You are such an inspiration.
The explanation of why you became a solopreneur - because you didn't want to manage or be managed is simple, yet incredibly insightful. All the best!
One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
181–190 of 221 posts
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#182Earlier 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?
You've got a backend as well, and support?
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice looking page? Did you design it? If so, where did you get the graphics? My design work looks like a kindergartener drew it with a fat crayon on Big Chief paper! ;-)
Yes I designed it myself and I did all the drawings myself on an iPad Pro with the pen. I wanted to create a unique and relatable website which didn't look like every other default Starter template and I also was too cheap to pay for professional images so whenever my brain was fried in the evening and I couldn't do any coding work anymore I grabbed my iPad and drew a couple graphics for the current page I was workin…
Completely understand fried brain and TV with the wife.
Thanks for the response
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#184He has a twitter thread where he describes Hobbit Software: "Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them. Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? S…
I don’t think that is possible. Almost all software depends on other software. At the very least, it depends on the clients software. Which means you can’t ignore what Chrome or Safari changes for example.
It most certainly is. You can be pedantic and argue that you’re depending on an HTML rendering engine but so is everyone else. The key is minimizing unnecessary dependencies. This is seen as untenable in communities that love to crow about “social coding,” but there are other groups of people who are happily living that.
They just aren’t chattering away about it.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#185Inspiring! 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?)
That's the trade-off of going alone – laptop travels with me, and I cannot leave cell-phone coverage area for too long.
Also there have been times when monitoring alerts start blaring at 3AM, and there's no more sleep that night. Thankfully does not happen very often :-)
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really is that easy. The trade-offs are no less annoying then answering customers emails or calls. In some cases you don't even have any sort of "checking in" arrangements if you've demonstrated good profitability. Like I'm not sure why you are so upset and sarcastic here. I get that the author doesn't care and thats fine. But there are already many scaling their existing revenues coming in and then tradeoff is sm…
I think they're being sarcastic because reducing the tradeoff to "a small bit of your equity" in exchange for "100x MRR" is misleading, to the extent that it reads as sarcastic ignorance. FWIW, I vouched your original comment because I think your comment represents an authentic view shared by other people on HN / in tech. My question for you: how do you price the stress-potential of hiring, managing, and firing / bei…
All those things you listed are natural result of adding more minds to an organization and cannot be modelled.
But I will concede that you do give up some freedom as a result of having to police and regulate individuals in the best interest of the company. ex) James Damore
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#187He has a twitter thread where he describes Hobbit Software: "Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them. Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? S…
I don’t think that is possible. Almost all software depends on other software. At the very least, it depends on the clients software. Which means you can’t ignore what Chrome or Safari changes for example.
It depends on what you choose to rely on.
There's web tech from decades ago that still works almost entirely the same. If you stick to the most beaten path, you can really profit off it.
A lot of "legacy" software is still kicking because of this. Well... it works and solves the problem. And we can update it too, if we just stick to what we're doing. There's Perl scripts decades old still chugging along on servers all over the world. There's Windows applications written in the 90s that work pretty much exactly the same and are still updated in C++.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#188If anyone wants some one-man-SaaS ideas, here's a few which I desperately want. Somebody please build these and let me know! I already have my own startup so I don't have time to build these other ideas. - A cheaper and simpler version of visualping.io, they used to be really good but now they're too expensive and enterprise-y. Would be easier and better with AI. - AI-based email assistant which instantly brings up t…
Regarding visualping, have you checked https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io, and if so, what's missing?
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
"Tolerate" is an odd way to describe a totally voluntary transaction in a market with plenty of alternatives. The service is either worth the price or not for each person, regardless of the COGS.
If only plumbers knew the value of having a toilet inside your house.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
His moat is his price. And it absolutely is a moat because most bigger competitors would not bother competing in the segment with even lower prices, as there’d be no upside
there's no moat. Indie hackers can build a tool like this in a month and i think there are already many copycats.
Indie hackers frequently think they can build tools like this in a month (hence the "I could build that in a weekend" trope). But making something that actually works well takes time (that this founder has taken).