Great to see this!
Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
31–40 of 233 posts
Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
#32Matt, this is simply an awesome story. It’s surprisingly common that people take years to get to the point where they can go full-time. I find your story far more relatable than the “I started a SaaS and reached tons of revenue in one year - and you can too!” stories we are plagued with.
It sounds a lot like many (most?) small/medium companies that take a decade of work to find their footing. You typically don't see them on the front page of HN though.
Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
#33Congratulations Matt. Would love to learn more about the lessons/tips you learned in the past 8 years. Is your primary reason to go full-time based on reaching a financial target or is it because you have more ideas for future now?
I'll write a lessons learned post in the future, thanks for suggesting it.
The decision to go full time now stemmed from a combination of factors: partly financial milestones, partly not having enough time in the day to focus on the things I want to work on, partly burnout (consulting + bootstrapping a SaaS takes a toll long term), partly just ready to enter a new season of my life, partly because I'm excited about the recent developments in AI want want more time to explore that space, partly because I think Preceden still has a ton of room for growth, just to name a few. For every person these factors will be different.
Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
#34Matt, this is simply an awesome story. It’s surprisingly common that people take years to get to the point where they can go full-time. I find your story far more relatable than the “I started a SaaS and reached tons of revenue in one year - and you can too!” stories we are plagued with.
Thanks for saying so! And yes, for every bootstrapped startup that sees a rocket ship trajectory and makes headlines, there are probably 100 that are struggling to grow. Would love to read more about those journeys.
Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
#35I love this story and I wish you all the best. It goes to show that everybody has their own pace and journey.
I feel like a lot of people are happy in their work even without a side gig, but it's kind of not cool to say.
I'm totally happy with my role and couldn't be happier and more committed to my current job.
The beautiful thing is that I have my own pace as well on a side gig. After 10 years of thinking and planning I just started on one faithful day with a HN comment 23 weeks ago.
Today my weekly newsletter for remote working parents has 23 newsletter sends and over 100 subscribers (muscle)
Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
#36You love to see it. Matt is a great example of someone who has bootstrapped and built a strong business while mitigating risk for his personal life. Much of the start up dogma tells you this isn't possible, but it is.
It's come a long way since the days of our old Orlando Tech meetups :)
Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
#37LeanDomainSearch has found me so many good product/domain names over the years. Thank you so much for creating it, and best of luck to you with going full time!
Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
#38A product built by an ex-soldier who was part of an occupying force that committed countless war crimes? No thank you. Question for other HN users - would you use a product built by an officer of the Russian army who was part of the war in Ukraine? Edit: Those downvoting me, did I say anything that is not true?
The dream of the 90's is alive in Portland - The tattoo ink never runs dry
Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no API at the moment to programmatically build your timeline, but that might be something I add down the road. Here's the relevant post on Preceden's public roadmap if you care to give it an upvote: https://roadmap.preceden.com/b/y0ge5xve/feature-ideas/api Hope it winds up being a good fit even without an API.
already upvoted it. unfortunately it won't work without the APIs because it needs to be part of our product and there the data is constantly being updated dynamically by different actors / processes .
Noted - thanks for the nudge to work on it!
Re: Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
#40Congrats!