Just wanted to say how much I appreciated self-hosted version of Healthchecks.io. It's so simple, it feels almost magic. Keep it up!
One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
151–160 of 221 posts
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#152I 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.
Huh that's very interesting, need to check that out and keep in mind.
Thanks for sharing!
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#153Massive respect for the no growth approach. We’re different in that we’re a consultancy rather than a SaaS but 14 years into running our “micro agency” (my wife and I). We’ve had plenty of opportunities to take on staff but have always chosen not to in favour of working with trusted freelancers. Net result is an extremely contented life spent living by the sea in Cornwall and a gently profitable business. We'll never…
Kudos to you and your wife, definitely not the way most agencies are going and it's a shame.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#154Wow, this reads almost as my story. Similar goals, similar time frames, even the hosting provider and the payment processor we use is the same. I have to contact my new-found twin!
Didn't see it in this article, which payment processor is that?
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a little reticent to post my physical home address to be honest, are EU micropreneurs really ok with that?
There are a lot of office spaces available for single person businesses around here. 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…
We're not a one-person shop, but as a fully remote startup we also use a forwarding address service. Not very expensive and quite convenient. Lets us rebind the final destination of our mail (like, when our "handles everything official" person moved!) without needing to update a lot of places.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Keep in mind that 95% downtime happens when you deploy things or change configuration settings.
If I am drunk dancing in the woods as a solo operator no one is doing config changes on my servers.
The remaining 5% downtime like internet connection to the server facility, solar flares, UFO taking over the world - I would not able to do anything about anyway, would have to wait until it goes away.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> start shipping it around Can you elaborate on this?
Share it on social media, talk to potential customers about it, give people something to sign up to, in order to learn more.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#158Inspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)
Not OP, but this works for me: - No phone number for support - Extensive FAQs to let people help themselves first - Vacation: take laptop along, check emails every couple days (but I haven’t tried remote vacation without internet ever) Generally speaking: outsiders vastly overestimate the support burden of a one-man business. Maybe I’m lucky, but I only receive 2-3 emails per day with 25k active users.
People who don't have experience running servers imagine that you have to baby sit the servers like every 5 mins something happens.
In reality if you don't deploy new version or don't change config or don't post your product to HN server will be there simply running.
In big companies you might have bunch of people doing config changes all the time on different levels and you might never know when someone will break something you rely on.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
That's a match for my experience so far. Never could have worked this hard for someone else.
Having full creative control, uncapped upside potential, and truly enjoying the work make it a lot easier to do every day.
As a long-term goal, I would like to restore better work/life balance.
But first, I'm trying to make hay while the sun shines, to hit escape velocity from corporate work permanently. Now that I've tasted freedom, I really don't want to be dragged back...regardless of the outcome with my current business.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#160I 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.
The idea is not super special or novel - I can type out 5 services like this from top of my head.