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How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

canny.io

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Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#111

Post by iosroot73 »

Many accounts are new or fairly new commending! I signed up and found it to be meh! It's a terrible product. Here we come selling yet another Trello with email. Also, both has worked at fb making $$$$ and using fb network to aggressively market. It means that they had safety net to fall back which many founders don't. If you are married or at age of having kids, problems multiply multifold.

Are they bribing fb internal teams or someone ? I don't have ounce of a doubt that this mediocore product is making $1 MM ARR without sleazy tactics when better products can't. You always find out after 2 years. Look what happened to recent startups imploded. This blog post is just humblebrag. Look how they took out "resume screening" details when commenters here started calling them out.

Why mention you are a couple. Like we care? Lol.

Has it become easier and easier to game hacker news? Or is game allowed when its someone white or a woman or allocate bonus points if asian woman?

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#112

Post by [deleted] »

blueline wrote: post #79
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #77

Why would you write an article about your first fire? How immature can you be? "We really wanted someone who would live and breathe Canny." Delusional owners.

the linked blog post for that gave me some serious raised eyebrows > Within the first week, we had over 100 applicants for our content manager position. We easily passed on 90% of applications that: >Opened with something like: “Dear Hiring Manager” or “Dear Sir/Madam” am i taking crazy pills? why would you pass on someone just for that?

[deleted]

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#113

Post by Existenceblinks »

iosroot73 wrote: post #111

Many accounts are new or fairly new commending! I signed up and found it to be meh! It's a terrible product. Here we come selling yet another Trello with email. Also, both has worked at fb making $$$$ and using fb network to aggressively market. It means that they had safety net to fall back which many founders don't. If you are married or at age of having kids, problems multiply multifold. Are they bribing fb intern…

It's been already quite easy to game HN, especially from YC launch compared to lots of cooler projects from independent developers. Brand name or big guys or tech celeb always outperform in marketing regardless of product features. The tech industry is no different than old business cabal. Are you well-known in this city? If no, you have to start lobby someone in town and grow from there.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#114

Post by nathan_f77 »

ab-dm wrote: post #101

This is inspiring and depressing to see (more inspiring). I've spent the last 4 years getting a bootsrapped saas off the ground. It's taken every ounce of my being to get us profitable, but we wouldn't be close to hitting 1 mil (USD) ARR for at least 2 more years. Every year that passes I suspect it becomes more and more impossible to get anything off the ground without at least a little bit of funding. If I had my t…

Yes, I'm also feeling the same mix of inspiration and depression. Especially since I did actually take some funding (from Earnest Capital), I launched around the same time as them, and I'm still nowhere close to $1M ARR.

The Canny founders are absolutely phenomenal startup founders, with a world-class background in product design and engineering background. They executed extremely well, chose an excellent target market, built an incredible product, and marketed it extremely well by sharing their story and progress.

This is like comparing yourself to a star basketball player in the NBA. (Especially considering that the founders came from careers at Facebook.) Meanwhile, most of us are just regular software engineers who are trying to make things work as a solo founder. I don't have a strong background in design and UX, and I've made a lot of mistakes. I'm still proud of my achievements and I think I'm building a great company at a sustainable pace, but it can still be a bit depressing when you see people executing perfectly and growing at an incredible rate.

"Marathons" are an over-used metaphor, but it's a good metaphor. You're almost certainly not going to finish first, even if you're a world-class athlete. But even if you finish last, I think that's still something to be proud of. (Where "finish" could mean achieving profitability, or having an exit.)

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#116

Post by dang »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #113
iosroot73 wrote: post #111

Many accounts are new or fairly new commending! I signed up and found it to be meh! It's a terrible product. Here we come selling yet another Trello with email. Also, both has worked at fb making $$$$ and using fb network to aggressively market. It means that they had safety net to fall back which many founders don't. If you are married or at age of having kids, problems multiply multifold. Are they bribing fb intern…

It's been already quite easy to game HN, especially from YC launch compared to lots of cooler projects from independent developers. Brand name or big guys or tech celeb always outperform in marketing regardless of product features. The tech industry is no different than old business cabal. Are you well-known in this city? If no, you have to start lobby someone in town and grow from there.

YC launches aren't gaming HN - they're specifically placed on the front page. This is one of the three things that HN formally gives back to HN in exchange for funding it. All this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

If you think it's easy to game HN, please tell us who's doing it (with links) so we can investigate. We put a lot of effort into trying to prevent that.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#117

Post by pbowyer »

janee wrote: post #104
RangerScience wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun story: The lead artist/dancer of https://www.skyfirearts.com/ had had that dream for years, and that "first lucky break" came when (8-9 years ago) he was getting coffee and the guy behind him in line was the guy for Tesla Coils in the US, who then helped Skyfire get up and running. AFAICT, what's repeatable / helpful is a bit more nuance about "how to make luck": 1) Know what you want so you can recognize it when…

I'd say timing plays a huge role and can also be seen as luck. The market is sometimes just not ready for something and knowing if your timing is right isn't obvious, nor even possible to determine in most cases imo

This.

I was pitching Roam-like software in 2005. No interest at all.

Now there's dozens of them talking as if graphs and relationships in (personal) knowledge management is new.

It's hard not to feel bitter.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#118

Post by mav3rick »

a13n wrote: post #10
ghiculescu wrote: post #7

Congratulations to the Canny team. It's a great product, apparently we've been happy customers since they were 20x smaller :) I found the note about luck in the Zero to One section interesting. I don't know anyone who runs a bootstrapped SaaS that's made it past 1M, who doesn't feel like they got super lucky with their first customer. We did exactly the same thing - a random connection that just happened to work out.…

Thanks so much for being a customer! And yeah, it always feels bad to write that "we got lucky", as it isn't really that repeatable/helpful. But it's true.

Did you require work visas in every country while you were a digital nomad and working on Canny ?

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#119

Post by cryptica »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #78
cryptica wrote: post #59

It never made sense to me why these kinds of 'marketing', 'feedback gathering', 'a/b testing', 'email campaign management' and 'project management' tools seem to always make so much money when clearly they add no value at all to the businesses who use them or their customers. They just keep employees busy and create more jobs. I blame the Federal Reserve Bank's money printing. One of the Fed's 2 mandates is 'job crea…

Have you ever considered that you might be wrong about “these kinds of tools” not having value?

Yes. I thought they did for a long time, but having used them as a developer and project manager and seen the harm they cause, I learned that they destroy value by creating unnecessary bureaucracy which has taken on Kafkaesque proportions in recent years.

The only people who claim that these tools add value are people whose jobs depend on the existence of these tools. There are a LOT, a LOT of such people. I would say at least 90% of office workers today and increasing.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#120

Post by vmception »

dang wrote: post #115
vmception wrote: post #26

How we are trying to get bought out at a 20x revenue multiple

" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Getting a high revenue multiple isn't a bad faith assumption. my PR agents would push me to write similar articles and file it under "thought leadership".

It would be interesting if other people had a similar experience. The end.

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