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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

#61

Post by jakear »

BowBun wrote: post #53
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…

I don't agree, coworkers and I use Sublime as our daily drivers. I think it depends very heavily on the tech stack and the work being done. I also disagree that you can even compare Sublime to VS Code because one is a text editor and one is an IDE. I don't know a single person that switched just because Sublime wasn't being updated, they switched because VS Code has some really deep integrations and features that are…

VS Code isn’t really an IDE, it’s more of a text editor with a much stronger extension story than Sublime’s.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#63

Post by alehul »

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…

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason that this business model survives is because of how much better it is for the creator of the service.

Receiving a steady flow of income from those who use your product every month is a great proposition. Additionally, if you build a product useful to more people, your monthly income increases (it's recurring, as opposed to being cash-flow based).

On the user's side, the argument is twofold:

(1) there's increased competition. Economically, the switching cost is lower if you're paying each month— to make an analogy, it's easier to convince someone to lease a new car at the end of a lease than it is to convince someone to buy a new car when they have already bought a car. This allows a lot of new and impressive SaaS companies to grow like wildfire.

(2) there's more freedom of choice, because you're entering a relationship with a company only for a period in which it benefits you enough that you want to continue using it (and as mentioned above, there's ideally plenty of alternatives). This motivates companies to improve their offerings.

While it isn't perfect, I doubt amazing apps like Notion would exist if not for a subscription model. It just isn't worth it to make a perfect note-taking app otherwise.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#64

Post by SyneRyder »

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…

Sublime is very much alive, they had another update at the start of October. They also have a second product now, Sublime Merge.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#65

Post by magicalhippo »

usaphp wrote: post #28
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…

> chances are you are constantly getting 10-15 new feature requests on a daily basis, it's hard to ignore those

What I've tried to do at work is to leverage other programs as much as possible.

For example, many customers want our program to massage the data slightly, or maybe augment it with some fixed values etc. Instead of making dozens of different ways to do this, I focused on making it easy to export data to Excel (or similar) and import it back in again. The import/export routine is generic enough that it takes me 15 mins tops to add it to a new form if it needs a bit of custom handling. If it's just a generic grid it's a one-liner.

Similar for file integrations. We can do (S)FTP, again with a reusable framework making it a breeze to add. For anything else we just access a (shared) directory and the customer can use what they want.

Fortunately for us though, we don't rely on ratings as such, so we can be a bit more strict.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#66

Post by navs »

jmduke wrote: post #39
rubicon33 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm using a combination of Mailgun and Postmark to send emails, and heartily recommend them both.

A combination of? Aren't they largely the same product? I'm just curious why you'd be using both.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#67

Post by cbzehner »

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…

Just took a look at your landing page, cool idea -- one element of your service that really stood out was down at the bottom "Free concierge onboarding".

Really interesting offer. Do you find new subscribers take you up on this a lot? Seems like a great way to improve your migration tooling!

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#68

Post by seanwilson »

> Similarly, I feel so happy when I could build things, make progress or make things better. As it’s not a VC-backed startup, exponential growth is not mandatory for me. What I want to do is to make my product better instead of just making it bigger.

Great post! I can relate with growing my own paid side project (https://www.checkbot.io, a Chrome extension for SEO). There's a big initial buzz with making the first sales as you never know how it's going to be received when you first make it public. After you get used to the sales getting more steady and predictable though, I don't find the marketing and sales side that interesting - I'm more motivated by the feeling I get from making something that people find useful and easy to use.

Having a project that I can manage myself is also much more appealing than the stress of e.g. having to get funding and hire people as well. I enjoy posts about apps/startups that aim for and are satisfied with modest profits instead growing huge. I can never relate to stories about mega rich people trying to get even richer.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#69

Post by robryan »

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…

Subscription model fits better. There are ongoing costs to maintaining the service indefinitely.

One off cost only really makes sense when you can sell a piece of software as being done essentially and move onto the next piece of software to charge a one off cost for. Having a one off cost to find ongoing costs probably isn’t going to end well as soon as a product is no longer growing.

Re: I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

#70

Post by transitivebs »

Indrop looks really well done, and I agree with the author's motivation coming from building core product as opposed to focusing on bizdev, marketing, and growth.

I know a lot of open source authors and indie makers who have very similar motivations, which is in large part why I decided to build https://saasify.sh.

I'm hoping that it will help developers and makers like the author in this article focus more on their core value proposition that drives their motivation while being able to largely put aside the growth focused stuff that most businesses need to focus on to be successful.

Saasify won't work for every project or for every author, but if it helps some aspiring makers out there sustain their passion, then it'll have been a success in my eyes.

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