I find that amazing that in a crowded SaaS market you can still find opportunity everywhere, yet alone making a SaaS that makes money a $250kARR.
Where do these people find ideas?
Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#32You're already in one of the best communities there is: Hacker News. Don't underestimate what you can learn just by carefully reading the threads here. I went from "idea in my dorm room" to interviewing and hiring executives in their 40s and 50s within 24 months. The best lesson I learned is that there are way fewer "rules" than you think, and smart, disciplined, focused entrepreneurs can accomplish way more than the…
Thanks, yeah I discovered HN about a year ago and it is a wonderful source of entertainment and valuable information
One thing I noticed is that the YC batch tend not to post or comment much here. Except for hiring and show posts. My guess is that they are heads down working!
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#33As a bootstrapped SaaS founder myself: congratulations! This is an unbelievable growth rate for a bootstrapped SaaS. It usually takes many years to reach these numbers. Very happy to see people build sustainable businesses this way — venture funding is not the only way to go! I'd be very interested to learn more, things like: is it a B2B or B2C SaaS? What is your ARPU and LTV, are you spending on marketing, and if so…
Thanks, I had a lot of discussion with my founder about funding. Until now, I'm happy we did it bootstrap. To answer your questions: Model: B2B, mostly public educational institutes with 10k+ students. ARPU: would be dumb to shared, but just under the EU tender limit, so sales cycles are reduced to minimum. LTV: That's a hard one when you sell yearly contracts and less than 10months old. But from what we see, schools…
> I had a lot of discussion with my founder about funding. Until now, I'm happy we did it bootstrap.
You'd have great luck with rolling seed stage funds like https://shl.vc/ and showcase events like https://mercury.com/raise
If you plan to not go down the traditional (go big or go home) VC route, then, check out these (go slow and go steady) funds: https://indie.vc/, https://tinyseed.com/, https://earnestcapital.com/
(not an endorsement)
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#34I find that amazing that in a crowded SaaS market you can still find opportunity everywhere, yet alone making a SaaS that makes money a $250kARR. Where do these people find ideas?
sheer dumb luck. Any business canvas drawing hipster telling you otherwise, is BSing you (I think)
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#35You're in the right spot – IndieHackers is a pretty great community for this kind of stuff too!
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#36Wow, this is really inspiring! As a college student under lockdown, building something like this would be my dream. I have so many questions: How do you manage to juggle the responsibilities of school and running your business? What kind of technical expertise do you need? How did you find your idea and gain traction? Do you have employees?
Balancing study and work is REALLY hard (and source of struggle with my parents, which I totally understand :) . We managed to get an office on campus, so it's literally a 3min walk from the lecture hall to the office. Besides that, I was never big on "planning", but now I'm usually planning a month ahead on the uni assignments. Mainly struggling with expanding the technical team. We have some freelancers, but develo…
Email in profile if you'd like help finding developers — I've worked with devs on a number of different projects from places like Ukraine, Serbia, India, and China. Depending on what you're looking for, pay is in the range of $17-$40/hr for most common stacks, at a junior to mid-range level of expertise (I assume you're mostly working in a web-based stack like Javascript, Ruby, or PHP).
LinkedIn recruiting is your friend here, especially in places like India, as you can post jobs for very low INR prices as compared to recruiting in the West or in more affluent countries.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#37Talk to Ives and Bas at CodeSandbox. Very similar situation — Dutch college students whose side project took off. They raised venture funding.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#38I find that amazing that in a crowded SaaS market you can still find opportunity everywhere, yet alone making a SaaS that makes money a $250kARR. Where do these people find ideas?
sheer dumb luck. Any business canvas drawing hipster telling you otherwise, is BSing you (I think)
You are far wiser at 19 than most founders I've met in their 40's.
Some of the best business advice I got was from pitching VCs. Even if pitching is not what you want to do now, it might be useful to open lines of communication and suss out who you may want to work with in the future.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#39Here's a counter-advise ( take it as you will ) :
Do not join any communities. You are a 19 year old who is at 250k ARR at 10 months. You are Bella Hadid. You don't have peers here, among IG influencers pretending to be important at 12K followers. It is lonely there, where you are. There's a reason for that.
P.S. You will make it.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#40Check out Indie Hackers (https://indiehackers.com), it's a great community I've found.