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One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

blog.healthchecks.io

101–110 of 221 posts

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#101
post #80

I've tried creating a few one-man SaaS's in the past and have always struggled to get customers to visit (let alone try it out and pay), any tips from people here who have had success? Thanks :)

There is no magic bullet I think. It also depends on the market you are after. If you are not after the big bucks from huge corporations, there are a few things I believe do help, things I also see on the healthchecks.io website:

- Have a no bullshit, clear description of what your product does right on the front page. No marketing lingo, no big overpromising. *Relevant* screenshots help.

- A free plan without huge caveats. This depends on your service, but it helps if people can actually trial the full service before committing. It also helps with word of mouth advertising, as someone who is using it personally might also recommend it for their company.

- Have clear and reasonable pricing.

- Don't hide documentation for your service behind a login. I have advised against using SaaS's services in the past because I couldn't easily find documentation.

- Actual have clear documentation for your product. It shows a level of maturity.

- Be clear about you as a company. You don't need to have an about page with mugshots of all team members smiling and their role description. But I do want to know what sort of company I am dealing with. So, I am looking for an about page with a reasonable description. Ideally, you have more than just a contact form. In fact, if you don't have a real address listed, I will not consider your service.

Disclaimer: Purely my personal experience being involved in selecting SaaS services. It also more or less aims at smaller to mid-sized companies, as with bigger companies you sadly do need some marketing bullshit. But with larger companies you also get to deal with more bullshit in regard to their requirements, something the healthchecks.io owner also specifically seems to avoid.

The above also assumes that you get people to land on your website. Which is really difficult, which is why I guess a lot of these services have a blog. Blog posts allow them to be posted on websites like hackernews and other media more often.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#102
post #39

I really respect your choice to optimize for balance and enjoyment. My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!" Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day! When I was a corpor…

He found the right niche, a passive product-led no-stress B2B low-maintenance & non-critical tool (because it is monitoring). It is so difficult to find such niches, so congrats for the success!

Isn't it somehow critical as it is monitoring? Thinking of monitoring critical prod interfaces

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#103
post #44

> Web servers upgraded to Hetzner’s AX42 (AMD 8700GE, 8 cores). On the old machines, saw a few nonsensical Python exceptions. A kernel update and a reboot didn’t fix it. Rather than messing with hardware troubleshooting, I upgraded to newer, faster, and more efficient machines. > Database servers upgraded to Hetzner’s EX101 (Intel 13900, 8+16 cores). I was setting up new database replicas after an outage and failover…

If you're using Go, Rust, OCaml etc. then you can deploy a static binary and have a systemd-service or similar take care of keeping it running with nginx as a reverse-proxy. I do that with NixOS which enables me to also have my infra as code. Another simpler alternative is to just run a cgi-bin on hetzner webhosting ( https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting/level-9/ ).

Static binaries make things easier, but even without them things can be quite manageable depending on what you need.

I suppose it sits halfway in between as you do need the java runtime, but with fat jars you can also quite reliably and easily run on bare metal managed through systemd.

There are a few things to consider outside of that, though those are also fairly easy to manage.

Log rotation and clean up is something a lot of cloud native people will not be familiar with.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#104

Inspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)

Not OP, but it is something that I've had to deal with. I essentially need to be within X hours of my laptop and a solid internet connection, where X is the maximum acceptable downtime.

I'd love to travel to a remote island, or do a 2 week hike out of cell service but it's difficult. The odds are incredibly low that downtime occurs in that window, but Murphy's Law and my anxiety won't allow it. The pros greatly outweigh the cons though. While I can't do those remote trips, I can still travel wherever else and just ignore things unless there's a downtime alert or an urgent support ticket.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#105

Inspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)

Not OP, but this works for me:

- No phone number for support

- Extensive FAQs to let people help themselves first

- Vacation: take laptop along, check emails every couple days (but I haven’t tried remote vacation without internet ever)

Generally speaking: outsiders vastly overestimate the support burden of a one-man business. Maybe I’m lucky, but I only receive 2-3 emails per day with 25k active users.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#106
post #48
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the blog posts: > Main values: Simple is good. Efficient is good. Less is more. > The core infrastructure runs on Hetzner bare metal machines. Hetzner offers amazing value for money and is a big part of the reason why Healthchecks.io can offer its current pricing. > No containers, no auto-scaling, no “serverless”. Plain old servers, each dedicated to a single role: “load balancer”, “application server” and “data…

So much nostalgia reading that. I wish we could go back

There are tens of thousands of companies who continue to work that way. You don't hear about them often, because there's nothing to write about.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re not pushing code/changes the likelihood of incidents is significantly less. Also, not having a few enterprise contracts that make up most of the revenue, helps ease customer support load.

Do you know what a typical enterprise contract for a nice tool like this could go for? I have an open source saas tool in a different niche but so far the biggest contract I have is 500$ per month and that's for companies who need a lot of customisations, a very white glove service and a few days o work to morph the tool onto exactly what it is they want (typically via plugin so changes are easily manageable). One on…

For any enterprise customer, I would recommend to increase their annual fees by two times the rate of inflation (or more if you like). Also: Ask yourself if you can afford to lose some customers during this process.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#108
Pēteris' model with healthchecks.io was a large inspiration for me, and it is the reason why ntfy.sh is following the same model: open source, self-hostable, fun driven development.

Thank you Pēteris for being an inspiration.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#109

I really respect your choice to optimize for balance and enjoyment. My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!" Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day! When I was a corpor…

> 7 days a week

IMHO you're risking a burnout and working on your company 0 day a week.

It would be better to be reasonable now than to kill your company in a few years because you can't stand it anymore.

Take this next week-end off and go do something totally "useless" like walking in nature ;) It will recharge you.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#110
post #80

I've tried creating a few one-man SaaS's in the past and have always struggled to get customers to visit (let alone try it out and pay), any tips from people here who have had success? Thanks :)

Look at the MRR graph in the post and I think you'll see why most projects are abandoned before they find a market and become a success - the "long, slow, saas ramp of death".
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