ExSaaSperated: A blog about the struggle to start a sustainable SaaS

Post by zomglings » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

utkarsh_apoorva wrote: post #17

alixanderwang wrote: post #5

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 was planning to write something along the same lines, if I make it. I guess the reason of this happening is this - after you fail, you are too busy picking up the pieces, and trying to survive. I have written so much about small wins at my previous startup. And when it shut down, I was just trying to avoid falling. In the current one, we built and failed with 5 products. And then got more traction in 10 days than w…

Post by iends » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:18 PM UTC

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #29

This is likely going to sound too harsh (and the folks behind this seem lovely), but content creation efforts like this are a red flag to me in terms of evaluating whether or not a bootstrapped SAAS is going to "make" it. 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 $…

Post by czbond » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:26 PM UTC

CoffeePython wrote: post #33

czbond wrote: post #31

My suggestion is to look outside of SaaS. Software is much easier to bootstrap in the past decade, increasing competition (from within a customer, and competitors). We're in the phase where every single permutation of what one can do with software is being exhausted. Businesses using the same concepts and business models outside of this scope have potentially less competition, higher available market, and higher upsi…

> Businesses using the same concepts and business models outside of this scope have potentially less competition, higher available market, and higher upside purchase exit. What type of businesses are you talking about here? Non-software or just non SaaS?

Post by sudhirj » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

iends wrote: post #34

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #29

This is likely going to sound too harsh (and the folks behind this seem lovely), but content creation efforts like this are a red flag to me in terms of evaluating whether or not a bootstrapped SAAS is going to "make" it. 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 $…

One of the trends I’ve noticed is that people who have minor SaaS success can 5x their income by creating an ebook + course + masterclass about how they did it. Selling shovels in a gold rush....

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

ruste wrote: post #37

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #22

Cool! I wish you luck. 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…

Interested in why writing it in PHP made selling it a non-starter. I'd expect that if it provided value it wouldn't really matter much what it was written in.