One-man SaaS, 9 Years In • Hacker News Board

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#61

Post by mathgladiator » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 2:10 AM UTC

This has been my dream for the last few years.

I'm making progress as I am also acting as a fractional CTO for a few start ups where I only took equity and only used my platform. All the companies are going to migrate off at some point, but they found market fit and are staffing up full engineering teams.

Over the next few years, I'm going to continue just having fun building. However, I have a few verticals that I plan to launch in and start figuring out marketing for that is... reasonable.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#62

Post by asdev » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 2:19 AM UTC

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.

Being unique is important if you actually want to dominate the market. A product like his has captured a piece of the pie, but someone with equal distribution can easily eat into that since he has no moat.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#63

Post by martin82 » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 2:30 AM UTC

It all sounds very... healthy :)

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#64

Post by insane_dreamer » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 2:32 AM UTC

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 :)

Why does he need to grow revenue if it's already supporting him and growing slowly but surely enough to where he can spend time of stuff that really matters instead of just making more money.

"Continuously growing revenue" is the trap.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#65

Post by iamcreasy » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 2:39 AM UTC

If the author is reading - what was the nonsensical Python exceptions that went away after hardware upgrade?

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#66

Post by brandly » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 2:52 AM UTC

jwr wrote: post #15

Wow, this reads almost as my story. Similar goals, similar time frames, even the hosting provider and the payment processor we use is the same. I have to contact my new-found twin!

Similar MRR?

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#67

Post by talldatethrow » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 3:19 AM UTC

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?)

I also have a one man show Saas with 34 companies paying that pays my bills.

It runs on namecheap shared hosting.

If it goes down, I trust namecheap to fix it asap. If it goes down and someone called me, I don't really know what I would do anyway....

In 6 years it has never been a problem.

PHP and jQuery. I use phpmyadmin via cpanel to manage the database.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#68

Post by yao420 » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 3:30 AM UTC

billllll wrote: post #60

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Literally every software I have ever used or company I worked for has had multiple competitors doing the exact same thing.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#69

Post by sakesun » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 3:47 AM UTC

Hacker News is filled with thousands of inspiring stories. This one is simply the best for me.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#70

Post by billllll » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 3:54 AM UTC

yao420 wrote: post #68

billllll wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Literally every software I have ever used or company I worked for has had multiple competitors doing the exact same thing.

I really doubt "literally" every software you used or worked for has multiple competitors doing the "exact" same thing. VC money can temporarily prop up multiple competitors doing the same thing, but over time, winners definitely spring up.

A lot of software that on the surface does the "exact same thing" often has different nuances, either to the business or the product that makes them appeal to different niches in the market.

Understanding the nuances and exploiting the market niche is your only goal when starting a business. It's not something you ever do or think about when working on software, but people who strike it out on their own quickly realize that simply building is not enough, you MUST give people a good reason to use your software. Just because you don't see or understand the nuances, does not mean they are not there.