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One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

blog.healthchecks.io

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Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#51

Post by sgarland »

rco8786 wrote: post #48
rvnx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the blog posts: > Main values: Simple is good. Efficient is good. Less is more. > The core infrastructure runs on Hetzner bare metal machines. Hetzner offers amazing value for money and is a big part of the reason why Healthchecks.io can offer its current pricing. > No containers, no auto-scaling, no “serverless”. Plain old servers, each dedicated to a single role: “load balancer”, “application server” and “data…

So much nostalgia reading that. I wish we could go back

Nothing is stopping you. Reject modernity, embrace stability.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#52

Post by Aurornis »

alberth wrote: post #41

I wouldn't be surprised if he 2x his price and wouldn’t have much churn. Increasing your pricing is the #1 way to grow revenue and weed out customers who abuse customer support. https://healthchecks.io/pricing/ With that being said, he clearly knows what he’s doing - don’t take advice from strangers :)

> Increasing your pricing is the #1 way to grow revenue and weed out customers who abuse customer support.

Unlikely with businesses like this. This business model is to offer a budget alternative to the big name services that doesn’t have the same level of support and reliability (it admits not having failover, for example) to customers who are okay with that in exchange for the lower price.

Once you start raising prices significantly, it no longer becomes the budget option. Customers may not churn right away, but growth would slow substantially as people started comparing to the full-featured mainstream services at similar price points.

The common startup wisdom is that raising prices dramatically is a magic wand to improve your customer base and grow your revenue, but that doesn’t work in the budget domain.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#53

Post by myaccountonhn »

sakopov wrote: post #44

> Web servers upgraded to Hetzner’s AX42 (AMD 8700GE, 8 cores). On the old machines, saw a few nonsensical Python exceptions. A kernel update and a reboot didn’t fix it. Rather than messing with hardware troubleshooting, I upgraded to newer, faster, and more efficient machines. > Database servers upgraded to Hetzner’s EX101 (Intel 13900, 8+16 cores). I was setting up new database replicas after an outage and failover…

If you're using Go, Rust, OCaml etc. then you can deploy a static binary and have a systemd-service or similar take care of keeping it running with nginx as a reverse-proxy. I do that with NixOS which enables me to also have my infra as code.

Another simpler alternative is to just run a cgi-bin on hetzner webhosting (https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting/level-9/).

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#54

Post by aprdm »

rco8786 wrote: post #48
rvnx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the blog posts: > Main values: Simple is good. Efficient is good. Less is more. > The core infrastructure runs on Hetzner bare metal machines. Hetzner offers amazing value for money and is a big part of the reason why Healthchecks.io can offer its current pricing. > No containers, no auto-scaling, no “serverless”. Plain old servers, each dedicated to a single role: “load balancer”, “application server” and “data…

So much nostalgia reading that. I wish we could go back

fwiw that's what most of the big companies do on their product that actually make money. All the "kubernetes revolution" is pretty new, as are contianers, and companies move very slowly. The core products only move if they really see an advantage

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#55

Post by gen220 »

localfirst wrote: post #31
iamsam123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sm…

I think they're being sarcastic because reducing the tradeoff to "a small bit of your equity" in exchange for "100x MRR" is misleading, to the extent that it reads as sarcastic ignorance.

FWIW, I vouched your original comment because I think your comment represents an authentic view shared by other people on HN / in tech.

My question for you: how do you price the stress-potential of hiring, managing, and firing / being fired by (1) a board (2) employees (3) cofounders / other executives; each with their own set of competing incentives and accompanied principal-agent problems?

It's certainly not zero. For many people, it's more expensive than the hypothetical marginal increase in MRR.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#56

Post by _heimdall »

Very cool to see, thanks for continuing to share updates!

It's refreshing to see one person or small teams happily prioritizing work/life balance over the never ending treadmill of profit and growth.

Finding what "enough" means to you is hard, holding that line over nearly a decade of success is even harder.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#57

Post by forgetfreeman »

rco8786 wrote: post #48
rvnx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the blog posts: > Main values: Simple is good. Efficient is good. Less is more. > The core infrastructure runs on Hetzner bare metal machines. Hetzner offers amazing value for money and is a big part of the reason why Healthchecks.io can offer its current pricing. > No containers, no auto-scaling, no “serverless”. Plain old servers, each dedicated to a single role: “load balancer”, “application server” and “data…

So much nostalgia reading that. I wish we could go back

Oh, we will. This is just another swing of the fat-vs-thin client pendulum.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#58

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #33

Really intrigued by how he got into this: “I thought I could do it just as well and cheaper,” effectively trading product market fit issues for direct competition.

That's how essentially 99% of businesses get started. The obsession with PMF and being "unique" is a very strange affectation specific to software startups.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#59

Post by ramraj07 »

RangerScience wrote: post #2

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?)

One man army apps are generally dead simple to maintain and bug-fix. You write all the code, so when someone pings you with a problem you know exactly what caused it without any need to check for anything. I’ve maintained apps like that for years and have sometimes pushed a code change directly on the GitHub app on the phone and just checking if the site is fixed after.

Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete - thus you actually get fewer bugs. In my experience most issues in software come because the engineer misunderstood the requirements that someone else wrote anyway.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#60

Post by billllll »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #58
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #33

Really intrigued by how he got into this: “I thought I could do it just as well and cheaper,” effectively trading product market fit issues for direct competition.

That's how essentially 99% of businesses get started. The obsession with PMF and being "unique" is a very strange affectation specific to software startups.

Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately.

You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper. Otherwise, your competitors are just a click away.

I'd argue the author HAS found PMF, just not the kind that gets you to $1b.

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