One-man SaaS, 9 Years In • Hacker News Board

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#191

Post by bsima » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 5:53 PM UTC

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #146

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.

Ok here is the playbook: - 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 blo…

actually a pretty good playbook, would probably work

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#192

Post by imafikus » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

_xnmw wrote: post #128

If 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…

I have a startup called Notify Me (notify-me.rs) whose main idea is to be a simple service for tracking web page updates. Not sure what exactly you need, but feel free to try it out / reach out if you have any questions.

We are trying to make it as hands-off for end user as possible, but just plugging AI into it is that easy as it seems, since you need to make sure that you are alerting for legit changes and that nothing is hallucinated by the AI

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#193

Post by TechDebtDevin » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 8:44 PM UTC

dustedcodes wrote: post #175

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you, I'll try the blog posts with SEO route first :)

A quick easy (but a bit dirty) trick is to post in a couple appropriate sub-reddits asking for a solution to a problem your app solves and let the comments organically populate. Make sure your question will be worded similarly to a search query on google. Come back a few days later after nobody is looking at your post any longer and edit your question to say you found a solution and link to your website. This is sometimes an effective way to get traffic via search since so many people append reddit to their search queries.

Also, you could just reply to your question with a link to your app under a different account but I'm not sure this as effective as having the link in the post which guarantees the link will be seen if someone clicks on that Reddit thread via Google, otherwise, there is no guarantee that your comment will get up voted and be visible, unless of course you game this also.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#194

Post by martinald » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 8:51 PM UTC

ozim wrote: post #156

prmoustache wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I agree entirely. The amount of times that I've thought a particular service I've made is "reliable" because of great uptime for 2-3 years (with no changes), that I do a small innocuous change and cause some issues really makes me remember this.

The most common issues I have with long term projects are small code/config changes (#1 by a ridiculous degree), then way below is drives filling up and then way below that is actual hardware failure.

Drives filling up are often the most annoying to fix as they cause very odd user facing problems. Just fixed this week an old wordpress site that I spent over 2 hours trying to fix, trying everything, before I realised the mySQL database was full. It turns out if a mysql db is full the provider revokes insert privs on the user and wp login will just go in a loop back to the login page if it can't write to the database. No errors on the UI :(.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#195

Post by charles_f » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 8:54 PM UTC

This is super inspiring, thanks for sharing. I hope I'll get inspired one day, as you were.

Sorry if that was shared elsewhere, how did you market your product?

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#196

Post by sunnybeetroot » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 9:09 PM UTC

binwiederhier wrote: post #108

Pēteris' model with healthchecks.io was a large inspiration for me, and it is the reason why ntfy.sh is following the same model: open source, self-hostable, fun driven development. Thank you Pēteris for being an inspiration.

Thank you for making ntfy.sh, excellent piece of software.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#197

Post by klabb3 » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

camdenreslink wrote: post #165

BigJ1211 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To me, burnout is putting large amounts of mental and emotional energy into an activity where you don't have much agency on how it is done, or the outcome. That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life. The actual amount of work leading to burnout is only a small component IMO.

Spot on. You don’t get burnout from boring tedious work. That’s a completely different form of exhaustion.

> That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life.

Yeah but it’s not at all limited to traditional work. A common source of burnout is family issues. People burn out taking care of others, especially someone with psychological or substance abuse problems. Or co-dependence, terminal illnesses. Those things can become worse by trying harder, and that’s a potent recipe for burnout.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#198

Post by varispeed » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 9:45 PM UTC

throwaway48540 wrote: post #30

varispeed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With things like https://mailinabox.email/ it is actually simple.

The difficulty has never been about the SMTP service software itself.

You need good IP and set all the certs and whatnot. But that is mostly do and forget, apart from refreshing certs once a year. Never had an issue with it, emails get delivered fine.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#199

Post by FartinMowler » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 11:04 PM UTC

seanhunter wrote: post #93

asdev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I thought it was Benjamin Graham, who's most famous pupil was Warren Buffet. I'll have to look it up when I get back. Right now I'm in the woods, drunk, in a tent in a rainstorm with nothing to do but HN and without a care if my SaaS is up or not (change freeze since 2 weeks ago).

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#200

Post by reassess_blind » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 11:31 PM UTC

fm2606 wrote: post #139

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…

One of my products makes well over that amount, and it’s an identical clone of one of about 500 identical products in the same (large) niche.

If all you want is $1000/mo, you don’t necessarily have to solve a new problem, you can solve a problem that already has solutions (ideally doing it slightly better, but this isn’t required).

If your product is identical to the competitors, then you can carve out a small percentage of the market just be being the first solution the user tries, e.g via paid ads putting you at the top of the search.

Best of luck!