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Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years

mattmazur.com

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Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years

#131

Post by nhance »

tr33house wrote: post #90

Congratulations Matt! How did you arrive at the threshold for working on this full-time? Are you sharing ARR/MRR values at this time?

Could you share this information as a percentage of your monthly expenses?

I'm pulling the trigger on this after 17 years in business and our ARR covered 50% of our anticipated annual expenses last year.

We also grew by 100% last year, all while on coast with $0 spent in marketing.

The time we spend on the products, when added up over time, the most valuable time we spend, so we have cut expenses and plowed away revenue to help us make this launch this year.

The goal is to meet 100% of anticipated annual expenses in net ARR by the end of this year and it feels very doable.

After 17 years, I'm also shy to discuss details because it's taken dozens, if not hundreds of attempts to find something that worked. Started in 2005.

Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years

#132

Post by atleta »

PentelicoMarble wrote: post #29

A product built by an ex-soldier who was part of an occupying force that committed countless war crimes? No thank you. Question for other HN users - would you use a product built by an officer of the Russian army who was part of the war in Ukraine? Edit: Those downvoting me, did I say anything that is not true?

I didn't downvote you but I think equating the Russian attack on Ukraine with the American war on Iraq is probably what earned you the downvotes. Especially because you seem to equate the too based on the extent and number of war crimes. Committing war crimes seems to be the norm, even an expectation in the Russian army. These also seem being denied and never investigated while they are pretty well documented. This doesn't seem to be the case with the US army. (Yes, they did happen, but they seem to happen at a much lower rate, more isolated cases and some of them actually get investigated officially and the perpetrators get sentenced.)

And then let's not forget that the American war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) has been ironically labelled as "democracy export" for a reason. Yes, it didn't work, yes it was probably a bad idea from the start, but at least it wasn't "autocracy export". Which the war on Ukraine is. The goal of the Russian leadership (read: Putin) has been to remove the democratically elected Ukrainian leadership and install a puppet government. This is a bit harder to support than the US narrative of toppling a dictatorship and help the people to start a democracy. (Again, even if the latter was doomed to fail.)

Sure, the Russian soldiers and society were also sold a nice (horror) story about the Ukrainian leadership (or maybe Ukrainians in general) being 'nazi'. You can hear in some captured phone calls from the early days of the war that the soldiers try to explain to their relatives that there are no 'nazis' there just normal people.

On I side note, I would use a product built by a Russian soldier who participated in the war if he made it clear that he didn't want to participate and didn't commit (or maybe even opposed/prevented committing) war crimes.

Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years

#133

Post by didgetmaster »

waprin wrote: post #112
Alex3917 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need more examples highlighted of entrepreneurs leading the slow-burn (in a good way) types of ventures. There will be a lot more example of this in the coming years because the costs of keeping a pre-PMF webapp online have basically fallen to zero. Whereas when Zuckerberg started Facebook, if it didn't take off right away then you had no choice but to shut it down. When you hear VCs and other folks cast doubt o…

Yeah it’s interesting reading the old pg essays where he says, VCs suck but they are a necessary evil. After all, racking reliable servers will cost at least 20k, paying a PR firm so that there’s a chance anyone will hear about your site will cost at least 20k etc etc Now basically every PaaS has a free or cheap ( It’s not strictly true because some projects use GPUs for ML , sometimes there’s some technical rot if y…

It has gotten much cheaper to host stuff, but I really wonder if marketing costs have fallen as well. You can certainly find cheap or free avenues (like HN) to tell people about your product, but it can be lost in the sea of information. Good marketing to the best subset of potential customers is essential in getting anything off the ground. That can be expensive especially if you are an engineer with very little marketing experience.

Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years

#136

Post by kqr »

Alex3917 wrote: post #125
lotsofpulp wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your strategy involves needing to take advantage of network effects, growing as fast as possible seems like a requirement. It is a winner take all dynamic.

