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Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

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Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#141

Post by maio »

evermike wrote: post #125
ernsheong wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari hasn’t joined the standards yet. You can do one code base for FF and Chrome, but Safari is a totally different beast.

Moreover, Apple is deprecating legacy Safari Extensions now and pushing developers to transition to Safari App Extensions – which are offered through traditional Mac apps via the Mac App Store. More here - https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/09/safari-12-extensions-more/ It's another headache for us. So far we did not find any good step-by-step article on how to do it.

We have pretty complex extension so we decided to write Chrome API compatibility layer. It allows us to run our existing Chrome extension as an Safari app. extension.

Check out https://github.com/avast/topee - It's work in progress (but already complete enough for our use case).

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#142

Post by maio »

ernsheong wrote: post #96
k__ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't extensions standardized for a years now?

Safari hasn’t joined the standards yet. You can do one code base for FF and Chrome, but Safari is a totally different beast.

Check out https://github.com/avast/topee - It allows us to use same codebase for Chrome and Safari (app. extension).

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#143

Post by evermike »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #140
evermike wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Actually right now we don't have anyone dedicated to marketing :) Our team structure is the following: CTO and COO (two other co-founders), me (design, product and marketing), 1 customer success, 2 front-end devs, 1 back-end dev. We'll hire a few more people soon, but this is how our team looks today. 2) I agree, many successful companies grew via freemium modal. So our case can't be applied to everyone.

> me (design, product and marketing) Who drafted the layout for your landing page + integrations pages + wrote the content? They are very, very good and look like the work of multiple people, not just one person.

I did all of this (except HTML/CSS coding). But it wasn't accomplished in one day. There were several rounds of improvements.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#145

Post by evermike »

mrhackerpoland wrote: post #144

What if you guys are reported to the dictator and the officals sieze your app and revenue?

Sorry, such a discussion is not very interesting for me. I think you have a distorted opinion about our country. Read about the "Belarus Hi Tech Park" initiative and conditions for IT companies. A very serious and important work has been done here.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#146

Post by mrhackerpoland »

evermike wrote: post #145
mrhackerpoland wrote: post #144

What if you guys are reported to the dictator and the officals sieze your app and revenue?

Sorry, such a discussion is not very interesting for me. I think you have a distorted opinion about our country. Read about the "Belarus Hi Tech Park" initiative and conditions for IT companies. A very serious and important work has been done here.

My partner was multi millionaire from Belrus who owned a steal rolling company.

Now, he took whatever he had and moved to states.

He got his company raided and government officals took over it.

Anyways, if the situation has improved, that's a good news :)

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#147

Post by allannienhuis »

evermike wrote: post #129
allannienhuis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news/geancn... does a nice job of highlighting new comments since your last view.

Looks like it doesn't work. Or I'm doing something wrong :(

sorry, my bad; I linked the wrong extension. I forgot I had two installed.

Try this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodle...

I use the collapsable threads feature a lot too.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#148

Post by brianwawok »

djrogers wrote: post #128
brianwawok wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? That is plenty to pay 7 employees in the US. Not in SF and not all senior developers.

No, it’s really not - you’re either forgetting or are unaware of payroll taxes, insurance, etc. not to mention rent, electricity, capital expenses, and every other expense needed to run a business come out of that $1m.

No. In fact I run a bootstrapped SaaS business and am able to pay more than 7 employees on 1m. Do you have a source for your claims? My accountant can verify mine.

Some of your list is silly. My electricity bill is $25 per month. My rent is $800 per month. I choose a smart place to open a startup, not SF.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#149

Post by ericintheloft2 »

evermike wrote: post #89
ericintheloft2 wrote: post #80

Hi! Very interesting read and congratulations on the success. How you every had a higher price tag, or have you thought about raising it? It feels like a very low price, but I don't know what the average your customers are ending up paying - I guess they most often have several users per account?

Our ARPU is about $50. Most of our clients are fairly small or just at an early stage. And this is natural. Bigger companies mostly have time tracking process in some form, and they do not want to change the tool (something that already works). For small teams our pricing is ok, although we've being often told that this is too much. People want everything free today. When we thought about our pricing, we looked at co…

Ah I see, interesting!

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#150

Post by evermike »

allannienhuis wrote: post #147
evermike wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it doesn't work. Or I'm doing something wrong :(

sorry, my bad; I linked the wrong extension. I forgot I had two installed. Try this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodle... I use the collapsable threads feature a lot too.

Thanks, will try.

Meanwhile, I found this - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

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