131–140 of 221 posts
Absolutely living the dream! Being a sustainable one man SaaS is what I'd ultimately love to be, but not only do I have no ideas about what to SaaS, I highly doubt I'd have the drive to follow through if I did. Kudos to you, and to another 9 years! Also I'm stealing the term Hobbit software, talk about comfy.
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 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.
This matches siblings comments where employees experience burnout more probably because employees are rarely rewarded for their best work. But executives and entrepreneurs are.
I suppose even if the reward is intangible that protects from burnout.
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…
150k users supported by one man holy shit! This is obviously a B2C freemium app, right? Would love to see a writeup on how you handled the devops/deployment for this. Load balancers, serverless, or just one baremetal server?
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> 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.
Not an expert or anything, but when I looked into burnout it was predicted by lack of expected reward. So there's two things you can change. The expectation or the reward. This matches siblings comments where employees experience burnout more probably because employees are rarely rewarded for their best work. But executives and entrepreneurs are. I suppose even if the reward is intangible that protects from burnout.
Until they are not. The most promising entrepreneurial project can take an unexpected turn south, and if you’ve worked yourself past the burnout threshold at that point it can be hard to come back.
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If you’re not pushing code/changes the likelihood of incidents is significantly less. Also, not having a few enterprise contracts that make up most of the revenue, helps ease customer support load.
Do you know what a typical enterprise contract for a nice tool like this could go for? I have an open source saas tool in a different niche but so far the biggest contract I have is 500$ per month and that's for companies who need a lot of customisations, a very white glove service and a few days o work to morph the tool onto exactly what it is they want (typically via plugin so changes are easily manageable). One on…
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> 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…
With coding, it's also a matter of quality of work. You need to step back so you can look at your work with a fresh perspective, and oh, there are ALWAYS horrors you will find, the ones you created when tired.
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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…
> In fact, if you don't have a real address listed, I will not consider your service. 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…
I just can't seem to come up with an idea. It has been said/written multiple times "scratch your own itch". It seems that I don't have an itch. If it takes me X-amount of steps or time to do some task, I don't ever look at how to reduce it, I just go with the flow.
In the grand scheme of life I am very satisfied. I don't NEED anything and for that I am grateful. However, I am a worrier and I do worry about the future and retirement (I'm in my mid 50s), specifically healthcare.
Anyway, better quite here and stop blathering on
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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…
Cloudflare is again down and your service is not available for an hour? You cant do anything. And nobody unsubscribes.
Most downtimes are because another service is down and you cant do anything.
Sometimes its really your issue. Your service is down for an entire day? Some customers may be pissed at the moment. But in the end they dont care if you are not a critical service - like this one.
Learning: Downtimes are not an issue. When such a message pops up just ignore it and look at it when you have time. This is strange first as we try to be perfect. But the world will continue to turn.