What is your startup?
[deleted]
Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
51–60 of 82 posts
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#52I 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)
Haha thanks for the reply. And congratulations!
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#53Entrepreneurs' Organization has been incredibly helpful to me. I've been a member for six years now - it changed my life. It's not cheap, but well worth it if your local chapter is well run.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#54For those requesting a link to the company of OP, it's this: https://schoolyear.nl/ I assume it's ok that I post this, it was easy to find (2 clicks from your profile snerual)! Good job, I think it's cool what you're doing! If I may ask: how do you prevent students from cheating on a test by using their phone for example? Or is your service for in-class tests where phones are forbidden?
Anti-cheating software is a fundamentally flawed approach. As remote education becomes more common educators should leave the concept of an "exam" behind and embrace project-based and open book curriculum.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#55For those requesting a link to the company of OP, it's this: https://schoolyear.nl/ I assume it's ok that I post this, it was easy to find (2 clicks from your profile snerual)! Good job, I think it's cool what you're doing! If I may ask: how do you prevent students from cheating on a test by using their phone for example? Or is your service for in-class tests where phones are forbidden?
Anti-cheating software is a fundamentally flawed approach. As remote education becomes more common educators should leave the concept of an "exam" behind and embrace project-based and open book curriculum.
[deleted]
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
> One thing I noticed is that the YC batch tend not to post or comment much here. They're on BookFace, YC's private forums. HN is just YC's public ad server.
That's not accurate. BF is great but it's not a parallel HN where a secret world of similar discussion is going on. To overgeneralize a bit, topics there tend to be narrower and oriented around specific concrete situations. A lot of it is about hiring, offices, things like that. There are a lot of Launch posts, especially by startups in the current batch who don't feel ready to go to a bigger format yet.
Actually I think YC would probably like BF to become more HN-like and may find ways to encourage intellectually richer discussion (I've been asked a few times to advise about that). But if YC founders aren't posting to HN, it's not because they're busy participating in an alternative-universe HN. It's more likely as the GP said, that they're busy working—as they should be.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#57For those requesting a link to the company of OP, it's this: https://schoolyear.nl/ I assume it's ok that I post this, it was easy to find (2 clicks from your profile snerual)! Good job, I think it's cool what you're doing! If I may ask: how do you prevent students from cheating on a test by using their phone for example? Or is your service for in-class tests where phones are forbidden?
Anti-cheating software is a fundamentally flawed approach. As remote education becomes more common educators should leave the concept of an "exam" behind and embrace project-based and open book curriculum.
Art school is a series of project-based classes that culminate in a portfolio of original work that the student can showcase, and that system seems to make perfect sense to everybody.
I don't know why other disciplines have been so resistant (forget textbook publishers, I mean the professors, deans, and other administrators themselves.) It's not clear to me there are any reasons to be against it, so perhaps it's simply the inertia of large, bureaucratic, conformist institutions.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#58You'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…
HN is pretty relentlessly negative, and compared to the market in general overindexes on technology/security/privacy and underindexes on distribution/marketing. Some of the top upvoted advice on certain threads (not all) is just bad, usually because it's not pragmatic enough, and should be taken with a large grain of salt.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#59Congrats, thats some impressive growth in a short time. If you want to know what not to do, I'm happy to chat, email in my profile. I've made almost every possible mistake in the last 20 years ;-) Despite all the mistakes my current company is a couple of stages past the 250k ARR and I'm on the right track. In the end most advice in this situation is not rocket science, like for example: - reserve time to work on you…
I'm probably not understanding something. How is $250k ARR enough to build a team with? I would think you would need to be a magnitude higher at least to support a team off of that, especially if you are bootstrapped and have no cash reserves.
Re: Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
#60Hi, since someone else mentioned your product's website I looked over it and I'm curious.
As far as I understand students need to install your app and the app requires users to log out and when they log in, it's launched automatically in full screen mode and users cannot escape until they submit their answers.
What if I install your app in a sandboxed environment (like a windows box in a vmware virtual machine)? While the app is in fullscreen mode inside it, I think there would be nothing preventing me from using host machine's functions (like accessing internet via browsers or opening documents). Have you considered these kind of risks?