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A Failed SaaS Postmortem

mattlayman.com

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Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#131

Post by fulafel »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #12

One of the craziest parts of this article to me is the sheer number of technologies he picked right off the bat to implement the service. Datadog? Digital Ocean? Wal-e? If he had gone with a cloud provider like AWS he probably could have cut that list by 2/3 by just using built in solutions.

The items on his list are on average easier to set up and learn than the equivalent on AWS.

Something that's more geared towards getting you up and running quickly (eg Heroku) might be another story.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#132

Post by gremlinsinc »

mblayman wrote: post #94

I love the discussion about all this. For a bit of context, I kept the article focused on the technical because that is the primary audience of my website. There is a criticism that I focused too much on the technical side in the article. That's entirely possible. My choice to focus on the technical is because my lessons basically boiled down to: 1. Don't focus on the technical (#1 YAGNI, #2 Ignore software upgrades,…

Did you look at competition? CollegePlannerPro seems to fit the same area you're going for, did you differentiate from what they were doing? I just was curious if there's a market fit for something like this, always thinking of running w/ a failed idea that still has runway, but I have so many half-finished MVP's it's not even funny.

I've got a bookmark folder of startup ideas to clone. So far I've cloned 0. Too busy freelancing. But I usually like two types of businesses :

1. Simple w/ multiple competitors doing 5-10k+ per month, like uptime monitors, wp management, social media posters/schedulers, crm's, project management.

2. More complex apps usually vertical specific with nobody really competing or filling the void, or the ones that are out there are shitty. Whether an idea I had, or someone else on a forum/reddit/hn etc or failed.

Yours would've in my mental compartmentalization of 'apps to maybe clone/build' fit into the second category, but looking at what's out there, I don't think a 1 person team could really compete w/ CollegePlannerPro - seems to have most things you'd need as an IEC.

I'm just wondering if you saw what they were doing at any time and thought, well shit. I'll never be that good, might as well give up. (I've had that thought a lot!).

tldr; Have you seen College Planner Pro, did seeing a polished competitor like them have any influence on shutting down?

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#133

Post by jlis »

Oh boy I can relate to a lot of things in this article. Like switching technologies back and forth, focussing too much on polishing instead of just delivering the damn thing.

You just think "ah, let me get this perfect and the customers will flood in automatically", but that's just wishful thinking.

In my case I think it relates to a fear of launching public and being criticized and judged.

I'll do it better on the next launch.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#134

Post by rusticpenn »

ericb wrote: post #75
jbob2000 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for an enterprise company with more than 70,000 employees. Standing up a team and getting them productive in 2 months is basically unheard of at this level. This community is heavily biased to small companies, startups, and students. I'd be hesitant to judge their approval as affirmations that you are doing the "right thing".

> affirmations that you are doing the "right thing." I'm not really looking for approbations--I'm happy to play this business game with a speed optimized team and see how my strategy fairs on merits against competitors maintaining two apps to my one. I'll make that bet all day long. I'd say hold up and question your assumption that there is a "right thing" at all. In terms of the perception of what is the "right thin…

It depends a lot on the customers. The tools we make are mostly B2B and are "premium". We are never first to market, but our tools are trusted over our "competitiors" ( I have put that in quotes and one of our competitors owns 30% of our firm), and this means get more customers because of the trust in robust tools (rebar reinforced concrete).

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#135

Post by sknzl »

jjice wrote: post #73
spookthesunset wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout So instead of talking with customers and growing your business you are busy wasting your time installing a web server, database server, configuring build tools, etc? Getting root access to a barebones linux install is conceptually "not complex". But that is only because it pushed all the actual complex stuff up the food chain and into your head.…

I don't know if I've been doing something wrong now. For my personal web apps, I've always just installed Nginx, Let's Encrypt, and then a docker image of my application/DB. Spinning this up on a fresh Ubuntu Server install takes less than a half hour if I had to guess. Nginx to force TLS and proxy pass to my docket image. I'm not trying to be rude, just genuinely curious if I'm missing something complex that could b…

You can use CapRover and additionally save the steps of nginx and Let’s encrypt. On DigitalOcean exists even a 1-Click App of it, so it’s trivial to get CapRover running on a droplet.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#136

Post by [deleted] »

streetcat1 wrote: post #101
powowow wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I thought you said nobody ever did large acquisitions for customers.... weird, I must be thinking of somebody else. Since it would make no sense for you to try to take both of those sides at once.

