Thanks for your comments. I am OP :-) My site went down for a bit while this is front-paged, but is back up now. Definitely I think it could be more of a success if I put more effort in (duh?). Definitely there is a need to promote across multiple channels and ideally own your audience/create your own content because then you have traffic generation on demand. The name is weird, I shipped anyways. earlybird.com and e…
Hire people on upwork to promote it for you and when you've connected with them sell them the same tool for their own needs.
People seem to have forgotten or not realize that SaaS is just a sales model to sell a $2,400 software product for $100 on a payment plan without requiring manager approval. If you can't find anybody who will pay you $2,400 for this product, then you won't be able to build a business selling it for $100/month.
You're right and wrong. It can be that but I think SaaS can be nice because it puts some responsibility on the service provider to update things and add features. Or maybe we are moving to an MRR world and everyone is evil...
I was following this same path until yesterday, when I gave up. I have the mock-ups and all the notes with me, but I won't go ahead because I know it would be too much of an effort. Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's, at least IMHO.
Hey, this isn't true at all. Reading up documentation/resources, watching youtube tutorials, and even sometimes banging your head against the wall is a normal part of the software development process. Don't let the frustrations get to you. You mentioned the 90s but boy were people jerks back then (from the horror stories I read). I think today is probably the best time to be working on software with so many open source tools in addition to collaborative and helpful people you'll come across. As far as tooling goes, just keep a simple. Aim for a simple MVP. DB? Go mysql. Frontend? Choose a templating engine like EJS and css. Backend? Node/Express ecosystem would be my go to. Push it to Github. Host it on Netlify. There are some fantastic tutorials around the net to get this far. Everything else like monitoring tools, security, testing, containers are secondary to the initial MVP you can build.
People seem to have forgotten or not realize that SaaS is just a sales model to sell a $2,400 software product for $100 on a payment plan without requiring manager approval. If you can't find anybody who will pay you $2,400 for this product, then you won't be able to build a business selling it for $100/month.
You're right and wrong. It can be that but I think SaaS can be nice because it puts some responsibility on the service provider to update things and add features. Or maybe we are moving to an MRR world and everyone is evil...
The fundamental concept that is missing from this post is that it's not the billing method that determines the success of the business, it's the value you bring to your customers. The service provider isn't going to update anything if they shut down 6 months after launch.
Are facebook ads really viable forna SaaS product? How should a lone founder organize a better launch than the OP?
I've only had one successful "ramp-up" to launch with a project that eventually didn't go anywhere[1], but here's what I did. For context, this was in the eSports/gaming space. I had an Excel sheet with ~500 game journalists and I emailed every. Single. One of them. With a semi-personalized email. I ended up being interviewed by Vice, Polygon, PCGamer, RedBull, and about a dozen others. I started also emailing podcas…
Awesome story. Automate a little bit of that away and find out how to engineer it.
You're right and wrong. It can be that but I think SaaS can be nice because it puts some responsibility on the service provider to update things and add features. Or maybe we are moving to an MRR world and everyone is evil...
The fundamental concept that is missing from this post is that it's not the billing method that determines the success of the business, it's the value you bring to your customers. The service provider isn't going to update anything if they shut down 6 months after launch.
Going to be down voted for that but after all those discussions of HN readers it is disappointing to see that click-bait titles works the same here than everywhere else
Maybe it's changed, but the title I see doesn't feel clickbait-y. It actually made me think the author was going to have completely failed; I'm glad to see there was some modest success.
Thanks :-)
I think my success is about equal to my work. It is hard to work on something when you're unsure if it will succeed.
The best indie launch I've seen was the initial launch of Balsamiq. It was played off as "meh" by Peldi but it was masterful. I had launched a product 2 years before and until then, I couldn't understand what I did wrong. I obsessed over what he did. Every single thing. Trying to find where he got "lucky". There was no luck.
Can I get some insight into this? What did Balsamiq do? I'm not familiar.
hard to really say, most of the stuff will be bitrotted.