101–110 of 150 posts
I don't see the point of this, is just content marketing.
Hey guys, My name is Mike. I'm co-founder and product at Everhour. I'd be happy to answer your questions if any. Feel free to ask here or on Medium.
Mike, thank you for all of this. 1. Can you talk more about the ramp up from the idea of Everhour to actually working on the project full time. Did you guys slowly wean yourself off of consulting work, or was there a decision to jump into Everhour as a SaaS early on? 2. How do you handle nonpayment for annual subscription renewal? Do you reach to the company, or shut them down immediately? 3. What kind of features do…
2) We contact them, ask what was the reason, but in general, if they don’t renew, they no longer use the product. Often there is no such a company anymore.
3) Well, for example internal invoicing. They ask better design, more templates, while larger ones used Xero or Quickbooks and they just need integration.
This is really interesting and helpful.
We've found generating leads for our SaaS [1] difficult, with similar results from google ad words and really bad results from LinkedIn ads.
In retrospect, talking to some friends about google ad words, the results aren't so surprising, but I'm glad we went through the experience. This note from the article rings very true:
> Plus you should constantly optimize your landings, banners, texts etc.
constantly looking at your landing pages, keywords and ad configurations is not a trivial task - it requires a lot of thought and discussion.
we've figured out the content marketing approach (blog posts and relevant SEO) and will be doing that; but we've also been looking for better lead generation approaches.
great post ..thanks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
obviously? Not every employee must be a high paid engineer. And there are certainly non SV based engineers that are totally fine with less than 100k $ per year? Being based in Germany, I calculate around 100k€ revenue per employee myself, maybe a bit more.
1mm is their revenue . It will be reduced by cost of goods sold, rent/electricity, taxes, payment for services like AWS, etc. before employees are paid.
They are a belarus company, selling to mostly US companies, so probably pay little sales taxes. other taxes are paid on profit, so explicitly after employee salaries are paid.
Salaries are usually the largest expense in many IT companies. They don't collect monitoring data or otherwise huge ingest of data from users, their server costs are probably low.
Their main channel of acquisition is partners, I believe Basecamp+Asana doen't take money for being on their partners page. Both just link out to the websites of partners without any means of "tracking", so that seems a right assumption.
If renting an office is more expensive than one monthly salary for one employee you have got yourself a palace, or you strategically choose the wrong city like SF or NY.
65% of my costs are salaries in my company. Looking at Buffers transparent cost report they are similar. From my experience talking to other business owners it is about the same, sometimes higher.
Now depending on what profit margin you are targeting, lets say 20% pre-taxes for a bootstrapped business in growth mode (it is "low" because you are re-investing money into the company by hiring people) that leaves 800.000$ * 70% => 560000$ for salaries. More than enough for 7 people.
Congrats :) And thanks for the blog post. How did you go from 0 to 20K mrr ? It's not really clear in the charts. Looks like the most difficult step for many boostrapers, the difference between "Default alive" and "Default dead" as PG says.
To be honest, the whole secret is in the product itself. At the very beginning we wanted to do everything faster - more features, more blog posts, more visitors, more backlinks etc. Did not work well. Then we decided to stop - pause any ads and promotion and 100% concentrate on the product, improve everything we have, do not add any big features. We talked a lot with our customers, found out what they liked/disliked…
can you say a bit more about your product and were you went to find relevant customers to talk to?
thanks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, the whole secret is in the product itself. At the very beginning we wanted to do everything faster - more features, more blog posts, more visitors, more backlinks etc. Did not work well. Then we decided to stop - pause any ads and promotion and 100% concentrate on the product, improve everything we have, do not add any big features. We talked a lot with our customers, found out what they liked/disliked…
> We talked a lot with our customers, can you say a bit more about your product and were you went to find relevant customers to talk to? thanks.
Hey guys, My name is Mike. I'm co-founder and product at Everhour. I'd be happy to answer your questions if any. Feel free to ask here or on Medium.
Hi Mike! Thanks for sharing your story and congratulations on your success. I have two questions: 1 - How should I reconsile your statement that you should be the user of your own product, with pivoting several times due to misunderstanding market demands? Were you still your own customer after those pivots? 2 - Since you mention pivots, have you been applying lean startup / customer development practices?
1. Let me give you an example. We were using GitHub and all the embed functionality was working fine because we were using it every day. But we did not use Asana or Trello. Then we decided to use this platforms as well in order to check UX there. And as soon as we did it, we've noticed performance issues, bugs etc. As soon as we redo those integrations, we noticed better conversion. Besides, it happens that an external tool changes something in their interface and our embed controls may disappear or simply will look bad. We can't wait for customers to point on this. In addition, we asked e.g. Asana to include us into an early adapters list when they do some A/B testing or release Beta feature.
2. I can not say that we strictly adhere to some methodology. Just trying to think over any new feature, ask the opinion of our customers, early release with the limited functionality. If there is a demand - we are refining. If not, we think what we did wrong and can redo it completely or even deprecate.
Enough to pay 3 fulltime engineers.
100K yearly AWS expense.
Running several scraps....scraping ads and listing them on site.
Most developers don't know where the market demand is, so they don't make a lot of money.
> (6) Finding your promotional Channel This is really interesting and helpful. We've found generating leads for our SaaS [1] difficult, with similar results from google ad words and really bad results from LinkedIn ads. In retrospect, talking to some friends about google ad words, the results aren't so surprising, but I'm glad we went through the experience. This note from the article rings very true: > Plus you shou…
I would also advise you to devote some time and collect feedback on such sites as Capterra, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, TrustRadius. Firstly, people search and read reviews before making their final decision. Secondly, reading about the competitors, they will find you. Third, sometimes bloggers use these sites to select the top 10 tools they will write about. If you are there - awesome. And finally, these sites sometimes do their own reviews and marketing campaigns. You better be there :)
Congrats :) And thanks for the blog post. How did you go from 0 to 20K mrr ? It's not really clear in the charts. Looks like the most difficult step for many boostrapers, the difference between "Default alive" and "Default dead" as PG says.
To be honest, the whole secret is in the product itself. At the very beginning we wanted to do everything faster - more features, more blog posts, more visitors, more backlinks etc. Did not work well. Then we decided to stop - pause any ads and promotion and 100% concentrate on the product, improve everything we have, do not add any big features. We talked a lot with our customers, found out what they liked/disliked…