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SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

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Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#101
1.) Build an audience (~6 years)

2.) Build your business (a few months...)

That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover & Product Hunt:

https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a...

The title was "Product Hunt's Rise: An overnight success 1,834 days in the making"... Same exact story here except growing Indie shuffle took closer to 2,190 days!

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the lesson is to develop a following first before developing a product. The music blog didn't happen by random chance, and his overall approach seems better than developing a product and hoping for a following.

I did this with the intention of promoting the product. The issue was that I built it on someone else's platform. Something I've known to be a cardinal sin and a disaster waiting to happen. Alas, I built /r/lifeprotips and it quickly became a default on reddit. I started building the site (lifeprotips.com which is no longer up) around the same time. Some moronic moderator named reddit.com/user/krispykrackers banned m…

  > Some moronic moderator named reddit.com/user/krispykracker
(krispykrackers is an admin, or rather, was until a few months ago)

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#105
post #76
post #45

The guy had a very successful music blog and used that to kick off the network effect needed to make SubmitHub work. There is zero chance SubmitHub would work without the music blog, so unless you have a very successful blog yourself this article will not help you in any practical manner.

True that, I find it that literally if you are famous or have some sort of following crowd you can easily do things others wouldn't. I watch a bit of twitch and the famous streamers in there literally could be considered millionaires already.

You're exaggerating.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#106
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Headline would be more precise had it claimed to have built an app in 10 months, not a business Still impressive, but not the same thing Edit: just to be extra clear, the reason why this is true is because, the customer base he generated was not in the 10 months he used to build his app, that was done over the years of blogging

The app itself is the business, and is separate from his blog. (Although it works together with his blog and with many other blogs, his particular blog is not a necessity.) EDIT: To respond to your edit, I agree he was able to leverage his blog's popularity. But his blog is only one out of 231 listed on SubmitHub. Thus, his blog's readers account for what's likely a negligible fraction of SubmitHub's users. That's no…

Read the part about network effect. His blog is a small part of SubmitHub now, but it was crucial that he had his blog in there in the beggining.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#107

SubmitHub founder weighing in here -- thanks for sharing, Courtland! If anyone has any questions about SubmitHub or Indie Shuffle (technical or business), feel free to ask :) Edit: in case you're curious, here's what the dashboard looks like for bloggers - http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png

Just wanted to chime in and say Indie Shuffle is one of the best resources I've found for new music out there (for my taste). While I have no need for SubmitHub's main purpose, the Popular tab looks like it can serve as another source of fresh stuff. All in all, massive respect for your work promoting new music. As a sidenote, I'd happily donate some money through Patreon/whatever to support an ad-free version of the…

Ditto, this popular chart is very cool: ranked by approval, http://www.submithub.com/popular

To me it seems like expanding on the playable features could make SubmitHub itself a very meta/cool place to submit through. A place to engage other artists. It's like HackerNews for music.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, it's the face behind the bot :). As some of you have guessed, I wrote an automatic summarizer to provide a little more context to hn articles because I often find myself wanting to know a little more before clicking the link. It makes sense that the HN community would want to push for reading the full article and against tldr culture. This was just a fun little side project I built yesterday, and I’ll be think…

Perhaps it should be a browser extension, called HN Executive Summary. How does it summarise? Some kinda AI?

Good idea! And Yup-- right now I'm using a library that just picks out sentences that are likely meaningful.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#109

1.) Build an audience (~6 years) 2.) Build your business (a few months...) That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover & Product Hunt: https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a... The title was "Product Hunt's Rise: An overnight success 1,834 days in the making"... Same exact story here except growing Indie shuffle took closer to 2,190 days!

Cannot allude to this more. Building an audience is the toughest part of any business. Not just SasS or PH. People get swayed by perceived overnight successes and attempt to replicate the same.

Re: SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months

#110

SubmitHub founder weighing in here -- thanks for sharing, Courtland! If anyone has any questions about SubmitHub or Indie Shuffle (technical or business), feel free to ask :) Edit: in case you're curious, here's what the dashboard looks like for bloggers - http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png

How much does it cost you to run the service?
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