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I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

blog.stetsonblake.com

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Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#161

Post by mekanicalsyncop »

kilroy123 wrote: post #160
nmfisher wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and getting the word out is half the battle. With such little effort put into the launch, OP could have been selling a dollar for fifty cents and no one would've cared. Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bub…

> There's absolutely zero chance that they all just happened to be female, nicely formatted [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com addresses. That is my email address: [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com I'm not female though.

yea but if you got 50 inquiries from random people on the Internet interested in your product would you expect all or even most of them to be in the exact format firstname.lastname@gmail?

I'd expect most or even all of them to be from gmail but I'd be skeptical if they all followed the same naming convention, whether its first.last or something else.

That alone is at least mildly suspicious but it doesn't prove its not legitimate. However in this case he also used other data points to make that determination.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#162

Post by sho »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #19

I was following this same path until yesterday, when I gave up. I have the mock-ups and all the notes with me, but I won't go ahead because I know it would be too much of an effort. Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's, at least IMHO.

> Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's

Nonsense! I've been around since the 90s too and let me tell you - you don't need any of the trendy new crap to make a successful app. You don't need a single page JS app except in very specific circumstances. You don't need microservices or serverless or map/reduce or Cassandra or NoSQL or nodejs or ML or any of it.

Ignore all that noise, go pick up "Agile Web Development with Rails 6" and just do it. Haters gonna hate but if it's good enough for github it's very probably good enough for you.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#163

Post by abbadadda »

withinboredom wrote: post #154
nmfisher wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and getting the word out is half the battle. With such little effort put into the launch, OP could have been selling a dollar for fifty cents and no one would've cared. Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bub…

> There's absolutely zero chance that they all just happened to be female, nicely formatted [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com addresses. That makes you fraudulent these days? Man, my wife and I are screwed.

You are female then? The author used the word "all" also.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#164

Post by luckylion »

shp0ngle wrote: post #149
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #145

I have not had any success on Upwork. 100% of the “leads” I got there were scams. Not 75%, not even 99%. 100%. Not one single honest job. Some were requests for me to participate in scams, but I don’t roll that way. I’m sure that my experience was unique, and that my profile must have had some “scam flag,” so I won’t write off the platform in its entirety. I heard good things about the site from friends, but every si…

PHP is still big in the publishing business. WordPress alone is bigger than HN would lead you to believe. Lots of business runs on PHP. And not just running Drupal from inertia; Laravel is a new shiny thing.

Can confirm. PHP/WP is easily 70% of my business. Virtually all of the affiliate/SEO business runs on WP, and so do basically all individual company websites. And they all need help.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#165

Post by mromnia »

CM30 wrote: post #140
dvt wrote: post #39

This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…

This plus the mention of ProductHunt makes me think they fell into the trap of marketing to their fellow creators rather than their audience. That's a common mistake plenty of people make when building anything. Game developers market their games on game development forums, website owners market their sites on web development/webmaster forums, authors market on writing forums, etc. They then forget that the typical p…

I see this advice a lot, but I never really understood what the alternative is. If your product has a specific niche, maybe there are some forums or subreddits dedicated to it, sure. But if it's a game? Some are designed for a niche audience, but most really aren't.

Another thing is that most of the forums/subreddits these days have strict rules against self-promotion.

And I'm not saying that you're wrong - I'm just wondering what do you think is the right way to do things.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#166

Post by danjac »

stets wrote: post #64
hckr_news wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, this isn't true at all. Reading up documentation/resources, watching youtube tutorials, and even sometimes banging your head against the wall is a normal part of the software development process. Don't let the frustrations get to you. You mentioned the 90s but boy were people jerks back then (from the horror stories I read). I think today is probably the best time to be working on software with so many open sour…

This is good advice. Tech doesn't really matter. Yes, things will suck. But don't introduce complexity until you're absolutely sure it needs to be or that it will help you save time later on.

I've worked/consulted at quite a few places where the code quality ranged from mediocre to abysmal. These companies were launched pretty much by people with an "X for Idiots" book on their lap or who hired their teenage nephew/best mate from college to do the coding.

And yet, these companies did quite well, became quite successful and profitable businesses in their niche - and when they did hit the hard limits of technical debt, they had the money to hire professionals. Unfortunately there are limits to what professionals can do with just-about-working spaghetti code and bizarre database schemas, when you can't just throw away and rewrite software that's powering a growing business that needs more new features than it needs a cleaner codebase, but nonetheless they got much further than many SaaS companies started by developers with well thought out architecture, beautiful code and the latest tech stack.

