How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

Sometimes it takes a few submissions to make it to the front page. There's nothing against this in the guidelines. We don't usually submit stuff to HN but this felt particularly worthy!

I didn't mean to imply luck... just that marketing is key and given two amazing products the one that reaches more eyeballs wins.

Ageism? Generally speaking older people are:

- more risk averse, less likely to join a small startup and prefer the security of a 9 to 5 job at a larger company.

- more experienced, and more experienced people require higher salaries, which a smaller company might not be able to afford.

Don't look for opression when there's none.

Hmm, we're still pretty new to sales.

Inbound: VIP trial sign-ups, demos booked, demos given, opportunities created, opportunities lost/won

Outbound: Emails sent, emails opened, reply rate, calls made, calls answered, conversions to trial/demo

We use SFDC for our CRM, and Apollo for outbound activities.

I'll bite. I'm 37, a tech startup founder. I'm wary of ageism and I've long believed that not being ageist would allow us to hire smarter than competitors.

However:

- The amount of programmers grows exponentially. I've seen stats claiming it doubles every 5 years.

- This means that at any time, 50% of the available workforce has - It also means there are simply way more programmers under 40 than over. If you randomly hire 9 programmers there's a fair chance they're all under 30.

- Anecdotally, less than 5% of the job applicants we got was over 40.

- Young programmers haven't had time yet to make the mistake to "repeat the same year of experience 10 years in a row". If you hire a young, junior programmer, you know they're junior - what you see is what you get. If you hire an older programmer they might be great or they might be that same junior programmer but more stubborn and with higher salary expectations.

As an avid anti-ageist, in fact I'm rather disappointed about that last point. I've met many programmers at around or above my age that have gotten completely stuck into a tiny niche of experience and, even there, seem to not really have progressed much in terms of depth. Why do people let this happen to themselves? I mean I met people who spent the last 10 years developing just-not-the-same custom Magento webshop plugin over and over again, each time with a slightly different twist for a different customer. Not hiring someone like that isn't ageist, it's common sense. Once Magento is out of fashion these people have a pretty serious problem.

The reason I don't understand this is because with each new technology you learn, there's a diminishing effort to learning the next because there's so many similarities to a thing you already known. There's a reason most people complaining about "javascript fatigue" are young.

As an example, when React/Flux/Redux first came to the scene, old farts like me could recognize that its "unidirectional data flow" wasn't fundamentally different from the good old desktop MVC UI pattern (before Rails hijacked the name and gave it a different meaning). I imagine that this made learning React and architecting decent apps on it easier for me than for people who'd never seen data "flow" in circles before.

Age definitely can be an advantage. But it isn't by definition. Keep learning new stuff folks! And if that ever stops being fun, you can always become a manager.