21–30 of 44 posts
There are certainly pain points to find your 10th-100th customer. But if you don't even know who your 1st customer is, you are flying blind.
I have authored one project that took ten years to reach maturity (It is now exploding). That allowed me to iterate it, and ensure that it would be top-quality, by the time I tossed the reins over to a new team.
It was free, though, and a labor of love[0].
I wrote another project as a "training course." It was sort of a dissertation. The quality is pretty much "off the charts."
I had originally thought about selling it, but was told that was a non-starter, because it was written in in PHP[1], so I simply open-sourced it as MIT.
Nowadays, I work on client-side code (native Swift for Apple stuff). I am not in a hurry to get back to SaaS.
I like the name of the blog.
[0] https://medium.com/@ChrisMarshallNY/the-story-of-the-bmlt-87...
[1] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...
I'm trying to get into it but don't know what to make. I follow Indie Hackers/Entrepreneur podcasts/wip.chat/etc... now I'm looking into Shopify stuff, make some niche API connector or something... but it will be a time sink to learn their docs/how stuff works on the Shopify aspect. Possible oversaturated market, etc... but I figure if I cruise through the forums/see recurring problems, maybe I can find something to…
This is a pretty interesting place to be. Since you have not yet committed yourself - so you sort of have a superpower that many of us crave for. There are at least a few ways of thinking about this. The well documented ones 1. Think about problems you've faced. Solve it. 2. Research online, find problems, fix them (what you seem to be doing). Less Documented ones: 1. Pick a product you like - as a customer / user. D…
I don't like that I have one income and I'm scared of losing my job sort of thing, granted I get a lot of recruiters hitting me up(though am I qualified, just string matching).
> 1. Think about problems you've faced.
This mostly it's an attention thing for me, I'm trying to learn Android/make a widget, I did the cross platform app part for the mobile/desktop app, for a centralized thing... this is not something that would make money eg. OneNote/Evernote/etc... Other thing is managing money I have spread sheet tabs.
Yeah only thing I use really are the note taking/money managing stuff(not YNAB or something just tabulating).
Yeah working with friends is hit and miss... I didn't get paid for that thing I built was about 14 hours(had to figure out PayPal's API(which one)).
I actually have few friends, most are in specific niches eg. aero industries.
Thanks for the thoughts.
edit: I didn't get paid because I'm expensive(to this person)/weird to ask friends for money even though time/expertise costs someone something. Arguable too can you charge for something you don't know... anyway it's still like one of those things where $60/hr or something is too expensive for a person.
At the end though, no I have not tried hard enough, I haven't launched anything.
I actually feel like I've been hearing a ton about failures, though they're all preceded by "you never hear about failures", and proceeded by, "and then I took what I learned and succeeded". What I actually never hear about is stories of trying to build a SaaS, failing, and then just giving up and going back to being a salaryman and retiring after a few decades. It's either that these stories are rare -- which signal…
I actually feel like I've been hearing a ton about failures, though they're all preceded by "you never hear about failures", and proceeded by, "and then I took what I learned and succeeded". What I actually never hear about is stories of trying to build a SaaS, failing, and then just giving up and going back to being a salaryman and retiring after a few decades. It's either that these stories are rare -- which signal…
This kind of describes @patio11's career. I still want to build my own SAAS though.
I actually feel like I've been hearing a ton about failures, though they're all preceded by "you never hear about failures", and proceeded by, "and then I took what I learned and succeeded". What I actually never hear about is stories of trying to build a SaaS, failing, and then just giving up and going back to being a salaryman and retiring after a few decades. It's either that these stories are rare -- which signal…
“But I learned something” Is an extremely low bar for evaluating an outcome. “But I learned something and applied it to make the next effort a success” is the natural valuable contribution...that we (quite tellingly) almost never hear about.
This is literally every "success" blog post out there. They always start with an early failure and how that launched/pushed/pulled them toward later success.
That’s not how you start a company.
This isn't because they're inherently bad or that the people writing them have bad intentions, but that they're a time/attention trap.
Meta articles like this, "How I made my first $10", "Breaking $1k MRR" and similar tend to do really well in attracting clicks but fail to connect with an actual target audience for whatever it is you're making. This makes them really dangerous as when you're starting out you don't have any "signal" as to what's working and these types seem positive.
Unfortunately, they're the equivalent of handing out free candy when your intention is to open a restaurant.
These folks would be much further ahead if they instead:
1. Started writing/learning about specific tactics and skills for starting and marketing a SAAS.
2. Randomly picked some industry or vertical and just started writing articles about learning that industry and the problems they had.
I say all this as someone who has drunk too deeply of the bootstrapped startup literature well, don't make my mistakes.
I actually feel like I've been hearing a ton about failures, though they're all preceded by "you never hear about failures", and proceeded by, "and then I took what I learned and succeeded". What I actually never hear about is stories of trying to build a SaaS, failing, and then just giving up and going back to being a salaryman and retiring after a few decades. It's either that these stories are rare -- which signal…