The reason they were successful is that the founders lived and breathed their niche and understood the problems and their customers. They saw opportunities as well as risks and blind alleys. The tech was just a means to that end, not the end in of itself. That said, before people say "the tech doesn't matter", I think that had they the technical skills to match their domain knowledge and connections, they would have been far more successful and would not have hit those hard limits that slowed them down and perhaps prevented them from expanding further and seizing on new opportunities. It's interesting that some of the real "unicorns" of the last few decades have had founders/leaders with strong technical chops - your Gates and Zuckerbergs. They might not have been the best in their field, but they had that relatively rare combo of technical ability and business sense.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#167

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

kjakm wrote: post #159
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, but you sound like you have used it to hire folks; not find work. It seems that it really is a great platform to hire people; just maybe not so good, if you want to be hired.

As someone who got hired through it for years I can confirm this: > learn to sift through the legit profiles vs the dodgy It's also important to get longer term projects through it (either a client that brings you repeat work or short-medium term hourly contracts). It has got more and more difficult over the years imo as the various freelance sites merged and you had more crap to sift through.

Thanks for that. I couldn't believe that my experience was the norm, as the site couldn't stay in business.

I'm not kidding, though. Every. Single. Contact. that I had was "dodgy."

I really must have had something in my profile that attracted them. I don't know what it could have been. I use a similar approach in all my endeavors, but that site responded quite differently.

I remember one that was pretty scary. They kept trying to get me to meet them in rather remote places, like commuter parking lots, or hiking parks. They also tried to find out where I lived (which, TBH, isn't difficult. I own a house, and don't use an LLC to obfuscate ownership).

I come across as fairly open and credulous, but I have dealt with serious hardcases almost my entire life. The alarm klaxon was going off like crazy on that one.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#168

Post by ehnto »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #19

I was following this same path until yesterday, when I gave up. I have the mock-ups and all the notes with me, but I won't go ahead because I know it would be too much of an effort. Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's, at least IMHO.

You can still build it with whatever you want to. User's don't care if you used React through a GraphQL API talking to Microservices that sits on an instantly scaleable AWS infrastructure. These are technologies designed to solve problems that Really Big Companies have, and that most of us bootstrapping a SaaS do not.

Don't be worried about "Scale" either, seriously. VC funded unicorns care about scale because they have million dollar budgets going into advertising, the reality for most bootstrapped SaaS and even mid-sized businesses is that a simple dedicated host is going to serve you well. Depends on the type of business I suppose, but if you need quick bursting scale then you'll probably know it.

The bleeding edge is a mess. You want to pick only the things you absolutely need from it, and if you can't figure out what it is you need, you don't need anything but what you've got and life is good. Many of these technologies come at a cost to overall complexity, and for big companies they will have enough developers to specialize in all the different technologies going on.

When I'm working with clients we can often use some new fangled technologies to help in really specific areas. But the vast, vast, vast majority of clients just need you to send their user a gosh darn web page and process some forms. Render your template, cache the thing and send it over. Instant low latency web experience, hoo-ray we're all happy.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#169

Post by mft_ »

Fun article - thanks.

The reference to Flask being a pain in the arse made me chuckle. I am a hobbyist python author and have been using Flask for years, doing exactly what you wrote about, with awkward front-end templates and handwritten SQL queries and the rest.

I did some basic tutorials on Vue a few weeks ago and it was absolutely mind-blowingly straightforward in comparison!

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#170

Post by square_usual »

probably_wrong wrote: post #96
jmknoll wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know there’s a lot of this, but what is the angle? Who is running the bot farms to click on Facebook ads and sign up for random services? And what are they hoping to achieve?

My wild assumption is that bot farms need to look like regular users, and therefore keep clicking on things even when they're off the clock. If Facebook has caught up on click farms that click on links but do nothing afterwards, I would assume that filling in some random data goes a long way to make bots harder to spot once your actual clients show up.

When you set up an ad on Facebook (and many other ad services), you can define a "conversion" (I'm more familiar with how google calls them, I'm not sure if that's what facebook calls it.). You can read about it here: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722022. Then, you can set a target "Cost Per Action", which factors into your bids and therefore how much you spend on advertising and where you advertise. That's why if you're doing ad fraud, you'd want to take it all the way through to whichever action "counts".
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