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

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#71

Post by twojobsoneboss » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 3:55 AM UTC

asdev wrote: post #62

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.

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.

His moat is his price. And it absolutely is a moat because most bigger competitors would not bother competing in the segment with even lower prices, as there’d be no upside

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#72

Post by gepardi » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 3:55 AM UTC

This is the DREAM.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#73

Post by xiaoape » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:08 AM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #59

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 produc…

> 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

This is so true. To me, finishing writing the code means releasable code. I have done the testing along the way.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#74

Post by xiaoape » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:13 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.

> You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper.

I don't think you have to have a unique selling point all the times. You can make an exact product as the market leader and layer on top a distribution that you own or you sell the product to a underserved groups. It will work too. In fact, this way of doing business happens a lot to non software products.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#75

Post by xiaoape » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:19 AM UTC

twojobsoneboss wrote: post #71

asdev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His moat is his price. And it absolutely is a moat because most bigger competitors would not bother competing in the segment with even lower prices, as there’d be no upside

> His moat is his price.

His moat is a combination of pricing + cost structure + time spent to cumulate the customer base.

If someone were to enter the market and try to take his business, they will have to consider if their conditions can result in the same offerings. I don't think it's easy to match the same offerings.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#76

Post by theultdev » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:19 AM UTC

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #22

Narhem wrote: post #18

Inspired beyond belief. Personally I'd rather commit suicide than work for the slave drivers at apple and google who screwed my life over then gave me jobs proving their guilt.

Or you could, you know, have a normal job.

A normal job for some is working for themselves.

It's unbearable to have to work for someone imo.

I wish to be in charge of my life as much as possible.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#77

Post by abrookewood » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:25 AM UTC

He has a twitter thread where he describes Hobbit Software: "Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them. Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub"

https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/112766460393943288

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#78

Post by yao420 » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:37 AM UTC

billllll wrote: post #70

yao420 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can’t think of a single software that does not have fierce competition. Just today, YouTube, slack, chrome, Claude, burpsuite, interm, obsidian, nest, outlook, Zillow, AWS, cloudflare,GitHub, Roborock, jetbrains.

They could all be replaced and do 90% of the job immediately and a week later figure out the last 10%.

As as for work, coinbase is not the only exchange, square is one of many, meta is another social media site.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#79

Post by mickael-kerjean » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 4:51 AM UTC

taxman22 wrote: post #20

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?)

If you’re not pushing code/changes the likelihood of incidents is significantly less. Also, not having a few enterprise contracts that make up most of the revenue, helps ease customer support load.

Do you know what a typical enterprise contract for a nice tool like this could go for? I have an open source saas tool in a different niche but so far the biggest contract I have is 500$ per month and that's for companies who need a lot of customisations, a very white glove service and a few days o work to morph the tool onto exactly what it is they want (typically via plugin so changes are easily manageable). One one hand it feels great to charge 500$ per month but then you sometime see numbers from companies like gitlab who are able to charge 100x that or even more, it's very hard to know how much to charge for something in the b2b sass space and I have that feeling that 1 large enterprise customer is the only thing you need in some spaces to sustain a company of 1 or even 2 that are not aiming for unicorn level

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#80

Post by chubs » Tue, Jul 30, 2024, 5:10 AM UTC

I've tried creating a few one-man SaaS's in the past and have always struggled to get customers to visit (let alone try it out and pay), any tips from people here who have had success? Thanks :)