Why not. There are no sides here. There are different moats. If you want a more elaborate view: http://reactionwheel.net/2019/09/a-taxonomy-of-moats.html

[deleted]

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#137

Post by NightlyDev »

spookthesunset wrote: post #65
madamelic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout, slap an email address on the page and there's your logging and error system. AWS is massively overcomplicated for an indie SaaS business, and it costs way, way too much. You can have a box with plenty of room for $5 - $10 / month and it takes about 25 seconds to launch it. I had 20k concurrent users with a $5 server and Cloudflare. Other people ar…

> Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout So instead of talking with customers and growing your business you are busy wasting your time installing a web server, database server, configuring build tools, etc? Getting root access to a barebones linux install is conceptually "not complex". But that is only because it pushed all the actual complex stuff up the food chain and into your head.…

You're wrong. I've been doing it for 11 years, and it really is simple and quick. Package-managers does most of the work and there isn't much config necessary to start out. You should give it a go.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#138

Post by NightlyDev »

woutr_be wrote: post #120
ericb wrote: post #8

We just did something crazy. We dropped the Ember app that was 3/4th's done in favor of plain JQuery and Rails 6. I'm just done maintaining two apps instead of one and all the hell that involves. And the Javascript ecosystem can keep rolling that Sisyphean upgrade treadmill with deploy dependencies and promises everywhere and I promise to use it as little as possible. Because it is just a giant time suck. Tut tut if…

I was so used to building SPAs and APIs, that it seemed the default to me. But I always felt it was slowing me down, I had to switch between multiple terminals, multiple editor windows, things had to be tested twice (on both FE and BE). I dropped that for just plain old MVC on the backend, and I find myself moving a lot fast now. I still need some JavaScript for things like dropdown, or the occasional AJAX call, but…

This is very true for me too. I used Vue frontend and php backend, it makes it more fun to work on the frontend, but it's definitely slower for me compared to just rendering everything serverside.

The more I learned, the slower I became. I think everyone who has been doing webdev for some years have experienced that.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#139

Post by blaser-waffle »

Crazyontap wrote: post #38

This is not a postmortem of a failed startup, maybe a failed app. The fact still is that to your consumer the software makes 0 difference. They will never know if you're running php or python, serverless or cloud. It's all a moot point until you hit at least $10k mrr or something. If you are spending majority of your time on these technologies then who is working on getting the leads, sales, seo, and the other little…

Bingo. The teaching and counseling crowd are non-technical for the most part and they're not concerned with Django or Ember.

Independent college consultants also seems like a fairly niche market.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#140

Post by woutr_be »

NightlyDev wrote: post #138
woutr_be wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was so used to building SPAs and APIs, that it seemed the default to me. But I always felt it was slowing me down, I had to switch between multiple terminals, multiple editor windows, things had to be tested twice (on both FE and BE). I dropped that for just plain old MVC on the backend, and I find myself moving a lot fast now. I still need some JavaScript for things like dropdown, or the occasional AJAX call, but…

This is very true for me too. I used Vue frontend and php backend, it makes it more fun to work on the frontend, but it's definitely slower for me compared to just rendering everything serverside. The more I learned, the slower I became. I think everyone who has been doing webdev for some years have experienced that.

In my recent project, I try to do as much as possible through serverside rendering, obviously there are things that still require JavaScript. I just extract those out as components. Right now I’m using WebComponents, but you can easily use Vue if you wanted.

Just treat it as a secondary layer for HTML, not the primary one.

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