC school of thought you should be chasing growth of that metric.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#26

Post by criddell »

> Make it better rather than bigger

Yes! I wish more developers would heed this. There have been quite a few apps that I started using when they were new, simple, and focused. Then feature after feature gets added and over time the app becomes less attractive and less fun to use.

Jamie Zawinski once said every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

These days that could probably be updated to say every app expands until it can share to social media.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#27

Post by indigochill »

jmduke wrote: post #14
philfrasty wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you experimented with removing your free plan? Curious to know what your support-time is in relation free:paid plans. Just from my anecdotal experience free-plans attracted the wrong type of customer for me, switching to paid with a free trial worked much better. When you have a large team and can built fancy funnels to make freemium work it seems like a great idea from a marketing perspective but for small(ish)…

I think this is one of things where my Business Brain 100% agrees with you (the majority of my customer support burden comes from free plans, though it's worth pointing out something like two-thirds of my paid cohort converted from free) but my Hacker Brain things this project _should_ have a free plan, because free plans are nice and good and neat.

>my Hacker Brain things this project _should_ have a free plan, because free plans are nice and good and neat.

I agree free stuff is neat. I think the other side of the hacker ethos is "figure it out yourself", so I would never expect someone who hacked something together and shared it for free to then provide support for said thing. That's cool if you want to do it, but seems like asking for burnout unless you really like the support side or perhaps are looking at turning it from a free thing into a business, as you seem to be.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#28

Post by usaphp »

criddell wrote: post #26

> Make it better rather than bigger Yes! I wish more developers would heed this. There have been quite a few apps that I started using when they were new, simple, and focused. Then feature after feature gets added and over time the app becomes less attractive and less fun to use. Jamie Zawinski once said every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by one…

> Yes! I wish more developers would heed this.

I think a lot of us know this, but customers demand more...I am selling a scheduling app for small businesses, and I wish I can just make the app better instead of building new features, but if you have over 1000 customers chances are you are constantly getting 10-15 new feature requests on a daily basis, it's hard to ignore those, especially when some customers give low ratings to your app with reasons like "missing feature X", even tho the feature was never promised to them.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#29

Post by juliansimioni »

This is really great, and gives me something to look forward to.

Two years ago I started a company with a friend, and we are _nearly_ at the point where our SaaS covers all our expenses. We do consulting to make up the rest, which is not bad at all, but of course it would be nice if it was completely optional.

I realized reading this post that I've definitely been focused on financial goals for the last few months. It wears on you, and it's not the best long term motivation.

Our dream has always been to be able to make our software better for a living, but it's definitely easier to do that once the financial side is taken care of :)

Sidenote, if anyone is looking for excellent geocoding with autocomplete, give us a try over at https://geocode.earth.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#30

Post by rubicon33 »

jmduke wrote: post #3

This post resonates a lot with me! I've got a side project that's current bringing in around ~2-3K MRR ( https://buttondown.email ). I spent a long time daydreaming about having it hit four-digits in recurring revenue — it felt like such an accomplishment that if I were able to crack it, it'd be a dream come true. It's certainly not enough to live off of (especially living in Seattle), but it's a non-trivial amount o…

Can I ask - how do you send emails programmatically? Every time I've done this for personal projects, I run into issues. Whether it's auth blocking from GMail or whatever. Seriously would appreciate even just a nudge in the right direction.
Post reply on HN