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Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead?

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Re: Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead?

#11

Post by reso »

Over what time period did you get 57 sales? If it was in a month or two, that's still excellent growth starting from zero.

Do you have any insights about the type of people who paid money for it? I would start from that image of your customers, and then think about where you can find more of them.

If you're generating marketing strategy for non-english speakers, I would figure out a particular vertical that you know exactly where to find those customers, and blast the crap out of it.

Re: Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead?

#12

Post by basisword »

My understanding is that the whole point of SaaS (software as a service) is that users pay you an ongoing fee for use of your software (i.e. a subscription). What you're doing is selling a product and will probably need a much more significant ongoing sales effort whereas with SaaS, past a certain point, you only need to sign up enough new subscribers to cover your churn. You mention 9 prior ideas with $0 MRR - this idea also has $0 MRR (monthly recurring revenue) as one time payments are not recurring. You need to decide what you want - to build a product you sell for a one-time fee, or to create a subscription based product.

Re: Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead?

#14

Post by duskwuff »

moralestapia wrote: post #6
erikson wrote: post #4

How did you initiate the first 57 telegram chats? Can you scale that?

This, remember there's GPT4 now, and Telegram bots are free. Go wild! Also, show HN, everything is a sales channel.

Telegram bots cannot initiate conversations. The platform doesn't allow for that, and it aggressively limits or terminates non-bot accounts which are used for automated spam.

Re: Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead?

#16

Post by mike_d »

One of the hardest pills to swallow when you are doing a startup is that there are customers you don't want. A customer that takes a week of grinding to close and makes you $27 IS NOT A CUSTOMER YOU WANT. You should pretend that sale never happened. It is just as much validation of your idea as a car salesman who manages to sell a brand new car to someone for 10% of what it is worth.

My honest advice is to get a job and stop digging yourself into a financial hole by living off credit. Work on your project one day a week. Try to take what you have and pivot it to a problem more people have and you can solve. Your goal should be to make something that you can spend 1/3 of the selling price on ads to acquire a customer. If you can't sell it with ads and you need a human involved to close people, you need to be selling your product for however much it would cost to cover a full time sales person (not you).

Re: Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead?

#17

Post by alangibson »

Fischgericht wrote: post #9

So, you have a tool that "creates marketing strategy for marketers and business owners". But you are not getting sales. Suggestion: Use a tool that "creates marketing strategy for marketers and business owners". That should solve your problem. scnr.

It feels like you just falsified AI.

Re: Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead?

#19

Post by yaj54 »

Based on your data your ideas have 1/10 odds of $1539 revenue and each idea takes on average 5.3 months to execute.

You can:

- Spend the next 5.3 months on a new idea. The expected value of this is $153.9 in 5.3 months.

- Spend the next 5.3 months doing your existing telegram strategy. The expected value of this is $4078.35 in 5.3 months.

This assumes your existing telegram strategy is reproducible. If it is - then double, triple, quadruple down on that. It's working, get after it. New channels are like new ideas, you may need to try 9 of them before you find one that also works.

If your existing strategy is not reproducible (I.e., in addition to the new channels not working your existing channel is also drying up) then I'd take a hard look at why.

And since this is HN: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

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