> If your strategy involved needing to take advantage of network effects, growing as fast as possible seems like a requirement. Not necessarily. Most businesses with network effects (including Facebook) follow the "come for the tool, stay for the network" approach.

Right, but in any given group of people, the first people won't stick around to become the network unless they have reason to believe their network will shortly span their entire group -- i.e. grows fast.

Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years

#137

Post by macNchz »

Alex3917 wrote: post #87
ricksunny wrote: post #55

Good on you; We need more examples highlighted of entrepreneurs leading the slow-burn (in a good way) types of ventures. Not every business activity fits the go-big-or-go-home Zuckerberg-esque meteoric rise archetype that the Techcrunch-led hype media attracts eyeballs for portraying.

> We need more examples highlighted of entrepreneurs leading the slow-burn (in a good way) types of ventures. There will be a lot more example of this in the coming years because the costs of keeping a pre-PMF webapp online have basically fallen to zero. Whereas when Zuckerberg started Facebook, if it didn't take off right away then you had no choice but to shut it down. When you hear VCs and other folks cast doubt o…

There was plenty of inexpensive hosting when Facebook launched. You could run several tiny PHP/MySQL web apps on a single shared hosting account for I recently migrated a little web app that has been online since before Facebook existed, away from the $5/mo shared hosting it had lived on since 2006.

My family’s dialup connection even came with free web hosting that ran Perl back in the 90s!

http://web.archive.org/web/20040612195543/http://www.linode....

Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years

#138

Post by encoderer »

This is great to hear, congrats.

I took about 6.5 years to do that same journey (and having a kid), and one problem I had was that the goalposts kept shifting on me, partly because a slowly growing side-income is easy to get accustomed to so even when I got to where my startup was able to pay me as much as my day job, it felt more like I had doubled my salary, not replaced it. Did you struggle with that at all?

Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years

#139

Post by matt1 »

encoderer wrote: post #138

This is great to hear, congrats. I took about 6.5 years to do that same journey (and having a kid), and one problem I had was that the goalposts kept shifting on me, partly because a slowly growing side-income is easy to get accustomed to so even when I got to where my startup was able to pay me as much as my day job, it felt more like I had doubled my salary, not replaced it. Did you struggle with that at all?

This was my life the last few years :D.

Eventually just had to go for it and give up the extra income.

It's not clear it was the best decision financially (though it may wind up being so), but it felt like the best decision for my soul, if that makes sense.

Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years

#140

Post by encoderer »

matt1 wrote: post #139
encoderer wrote: post #138

This is great to hear, congrats. I took about 6.5 years to do that same journey (and having a kid), and one problem I had was that the goalposts kept shifting on me, partly because a slowly growing side-income is easy to get accustomed to so even when I got to where my startup was able to pay me as much as my day job, it felt more like I had doubled my salary, not replaced it. Did you struggle with that at all?

This was my life the last few years :D. Eventually just had to go for it and give up the extra income. It's not clear it was the best decision financially (though it may wind up being so), but it felt like the best decision for my soul, if that makes sense.

Oh yeah you bet. Same here. For me, it was doubly true because I made the leap during the Pandemic lock-down and it was an enormous relief to get out of the zoom-meeting hellscape that my life had became. (I was a middle-manager).

It is hard because I also did not ask my wife/family to take a big hit and instead figured I would burn through cash for 2-3 years while I either grew the business or, eventually, did something else. At the time my portfolio was doing great, tons of crypto gains, real wealth effect, and then basically 4 months after leaving my job the top was in and it's been nothing but declining values. Nevertheless, the business has grown, and as far as I can tell, in 2023, we will break even as a family, and then be out of this crunch. I do wish I could have refinanced my mortgage at 2% but nobody would touch me because I didn't have a regular w2 income from a non-affiliated company.

Wish you the best man! I do have timelines in my product and I would pay a modest fee (maybe... 1k a year?) to license a library that was better than what I currently use which is fullcalendar

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