One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

Post by chwzr » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 3:37 PM UTC

webprofusion wrote: post #127

webprofusion wrote: post #122

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.

Post by gears_ » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

m3h wrote: post #164

Are there any solutions for one-man SaaS to handle payments from enterprise customers? I'm assuming that the preferred mode of payment here is through wire transfers after some kind of PO process.

Post by dustedcodes » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:03 PM UTC

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #166

dustedcodes wrote: post #162

How long did it take you to find your first paying customer and which channels did you find to be most successful in acquisition? I've just launched my own SaaS as a Solopreneur ( https://msgdrop.io ) and and trying to figure out where to invest most of my limited free time to grow it now.

Paid advertising or organic marketing with reels/shorts and blog posts that are SEO optimized,lastly, a bit of luck.

Post by LVB » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:22 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #161

cedws wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What blows my mind is that people tolerate paying monthly for what is a static service. A service routine monitor doesn't need to be updated every month to function, so why would anyone pay every month to use it?

Post by rambambram » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #59

RangerScience wrote: post #2

Inspiring! 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?)

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…