SaaS is awesome. I too want to build one.
I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
141–150 of 264 posts
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#142I'm struck by two things as I mull over how I'll monetize my own SaaS app that I've started ideating. Firstly, the author says to rather sell to businesses than to individuals. Fine. Secondly, one of his links ( https://makebook.io/ ) says monetize by asking users for money, and makes a point of saying don't use ads anywhere. But if my product is aimed at consumers, why not monetize with ads if it's notoriously diffi…
Because $10 is roughly 10,000 ad views (unless you have a specific high demand audience that people find hard to reach somewhere else then you get paid more per view).
A typical user will not view 10,000 ads on your app/site in their lifetime.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#143Grats on shipping! Highly recommend testing positioning this as a B2B product for monitoring companies that I could use as sales leads. For example it would be great to get alerted from all the diff job boards when different companies are trying to hire for what our product solves, similar to how Reilly is using your product.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#144„Just ship it“ does not mean spending 9 months(!) building something that should have been a no-code MVP built in 2 weeks max.
I agree 9 months is way too long but do you think you could build it in 2 weeks with no-code ?
I can see an experienced developer doing that in 2 weeks with little code, but no code ? If so, can you tell me what kind of products would you use ? I'm interested for some personal projects.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#145I have not had any success on Upwork.
100% of the “leads” I got there were scams.
Not 75%, not even 99%. 100%. Not one single honest job. Some were requests for me to participate in scams, but I don’t roll that way.
I’m sure that my experience was unique, and that my profile must have had some “scam flag,” so I won’t write off the platform in its entirety.
I heard good things about the site from friends, but every single person that extolled its virtues had used it to find contractors. Not one had used it to find work. The couple of people that I know that used it to seek work had experiences similar to mine, and nothing good to say about it.
But that is small-sample anecdotal data. Not something that I would say should be used to provide any meaningful recommendations or reviews.
But for me, the site is worthless. I was pretty appalled at the brazenness of some of the approaches. No one seemed to be worried that I would refer them to the FBI, so I guess I don’t come across as a snitch; just a chump.
A couple of years ago, I decided to “refactor” myself back to full-time engineering.
My ultimate goal was to specialize in Swift development (what I do, now).
Until then, all my work was part-time, on open-source projects; equal parts PHP server stuff, and Swift apps.
So the first thing I did, as a “self-training” project, was design and build a multipurpose, secure application SaaS backend, in PHP, because I didn’t want to waste time learning up on my JavaScript, which I planned to abandon. This was just the first-stage booster.
This was what I wrote: https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...
It’s not something that folks are interested in, probably because it was written in PHP, and doesn’t really tick many boxes on a “Buzzword Bingo” card, but it accomplished its purpose.
I’ll be happy to never write PHP again, but I’m glad it was there for the experience.
And I nuked my Upwork account months ago.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#146This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…
This is bad advice. Spending money on SEM before you have any product validation is a waste of money.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#147How much did it cost you to launch? Did you manage to turn a profit?
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#148This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…
This plus the mention of ProductHunt makes me think they fell into the trap of marketing to their fellow creators rather than their audience. That's a common mistake plenty of people make when building anything. Game developers market their games on game development forums, website owners market their sites on web development/webmaster forums, authors market on writing forums, etc. They then forget that the typical p…
This comment is gold dust, if I had known that 25 years ago...
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#149I have not had any success on Upwork. 100% of the “leads” I got there were scams. Not 75%, not even 99%. 100%. Not one single honest job. Some were requests for me to participate in scams, but I don’t roll that way. I’m sure that my experience was unique, and that my profile must have had some “scam flag,” so I won’t write off the platform in its entirety. I heard good things about the site from friends, but every si…
PHP is still big in the publishing business.
WordPress alone is bigger than HN would lead you to believe. Lots of business runs on PHP. And not just running Drupal from inertia; Laravel is a new shiny thing.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#150I have not had any success on Upwork. 100% of the “leads” I got there were scams. Not 75%, not even 99%. 100%. Not one single honest job. Some were requests for me to participate in scams, but I don’t roll that way. I’m sure that my experience was unique, and that my profile must have had some “scam flag,” so I won’t write off the platform in its entirety. I heard good things about the site from friends, but every si…
I've spent over 50k over the years on Upwork working a heap of great freelancers. Once you get into it and learn to sift through the legit profiles vs the dodgy it becomes very useful. And it's great to get to work with folks around the world