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I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

blog.stetsonblake.com

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Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#101

Post by reillychase »

dvt wrote: post #39

This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…

I told him that too. People put too much emphasis on “Launch Day”, when really Launch Day should be day one and every day after. Never stop promoting and publicly “Launching” new features. Also too many people launching to Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Reddit where their peers hangout instead of places where their customers hangout.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#102

Post by Brajeshwar »

cheez wrote: post #41
dvt wrote: post #39

This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…

The best indie launch I've seen was the initial launch of Balsamiq. It was played off as "meh" by Peldi but it was masterful. I had launched a product 2 years before and until then, I couldn't understand what I did wrong. I obsessed over what he did. Every single thing. Trying to find where he got "lucky". There was no luck.

Peldi is just super friendly and a superhero with customer support. I believe that played a big role in the beginning, and perhaps later.

I knew Peldi from the Flash days. Met him once or twice in SFO, and he has an infectious smile and was super friendly.

Once, one of our team was showing me Balsamiq and they all liked it. I tried and it was super easy to use. I went to buy the license or I went to ask how to buy it, and Peldi replied back, something in the lines of, "Free for you buddy. You did enough for the community, this is the least I can do." That was also the time when I realized Peldi was behind Balsamiq.

I had had various interactions with him, not just about Balsamiq but asking him stupid questions, advice, and networking introductions.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#103

Post by stets »

4444 wrote: post #99

Thanks for sharing it , really cool one, but > Framework / Language really doesn't matter that much. Choose what you're comfortable with, "even if it's php." I think modern php is able to manage almost anything, starting from facebook as well.

Yep! Php ain't all that bad. I'm migrating earlybrd to laravel soon and enjoy it a lot. just poking a bit of fun because nerds like to hate on php.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#104

Post by stets »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #102
cheez wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best indie launch I've seen was the initial launch of Balsamiq. It was played off as "meh" by Peldi but it was masterful. I had launched a product 2 years before and until then, I couldn't understand what I did wrong. I obsessed over what he did. Every single thing. Trying to find where he got "lucky". There was no luck.

Peldi is just super friendly and a superhero with customer support. I believe that played a big role in the beginning, and perhaps later. I knew Peldi from the Flash days. Met him once or twice in SFO, and he has an infectious smile and was super friendly. Once, one of our team was showing me Balsamiq and they all liked it. I tried and it was super easy to use. I went to buy the license or I went to ask how to buy it…

They are still a pretty damn awesome company. Gave me a bit of free credit and a shirt for tweeting about them. I'm wearing it in my tweet about this post making front page :-)

https://twitter.com/stets_10/status/1266158608024305664

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#105

Post by ueuebwiw8 »

keithwhor wrote: post #80
ShorsHammer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN readers are probably the most likely to copy and reproduce your product then spend 5x more on marketing and drive you out. In true cynical form: Unless you are trying to either sell products to developers or are working on getting into ycombinator it seems like a terrible idea to pitch your idea here, the main benefit seems to be identifying competitors. Then again, dropbox.

Nobody's going to copy your product and outspend you on ads. Mostly because you have things the wrong way around; you spend on ads after you understand who you're marketing to and why. If your product already has that messaging nailed then you'll succeed regardless of where it's posted, and ad spend irrelevant. (You do it once you have the cash to accelerate the product adoption.)

Said by someone who never competed for anything meaningful ever.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#106

Post by onion2k »

dvt wrote: post #47
cheez wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best indie launch I've seen was the initial launch of Balsamiq. It was played off as "meh" by Peldi but it was masterful. I had launched a product 2 years before and until then, I couldn't understand what I did wrong. I obsessed over what he did. Every single thing. Trying to find where he got "lucky". There was no luck.

Can I get some insight into this? What did Balsamiq do? I'm not familiar.

It was an early wire framing tool for prototyping UIs. The clever bit (that seems obvious now) was that it looked intentionally rough so that clients would focus on the overall UI layout instead of the minor details. It was a great app.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#107

Post by redis_mlc »

stets wrote: post #70
jrumbut wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could almost still run PHP scripts from those days. The same basic architecture works you just gotta study the new DB access methods that use prepared statements instead of string concatenation/interpolation. If you used Perl, mod_perl exists and CGI.pm is available in CPAN. The CGI protocol is as viable as it ever was (though of course there are new and improved alternatives). There are a bunch of minimal styles…

Someone should make a contest to revive older tech like perl and make a profitable product from it. Use the oldest tech and see who can make the most valuable product

FYI: Perl has one of the most powerful and modern web frameworks, Mojolicious, and one of the best web form libraries, called CGI::FormBuilder.

Besides that, Perl allows forward references and has moderately strong type checking. And mod_perl is the best-performing language accelerator.

I cringe whenever I have to downgrade to Python.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#108

Post by fxtentacle »

stets wrote: post #50
dvt wrote: post #39

This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…

Yeah, you're probably not wrong. TBH, I used to not be a fan of FB ads because I thought paid ads were evil or something. I still haven't really used them but I've got some other projects I'm about to use them for.

In my opinion, Facebook is so full of bots and hacked accounts, buying ads there is like pouring money down a drain. Unless, of course, you are an expert at filtering those out through super specific audience restrictions.

Reddit, on the other hand, is similarly priced and I got a lot more real users from them.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#109

Post by fxtentacle »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #45
dvt wrote: post #39

This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…

Are facebook ads really viable forna SaaS product? How should a lone founder organize a better launch than the OP?

In general, paid ads can easily become too expensive because they have bad ctr, low engagement, and lots of spam mixed in.

So unless your average customer spends $100+ with you, it will most likely not work. A common trick is to offer upfront paid annual plans, to convert $10 monthly into $120 now.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#110

Post by shoo »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #37
triyambakam wrote: post #30

> Go for B2B if you can. Freelancers aren't rich. I don't understand this... can anyone explain?

B2B vs B2C aren't two starkly different things - it's a spectrum between them. Freelancers are a notoriously difficult market to sell to as they perceive every dollar spent as coming out of their wallet. Compare that to a large enterprise company where the person making the buying decision is going to take home the same salary at the end of the week whatever the decision ends up being.

large enterprise companies can be reasonably challenging to sell things too, but for a whole range of different reasons ( not in sales, do work at an enterprise that will take 18 months to arrive at a decision that it is acceptable to start using a different vendor's monitoring tool )
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