111–120 of 221 posts
If the author is reading - what was the nonsensical Python exceptions that went away after hardware upgrade?
In one case, it was thrown from some_string.split(), in another case from some_string.encode().
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 c…
Great point. Always leaves a bitter taste, like the business is trying to hide behind their website.
In Germany there's a law that requires anyone doing business on the internet to have your real address on your website (commonly known as impress, see §2 DDG). From what I know this is even a EU regulation, so probably law in all EU countries. And honestly, I think that's a really good law.
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.
Most people I know that actually work all-the-time, not self-proclaimed "I work X hour weeks people that say it to sound 'cool'" people. Never have a burnout.
Most of those people also go on extended vacations of say 5-7 weeks. But still work 2-3 hours every day.
Burnout seems much more common in the average worker that only works a 9-5.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being unique is important if you actually want to dominate the market. A product like his has captured a piece of the pie, but someone with equal distribution can easily eat into that since he has no moat.
What if he doesn't actually want to dominate the market? The idea of an "economic moat" comes from Warren Buffett[1] and it was/is part of his investing philosophy to look for companies with some sort of unique feature which allows them to dominate markets and create effective monopolies on their particular niche. It makes sense in that context but it doesn't necessarily apply everywhere. What if you're just trying t…
Agreed.
>What if you're just trying to create a business that gives you a good lifestyle and you're not looking to dominate? Maybe the market is big enough that if you just take a piece of it that's plenty. There are plenty of businesses out there that are offering a product that is one of a range but the market is large enough to sustain multiple offerings.
Yes. In fact, the majority of businesses in the world are probably this way.
>Not everyone needs a moat because not everyone is trying to build a castle.
That's a brilliant line and metaphor. Gonna steal and share it whenever and wherever I can. Thanks.
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?)
One man army apps are generally dead simple to maintain and bug-fix. You write all the code, so when someone pings you with a problem you know exactly what caused it without any need to check for anything. I’ve maintained apps like that for years and have sometimes pushed a code change directly on the GitHub app on the phone and just checking if the site is fixed after. Another point is if you’re also your own produc…
How do you do to get alerted of your service going down when:
- you are in the wilderness, ouside or with little cell coverage
- drunk and dancing in a wedding with music at full blast
These are just 2 small examples out of many others. Also it means you need to stay connected when taking a plane, be able to stop and/or swap drivers if your are in a long driving trip so that you can fix your service in a rest area or while your partner is driving, etc.
I am pretty sure outages are very rare but if that happens the day your are out of cell coverage and unable to react, you might lose a lot of trust from your customers.
I am also suprised he relies on only one hosting service. I would have thought you might not want to have everything in the same basket.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm absolutely convinced that burnout is a function of spending time on things you loathe to do. Not how much time you spend on something you love doing. Most people I know that actually work all-the-time, not self-proclaimed "I work X hour weeks people that say it to sound 'cool'" people. Never have a burnout. Most of those people also go on extended vacations of say 5-7 weeks. But still work 2-3 hours every day. Bu…
Even now I have a project where I have to fix a bunch of hastily written code and while I’m making progress and it’ll eventually be fine, it’s quite unsatisfying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm absolutely convinced that burnout is a function of spending time on things you loathe to do. Not how much time you spend on something you love doing. Most people I know that actually work all-the-time, not self-proclaimed "I work X hour weeks people that say it to sound 'cool'" people. Never have a burnout. Most of those people also go on extended vacations of say 5-7 weeks. But still work 2-3 hours every day. Bu…
The commonality of burnout in some form to full burnout seems to be roughly 75% for employees[1] and roughly 70% for executives[2] and 25% ~ 75% for entrepreneurs[3].
My experience is based mostly on the latter.
[1]: https://www.gallup.com/topic/burnout.aspx / https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/flexjobs-mha-mental-healt... [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2023/01/23... [3]: https://wifitalents.com/statistic/entrepreneur-burnout/
The statistics on this vary wildly, so I'd take all these statistics with a giant grain of salt.
I wish the best for OP but I really wonder if advertising your one-man-SaaS to the wider world is a good idea. Especially on a forum like HN where competent people are few clicks away from stealing your idea.
Stealing ideas is a lot of work.
And it is even more work to, you know, actually (as in real life deploy) implement the copied business idea, and then to keep it running on an ongoing basis, showing up daily, even if not for a mad number of hours. This is the point where most of the glib talkers would fail, early.