How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup • Hacker News Board

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#51

Post by ticmasta » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

dimitrios1 wrote: post #42

Yet again, not a single person over 40+ (probably even 35) in that happy-go-lucky clique team photo. Happy for you all, sad for the ageism that is rife in our industry. For all the talk about representation matters, and tech workers champion social issues, this just seems like a really frustrating and curious massive blind spot. Anyway, again, not to detract from the success, but I just see examples of this weekly he…

Q: You're a 20 or 30-something start-up founder, pulled a million different ways, trying to grow your company on a shoe string budget and decide you need to hire another team member; what do you do?

A: Spend all your energy to target potential hires from a demographic into which you have no insight or contacts, that typically wants more reward and less risk than you can possibly provide.

They can most certainly be open to having a diverse team but it's not up to every startup with a few employees to fix the system*

*the opinion of this 50ish visible minority

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#52

Post by a13n » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 7:57 PM UTC

welder wrote: post #43

a13n wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope that wasn't the key learning from our post! It's not a very repeatable/helpful learning :) Luck can definitely play a big role in building a successful company. I think what a lot of people don't realize is how you can increase your exposure to luck. For example, if you have a bigger/better network, you're more likely to get lucky from that. If you talk to more people about your company, you're more likel…

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

Very true!

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#53

Post by ticmasta » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #49

dimitrios1 wrote: post #42

Yet again, not a single person over 40+ (probably even 35) in that happy-go-lucky clique team photo. Happy for you all, sad for the ageism that is rife in our industry. For all the talk about representation matters, and tech workers champion social issues, this just seems like a really frustrating and curious massive blind spot. Anyway, again, not to detract from the success, but I just see examples of this weekly he…

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…

>> with each new technology you learn, there's a diminishing effort to learning the next.

You kind of answer this in your following paragraph, but there's also diminishing benefits with learning the next great tech stack. Coupled with the exploding growth in frameworks et al, it's impossible to learn them all.

So I'd counter your fear of the 10x 1 year experience "veteran" with the very real scenario that you have a 10x technologies for doing the same thing. This might help someone get a job but not too many companies need this specialized, redundant skill set.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#54

Post by refaelw » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

ghiculescu wrote: post #7

Congratulations to the Canny team. It's a great product, apparently we've been happy customers since they were 20x smaller :) I found the note about luck in the Zero to One section interesting. I don't know anyone who runs a bootstrapped SaaS that's made it past 1M, who doesn't feel like they got super lucky with their first customer. We did exactly the same thing - a random connection that just happened to work out.…

Couldn't agree more about luck, start-ups take a lot of luck, but their is a huge amount you can do to improve your luck.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#55

Post by porker » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #49

dimitrios1 wrote: post #42

Yet again, not a single person over 40+ (probably even 35) in that happy-go-lucky clique team photo. Happy for you all, sad for the ageism that is rife in our industry. For all the talk about representation matters, and tech workers champion social issues, this just seems like a really frustrating and curious massive blind spot. Anyway, again, not to detract from the success, but I just see examples of this weekly he…

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…

> 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.

I'm the same age as you and consider this a narrow characterisation of an older programmer.

I know there are better younger programmers than me. I know that I've got suck with the same experience over and over, because as I got more senior, that's what people wanted from me.

I also know that the breadth of other skills I bring is significantly more than a young programmer. I've had to master how to deal with management, seen projects fail for many different reasons, mentored juniors, pulled together international teams of programmers (with varying success - motivating certain nationalities is a skill I've yet to gain), architected projects, held the peace between junior programmers who saw everything in black and white, and continued to write code that was distinctly less buggy than others.

I am a programmer. One who needs to take a sabbatical and learn some new programming languages, but at heart I am someone who makes stuff happen by writing software. I like working with younger and older programmers (the oldest is in his early 60s); both keep me sharp and challenge my outlook.

But if you look at my resume, sure I've gotten completely stuck and haven't progressed in terms of depth.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#56

Post by jnwatson » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #49

dimitrios1 wrote: post #42

Yet again, not a single person over 40+ (probably even 35) in that happy-go-lucky clique team photo. Happy for you all, sad for the ageism that is rife in our industry. For all the talk about representation matters, and tech workers champion social issues, this just seems like a really frustrating and curious massive blind spot. Anyway, again, not to detract from the success, but I just see examples of this weekly he…

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…

I'll add a few points as an over-40 developer/recruiter currently working for a startup:

* By 40, they've probably already done the startup thing once or thrice, and many have been there, done that. They are also less motivated by startup stock options, having seen them evaporate personally.

* By 40, they are more likely part of a family unit that values financial stability.

* By 40, they are at their salary cap. They are simply more expensive. They've also been around the block enough to have connections and to play the regotiating game harder.

Overall, I think the strongest factor is simply the demographics you mentioned. There weren't that many folks that graduated in CS until the 2000's. Also, many of the folks that are around my age have switched careers away from development.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#57

Post by jamesmishra » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

Congratulations! I remember meeting the Canny founders around when they first launched in March 2017. It's great to see how far they've come. They've built a very well-designed product.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#58

Post by cryptica » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #49

dimitrios1 wrote: post #42

Yet again, not a single person over 40+ (probably even 35) in that happy-go-lucky clique team photo. Happy for you all, sad for the ageism that is rife in our industry. For all the talk about representation matters, and tech workers champion social issues, this just seems like a really frustrating and curious massive blind spot. Anyway, again, not to detract from the success, but I just see examples of this weekly he…

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…

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

The worst part about this is that the world doesn't need so many developers. It also doesn't need so many marketers and data scientists either. The jobs are being created artificially as part of the Federal Reserve Bank's job creation mandate and financed by fiat money printing.

The economy of the past decade is a complete farce. When will people wake up and realize what's going on? Soon it will take 100 developers to do the same work which used to only require 1 developer and the outcome will be worse.

I think the strategy is to create a large population of developers who are incapable of creating real value outside of their extremely narrow niche... Thus making them (and the society that they are an increasingly large part of) totally dependent on corporations and allowing corporations to control and shape our politics and society and suppress our free speech.

I'm a developer so it's not in my interest to say this. I wish it were not the case. Nowadays people only get into this industry for money. Nobody cares about coding.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#59

Post by cryptica » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

It never made sense to me why these kinds of 'marketing', 'feedback gathering', 'a/b testing', 'email campaign management' and 'project management' tools seem to always make so much money when clearly they add no value at all to the businesses who use them or their customers. They just keep employees busy and create more jobs. I blame the Federal Reserve Bank's money printing. One of the Fed's 2 mandates is 'job creation' but people severely underestimate how damn good the Fed is at achieving its targets in that regard.

The Fed will keep printing more and more money and jobs will become increasingly useless. It terrifies me to think that the situation could get worse than this and most people still won't notice.

If it continues down this path, in the future, we'll have people whose entire career will be to sit at a desk and stare at a wall from 9am to 5pm and their employers will seriously believe that this activity adds value to the economy. We'll have consultancies which specialize in wall staring. Some will specialize in staring at white concrete walls, others at wooden walls, etc...

It might sound like I'm joking, but I'm very serious.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#60

Post by bkruse » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

ponker wrote: post #19

bkruse wrote: post #3

Love Canny We use them at CommentSold for feature ideas, bug reports, and even top 1% feature ideas. The ability to tie it into our product and see the features voted on from an MRR aggregate not a vote-aggregate is phenomenal

What is “comment selling”?

Without doing the sales pitch, it's using comments as the medium for indicating purchase intent instead of clicking on a link

"Oh, you like this item you see on your facebook feed? Comment sold and your size to order it"