121–130 of 221 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stealing ideas is a lot of work.
Right. 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.
The key points are:
- offer email support, but don't offer phone, video calls or remote support. This works for most people and forces them to properly phrase questions instead of just "jumping on a call" (so you can then effectively train them over the phone, which doesn't scale).
- offer as much self-service as possible
- work at your own pace and it's ok to just not work some days.
- finding a niche is hard, but they can be surprisingly basic. You're just saving someone time, effort, worry etc.
- lean on global cloud services for reliability. Let them do that.
Do you do marketing as well? I'd assume not based on the no JS-analytics so I'm curious what your customer acquisition methods are, as in how they find out about your business?
Do you do marketing as well? I'd assume not based on the no JS-analytics so I'm curious what your customer acquisition methods are, as in how they find out about your business?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That is not answering the question. 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 ca…
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.
I have a similar style of business, ~10K customers, ~150k users, ~7yrs. The key points are: - offer email support, but don't offer phone, video calls or remote support. This works for most people and forces them to properly phrase questions instead of just "jumping on a call" (so you can then effectively train them over the phone, which doesn't scale). - offer as much self-service as possible - work at your own pace…
That way they can just go to azure and subscribe to the license that way, without needing any azure resources etc, it's just a billing mechanism.
They can then bundle that into their usual Azure spend and even do manual POs etc that I never have to deal with.
- A cheaper and simpler version of visualping.io, they used to be really good but now they're too expensive and enterprise-y. Would be easier and better with AI.
- AI-based email assistant which instantly brings up the entire history of contact I had with a person (even if they used a different email or sent to a different inbox) and can quickly be used to draft replies based on that history and a set of canned response templates. Note that I don't want a full email client, I want to use my own email client, I just want an assistant that is plugged in via API/whatever. Yes I've already tried all the alternatives in this space like Mailbutler/Spark/Superhuman but they're all crappy and force you to be locked in to their client.
- An Apple TV/Android TV app for the Anki memorization app. Lots of people have made successful Anki plugins and little hardware devices and made good money, like AnkiRemote.com. TVs are extremely well suited to laid-back studying and memorization, so you could easily promote this within the Anki student community if you made one.
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?)
I also have a one man show Saas with 34 companies paying that pays my bills. It runs on namecheap shared hosting. If it goes down, I trust namecheap to fix it asap. If it goes down and someone called me, I don't really know what I would do anyway.... In 6 years it has never been a problem. PHP and jQuery. I use phpmyadmin via cpanel to manage the database.
I have a similar style of business, ~10K customers, ~150k users, ~7yrs. The key points are: - offer email support, but don't offer phone, video calls or remote support. This works for most people and forces them to properly phrase questions instead of just "jumping on a call" (so you can then effectively train them over the phone, which doesn't scale). - offer as much self-service as possible - work at your own pace…