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One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

blog.healthchecks.io

31–40 of 221 posts

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats OPM?

Apparently taking outside money can 100X MRR with no trade offs! Awesome!

It really is that easy. The trade-offs are no less annoying then answering customers emails or calls. In some cases you don't even have any sort of "checking in" arrangements if you've demonstrated good profitability.

Like I'm not sure why you are so upset and sarcastic here. I get that the author doesn't care and thats fine. But there are already many scaling their existing revenues coming in and then tradeoff is small bit of your equity for 100x MRR which is common with SaaS where multiplies in its sales pipelines is very easy once you've identified where your customers are!

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#35

Inspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)

Probably just uses some on call pager support (PagerDuty, xMatters, …) and configure it to alert if infra goes down.

Then just remote into systems, and fix issues. He’s pretty much “on call” 24/7/365

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#36
post #14

The linked email story was also interesting: https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr... The author's end solution goes against all common HN wisdom (!) This is the way things should work. There should be millions of email senders and receivers, not just 32 mafiosas (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, MailChimp, etc). There are endless counter-examples on HN advocating against hosting something as simple as e…

“As simple as email…” You could at least be realistic instead of blatantly sounding like a zealot.

The notes on self-hosting[1], from somebody making $14k/month relying on Maddy, says it pretty realistically. The author goes into a fair amount of detail covering what he did and it sounds pretty simple compared to what it was ten years ago.

I'm not sure zealotry is the best way to push back against conventional wisdom, but otoh the parent comment didn't sound zealous to me.

In fact the more I read about Maddy[2] the more it seems to simplify running a mail server compared to when I did it back in the day. I mean you still have to worry about landing an IP address with a bad reputation but it takes care of soooo much of the rest of it.

[1] https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr...

[2] https://maddy.email/faq/

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#38
post #34

Good to see simple services generating 5 digit revenue! I would have liked to see a breakdown of expenses per month and profit though.

Infrastructure costs 500 EUR / month of servers, then on top you have to add the tools (e-mail, etc), so should be between 500 and 1000 EUR / month.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#39

I really respect your choice to optimize for balance and enjoyment. My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!" Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day! When I was a corpor…

He found the right niche, a passive product-led no-stress B2B low-maintenance & non-critical tool (because it is monitoring).

It is so difficult to find such niches, so congrats for the success!

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#40

Inspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)

> if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?

They probably set up a HealthChecks.io alert.

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