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I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

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Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#41

Post by msvan »

BowBun wrote: post #35
FpUser wrote: post #34

Congrats to authors and good luck. Have a question. I do pay for few things (netflix, amazon prime and couple of others). Their services are natural candidate in my opinion for being billed monthly. Now everyone my cats included are trying to sell their wares however small they are as a service. If I've paid monthly fee for every notepad sized program I use I'd be out of commission. How does this business model manag…

I agree, it's ridiculous! Not to mention that many app developers (as mentioned in the post) can't grind along on a single app for 10 years, so you most likely are not getting $5/mo (or more!) of value out of the product for 10 years. Sublime did it best, IMO. Charge a non-negligable amount ($70) for an individual, but pennies to a company. That's how many of us got our licenses. That $ should be enough to run their…

The flip side of the story is that Sublime died. I know they have had some updates recently, but for years it was completely stagnant. The hole that was left by Sublime was filled by VS Code. Maybe Sublime would've survived with a subscription model?

When you're paying a subscription you are paying for the maintainer's continued interest in the product over time, which is not to be underestimated. Software rots quickly.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#42

Post by gshdg »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #32

One of the things I have observed over the years is that some people are motivated to build technology because they like building things, and some are motivated by the fact that builders of technology make money. People who like the 'art' of building this stuff, are (again in my experience, not an exhaustive study or anything) generally much better programmers and engineers that the purely financially motivated folks…

I think there's a third set, which is people who like seeing other people use the stuff they built, whether or not it makes money.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#43

Post by naringas »

msvan wrote: post #41
BowBun wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it's ridiculous! Not to mention that many app developers (as mentioned in the post) can't grind along on a single app for 10 years, so you most likely are not getting $5/mo (or more!) of value out of the product for 10 years. Sublime did it best, IMO. Charge a non-negligable amount ($70) for an individual, but pennies to a company. That's how many of us got our licenses. That $ should be enough to run their…

The flip side of the story is that Sublime died. I know they have had some updates recently, but for years it was completely stagnant. The hole that was left by Sublime was filled by VS Code. Maybe Sublime would've survived with a subscription model? When you're paying a subscription you are paying for the maintainer's continued interest in the product over time, which is not to be underestimated. Software rots quick…

did sublime die? I use it everyday. and I am looking forward to sublime merge with plugin capabilities

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#44

Post by msvan »

naringas wrote: post #43
msvan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flip side of the story is that Sublime died. I know they have had some updates recently, but for years it was completely stagnant. The hole that was left by Sublime was filled by VS Code. Maybe Sublime would've survived with a subscription model? When you're paying a subscription you are paying for the maintainer's continued interest in the product over time, which is not to be underestimated. Software rots quick…

did sublime die? I use it everyday. and I am looking forward to sublime merge with plugin capabilities

None of my colleagues or friends are using Sublime anymore. I think that there's a chart somewhere at Sublime HQ that looks like a ski slope.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#45

Post by rabidrat »

juliansimioni wrote: post #29

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. I…

$200/mo is quite a lot for "basic". I could see myself doing 2k or even 20k requests per month, but nowhere near 200k. If there were a $20/mo option (or maybe even $50/mo) I might consider it. But then of course you have to deal with 10x of small-time users like me, who have limited resources and may have problems getting set up. So it may not be worth it for you.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#46

Post by elliekelly »

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.

A little second-hand anecdata: my sister works for one of the big email marketing companies and from what I've heard from her the tagging features are a _big_ thing for customers. You could perhaps try shifting "tagging" to the paid subscription or somehow constrain the tagging on free plans?

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#47

Post by PerfectElement »

I follow the same philosophy, but my side-project got out of my control and its monthly profits now cover 12x my expenses.

Of course, maintaining it became a lot more stressful than when the MRR was at $10k and I had to hire a small team to help.

I still try to keep things under control by spending most of our time on product and customer support, and zero time/dollars on marketing/ads. This keeps our growth rate manageable (3%-5% per month). I also ignore all interested investors/buyers that want to scale the business.

At our revenue level, I realize I could probably sell the business and never have to work again, but I'm enjoying the ride and afraid of what the pressure to scale could do to our customers.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#48

Post by lifty »

msvan wrote: post #44
naringas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did sublime die? I use it everyday. and I am looking forward to sublime merge with plugin capabilities

None of my colleagues or friends are using Sublime anymore. I think that there's a chart somewhere at Sublime HQ that looks like a ski slope.

If they implement a sane plugin system I will switch to Sublime. Currently it takes too much effort to use Sublime as and IDE when you compare it to something like VS Code.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#49

Post by mobitar »

I had a similar experience growing my company (funnily enough, also a note taking app). When I reached the point where I had everything I needed, I had to ask myself, why keep going?

The answer for me was a custom-fitted realization that building a company is to be treated no different than a game. A factory building simulation game, like Factorio. The goal isn't to achieve operational bliss, because that goal is wickedly unattainable (or also extremely attainable, but would mean you'd accomplish that goal by simply just not playing at all). It is instead to grow, build, scale, solve, for no reason other than it being enjoyable to do so. Because playing the game, for problem-solving minded individuals, is a lot more stimulating than not playing it.

I wrote more about my personal experience with this here:

https://listed.to/@mo/2476/play-the-game

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#50

Post by aantix »

PerfectElement wrote: post #47

I follow the same philosophy, but my side-project got out of my control and its monthly profits now cover 12x my expenses. Of course, maintaining it became a lot more stressful than when the MRR was at $10k and I had to hire a small team to help. I still try to keep things under control by spending most of our time on product and customer support, and zero time/dollars on marketing/ads. This keeps our growth rate man…

What's your project?
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