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Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

petekeen.net

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Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#71

Post by Oculus »

nmcfarl wrote: post #50
bluedevil2k wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've made is just a hobby then, not a business. (Not that there's anything wrong with programming being a hobby - it's more about managing expectations)

I’m not sure - I’ve coded several "micro-businesses". They make small amounts of money, and cost small amounts of money to run, and take almost no time. One for example makes about $500 revenue with $200 expenses and 2 hours a year. It’s profitable, I’m not doing it because I like spending time on it - or I’d spend more time on it. These aren’t traditional businesses, but they sure aren’t hobbies. They are services I…

I think the distinction Bluedevil is trying to make is you're going into this SaaS app with no intention of it being hugely profitable or successful. You're scratching an itch and if other people decide to pay you to help scratch their itch as well, then that's just a sweet bonus.

In contrast, a business would be going in with the intention of the service/app being successful (profitable or popular). Maybe hobby isn't the best way to describe it, but I agree your way of looking at things is closer to a hobby then a business.

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#72

Post by mgl »

nmcfarl wrote: post #50
bluedevil2k wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've made is just a hobby then, not a business. (Not that there's anything wrong with programming being a hobby - it's more about managing expectations)

I’m not sure - I’ve coded several "micro-businesses". They make small amounts of money, and cost small amounts of money to run, and take almost no time. One for example makes about $500 revenue with $200 expenses and 2 hours a year. It’s profitable, I’m not doing it because I like spending time on it - or I’d spend more time on it. These aren’t traditional businesses, but they sure aren’t hobbies. They are services I…

I have very similar experience creating a few microwebsites making $200-300 a month with no intervention what gives extreme ROI (2-3 days of initial work). These are mainly spin-offs - projects we have coded in spare time - from our Ruby on Rails and Java software house http://codedose.com

If you want to build your MVP or extend your existing development team with reliable programmers thinking about scalable design, SEO and A/B testing from the very beginning we are the guys the call.

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#75

Post by nmcfarl »

Oculus wrote: post #71
nmcfarl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure - I’ve coded several "micro-businesses". They make small amounts of money, and cost small amounts of money to run, and take almost no time. One for example makes about $500 revenue with $200 expenses and 2 hours a year. It’s profitable, I’m not doing it because I like spending time on it - or I’d spend more time on it. These aren’t traditional businesses, but they sure aren’t hobbies. They are services I…

I think the distinction Bluedevil is trying to make is you're going into this SaaS app with no intention of it being hugely profitable or successful. You're scratching an itch and if other people decide to pay you to help scratch their itch as well, then that's just a sweet bonus. In contrast, a business would be going in with the intention of the service/app being successful (profitable or popular). Maybe hobby isn'…

In my book If you don't enjoy doing it not a hobby. If you care about ROI, and profit it is a business.

For me weather something is a business or a hobby has more to do with outlook than anything else. A few lucky people have insanely profitable, and scalable hobbies with 1000s of employees, and plenty of kids are struggling to keep their lawn mowing biz afloat so they can afford a new video game.

Over the years I've been told that company I founded 8 years ago, and has been my and several other peoples's day job ever since, is a hobby for many reasons, including not enough W2 employees, revenue and so on. Which, even though these things were said to prop up the speakers egos, made me think on the topic - and this is what I've come up with.

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edit: totally rewritten

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#77

Post by nashequilibrium »

jenius wrote: post #29
bluedevil2k wrote: post #6

This was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". Launching without an audience means nobody shows up. It's a very true statement. One of my favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.

Just this weekend, I started coding up a tiny "saas product" that I thought about last week. Nobody knows about it, and that certainly has no launch page or audience. I got most of it done over the weekend, and really enjoyed putting it together in my favorite stack (sinatra, roots, marionette) and doing some design work, which I don't often get a chance to do. I'll probably launch it late this week or next week. I h…

One of the reasons i taught myself to program years ago, was because i wanted the power to make my life easy for myself. I am currently building a semantic supply chain for my ideas, i have being using a few notetaking apps but they do not satisfy my needs because they lack in their ability for me to query, visualize and interlink my ideas.

So i was reading a paper on supply chain management and thought maybe i can implement this process for taking my ideas from inception to prototype. This is not a startup and i will use the cheapest hosting i can find, but i am thinking of allowing people to use it in the web and app form. If it gets traction, i will adjust app accordingy, if not i have a cool process to get my ideas out and visualize their process.

The bottom line is: "Don't build technology unless you feel the pain of not having it." http://nathanmarz.com/blog/suffering-oriented-programming.ht...

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#78

Post by kpapke »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #6

This was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". Launching without an audience means nobody shows up. It's a very true statement. One of my favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.

I have a question about the lesson here "don't write code without having committed customers first." Does this apply to a startup that is not a SaaS product? I am working on an app that has the chicken/egg problem where it can't make money straight away, it needs a strong user base to be effective.

I have been working on this app for the past year it seems like, with development really amping up in the last 6 months. We just brought on another developer to help us finish up and get it out the door. I submitted my market information and business proposal to a university marketing research class, and they gathered data from a 50 person survey for us, which validated our ideas & assumptions. When we do launch it will be a quiet soft launch with friends & family trying it out first. Then we will tweak it with their feedback before we really try to make it public and do serious marketing efforts.

All of that said, our monetization strategy won't be implemented until post-launch once we have this feedback from actual users and a good amount of them sticking around. The whole thing is bootstrapped and we haven't spent anything, aside from the weekend development hours. Does this seem like the right approach for launching our product?

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#79

Post by wikwocket »

awwstn wrote: post #28
bluedevil2k wrote: post #6

This was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". Launching without an audience means nobody shows up. It's a very true statement. One of my favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.

get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it. This seems like sound advice, but I'd like to hear more on the execution of it. Do you actually get these people to sign contracts, or is it more of getting people to say "yeah, I'll pay you for that"? Do you let them know you haven't written any code, or just say it's "in development"? Etc., etc.

Brennan Dunn and Nathan Barry have both appeared on HN a number of times, and their approaches to selling eBooks and SAASes have included the option to pre-order the book/prep-pay for the SAAS subscription at a discount.

Something like this works great when you have an audience and/or have some decent previews to show. (btw, my takeaway here is not 'this only works for internet-famous people,' but rather, 'it's a great idea to build an audience for your idea and show them previews to keep the leads hot')

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#80

Post by wikwocket »

kpapke wrote: post #78
bluedevil2k wrote: post #6

This was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". Launching without an audience means nobody shows up. It's a very true statement. One of my favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.

I have a question about the lesson here "don't write code without having committed customers first." Does this apply to a startup that is not a SaaS product? I am working on an app that has the chicken/egg problem where it can't make money straight away, it needs a strong user base to be effective. I have been working on this app for the past year it seems like, with development really amping up in the last 6 months.…

It sounds like you have some validation, which is a huge step in the right direction, but more is always better. One reason is that, if you ask someone if they would like to use/have product XYZ, you will get very different answers and feedback than if you ask, "Would you like to pay $NNN for Product XYZ right now?"

Depending on your product, I might recommend starting to build an audience of people interested in your product. Try to interact with them as soon as possible. Get them interested. Then when you launch, you have a stable of warm leads, champing at the bit to go.

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