141–150 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.
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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 swear to god that this is the future.
I'd love to just make $1000 / month profit. I don't "need" the money per se, but definitely "want" it. Maybe for no other reason than to just to do it. 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…
Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.
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> 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’m a little reticent to post my physical home address to be honest, are EU micropreneurs really ok with that?
The point is that I don't need to be able to visit or physically mail anything. But it is just one more point of trust and something I can more easily verify.
Frankly, I'd be okay with a P.O. box if it is clear it is a small business operated mostly from someone's home.
It simply, at least here, is something that allows you to verify things like a company actually being registered at that address.
Another thing is that geographic location matters. For things like data protection laws and other laws the company I want to do business with might or might not follow depending on the country they are based in.
I'd love to just make $1000 / month profit. I don't "need" the money per se, but definitely "want" it. Maybe for no other reason than to just to do it. 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…
I have the same problem. When I see the kinds of simple products printing HNers money I think “people pay for THAT?” Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.
Or, choose a small thing you can build in a few weekends, get it built and try shipping it.
If you get no traction, you learned something. If you do, you can now invest more.
This is the whole idea behind lean startups: don’t assume tou have a winner or a stinker, go find out and adapt based on feedback.
I'd love to just make $1000 / month profit. I don't "need" the money per se, but definitely "want" it. Maybe for no other reason than to just to do it. 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…
I have the same problem. When I see the kinds of simple products printing HNers money I think “people pay for THAT?” Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.
- Go here https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=it...
- Look at the list of products
- Copy one of them
- Do it a bit better (e.g. cheaper, faster, hosted in EU, targeted at some specific segment of users etc.)
- Launch asap (no longer than 3 months of coding)
- Reach out to potential users everywhere you can, until you get a few dollars of recurring revenue in
- Write blogs, and long form content, integrate with other libraries and systems
- Automate everything, pay for services that aren't core to your business (e.g. payments, backups, etc.)
- Do everything you can to help all your early users, keep improving the product every week
- Wait a few months/years, till it compounds up to 10-20k MRR
I'd love to just make $1000 / month profit. I don't "need" the money per se, but definitely "want" it. Maybe for no other reason than to just to do it. 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…
I have the same problem. When I see the kinds of simple products printing HNers money I think “people pay for THAT?” Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.
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I have the same problem. When I see the kinds of simple products printing HNers money I think “people pay for THAT?” Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.
So in future, build a landing page, start shipping it around and see if you can get some early potential customers interested. Or, choose a small thing you can build in a few weekends, get it built and try shipping it. If you get no traction, you learned something. If you do, you can now invest more. This is the whole idea behind lean startups: don’t assume tou have a winner or a stinker, go find out and adapt based…
Can you elaborate on this?
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…
One trick I may or may not have invented for the enterprise PO problem (manual processes etc) was to offer an Azure Marketplace subscription for the product. 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.
Edit: another question: do you advertise on your website the possibility to use Azure billing?
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Being unique is important if you actually want to dominate the market. A product like his has captured a piece of the pie, but someone with equal distribution can easily eat into that since he has no moat.
What if he doesn't actually want to dominate the market? The idea of an "economic moat" comes from Warren Buffett[1] and it was/is part of his investing philosophy to look for companies with some sort of unique feature which allows them to dominate markets and create effective monopolies on their particular niche. It makes sense in that context but it doesn't necessarily apply everywhere. What if you're just trying t…