ExSaaSperated: A blog about the struggle to start a sustainable SaaS • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by chrismorgan » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

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…

> every single permutation of what one can do with software is being exhausted

This is not in the slightest bit true. It’s just that most people that you hear about are just executing variations on a theme. But there is vast untapped potential, and also many novel things in the software industry being developed that you just never hear about, because the people making them are not present in this chamber.

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

#42

Post by skrebbel » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #21

Almost every SaaS I've worked on did not start as people sitting down saying, "Lets make a SaaS". It started as people fell into a problem space as part of their ongoing work. In those cases, your first customers are already right in front of you, so you build what they need, then iterate to make it more useful for a wider community. There are certainly pain points to find your 10th-100th customer. But if you don't e…

It's more general I think: it's hard to build a SaaS without a head start. In your examples, having ~10 launching customers is such a head start.

But there's also plenty SaaSes that started building tech for something else, that didn't pan out, but they realized they could sell the tech separately. Eg close.io did this and so did my company talkjs.com. There's likely many more examples.

But I agree that if you have to start without something to sell and without customers ready to pay, you're definitely in for a rough ride.

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

#43

Post by puranjay » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 5:16 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 $…

If your target audience is other startups, then it is absolutely worth it.

But if its not, you shouldn't bother at all. Focus on creating content that solves core pain points for your target customers.

(And if you don't know these pain points, you don't have a product)

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

#44

Post by mromanuk » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

sudhirj wrote: post #38

iends wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

Every success story is really about people selling the secret of success, which is to sell the secret of success. Twitter is full of this. Every success guru is selling a course about selling courses.

Yes, there is some guy on Twitter, who recently grew his followers (like 100x) now he sells courses on how to grow your Twitter audience