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Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

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Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#81

Post by evermike »

yazr wrote: post #60
evermike wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's very important to choose the stack with which you have the most experience. In this way, you will protect yourself from the situation when something went wrong on PROD and you do not know how to fix it. I generally for reliability and predictability. Sorry, maybe it does not answer your question?

I meant to ask which frameworks are most used in Ukraine and makes it easier to recruit programmers ? We cant use PHP.

We aren't from Ukraine, so I don't know. We are from Belarus.

I'm not an expert here. To get the right picture, I would recommend searching for some kind of UpWork report. Like this - https://www.upwork.com/press/2018/05/01/q1-2018-skills-index...

But if you consider remote employees, you want have problems with any framework.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#82

Post by evermike »

giarc wrote: post #76

>$1 million by itself isn’t a big thing. Don't be so humble. $1 million ARR is f hard. Take credit where credit is due.

Thanks! It feels that you are speaking from your own experience. Indeed, it's hard. But not everyone understands this.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#83

Post by debacle »

beberlei wrote: post #68
kumarm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where you are located. If its a US Based company, obviously not enough revenue to sustain 7 employees. The company is based in Belarus where salaries are lower than US: https://blogs.elenasmodels.com/en/average-monthly-salary-in-...

obviously? Not every employee must be a high paid engineer. And there are certainly non SV based engineers that are totally fine with less than 100k $ per year? Being based in Germany, I calculate around 100k€ revenue per employee myself, maybe a bit more.

It's likely that at least two of the people at this SaaS have put in an average of 60+ hours a week from its inception.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#84

Post by scrollaway »

pcprincipal wrote: post #61

Question for this company / anyone who runs similar businesses - is $1MM ARR enough to pay 7 people? I'd be interested to know what they do in EBITDA and how they think about salaries. This is actually a general question I have about start-ups. The economics of having a business that makes $1 - $10mm in revenue and hires 7 - 100ish people is still difficult for me to understand. Yes, you can raise equity or debt beca…

I bootstrapped, ran, and left a 3-year-old $1MM ARR SaaS. It's more than enough to pay 7 US engineer salaries if you don't have offices to worry about.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#85

Post by evermike »

docker_up wrote: post #75

I would love to know how the revenues/profits are shared among the employees. Is there an equity plan or profit sharing plan with the non-founding employees?

We do no offer any revenues/profits sharing for employees. Just very competitive salary. But maybe we will consider this in the future. In addition, it is still not very common in Belarus. Even in terms of legislation.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#86

Post by debacle »

evermike wrote: post #2

Hey guys, My name is Mike. I'm co-founder and product at Everhour. I'd be happy to answer your questions if any. Feel free to ask here or on Medium.

Mike, thank you for all of this.

1. Can you talk more about the ramp up from the idea of Everhour to actually working on the project full time. Did you guys slowly wean yourself off of consulting work, or was there a decision to jump into Everhour as a SaaS early on?

2. How do you handle nonpayment for annual subscription renewal? Do you reach to the company, or shut them down immediately?

3. What kind of features do a free vs paid userbase generally request?

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#87

Post by PacifyFish »

beberlei wrote: post #68
kumarm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where you are located. If its a US Based company, obviously not enough revenue to sustain 7 employees. The company is based in Belarus where salaries are lower than US: https://blogs.elenasmodels.com/en/average-monthly-salary-in-...

obviously? Not every employee must be a high paid engineer. And there are certainly non SV based engineers that are totally fine with less than 100k $ per year? Being based in Germany, I calculate around 100k€ revenue per employee myself, maybe a bit more.

1mm is their revenue. It will be reduced by cost of goods sold, rent/electricity, taxes, payment for services like AWS, etc. before employees are paid.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#88

Post by scrollaway »

jaxn wrote: post #53
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an entrepreneur, but, 12 months at 10 months of subscription fee is still more than 6 months at 6 months of subscription fee. Always offer a "loyalty discount" if it means they commit to paying for a minimal amount of time.

But our churn is really really low with an average subscription length several years long. So 12 months at 10 months fee is less than 12 at 12. There is work to help people update info, etc. And an annual check or ACH would save card fees. But it doesn't sound like OP offered a discount, so just curious.

At the end of the day, you know your customer base better than anyone on HN, so you are the best-placed to do this research. I will say that in SaaS, unless you're extremely enterprise, a several-years-worth LTV is very rare. If you are in enterprise, you might gain customers by having annual billing at all.

If you're unsure then I second the other commenters' opinions, do 12 months at full price. If you want to try a discount for some time to see if it helps conversion, that gives you a comparison point. There are advantages in annual billing beyond "it's cheaper", so you can't compare directly to monthly billing.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#89

Post by evermike »

ericintheloft2 wrote: post #80

Hi! Very interesting read and congratulations on the success. How you every had a higher price tag, or have you thought about raising it? It feels like a very low price, but I don't know what the average your customers are ending up paying - I guess they most often have several users per account?

Our ARPU is about $50.

Most of our clients are fairly small or just at an early stage. And this is natural. Bigger companies mostly have time tracking process in some form, and they do not want to change the tool (something that already works).

For small teams our pricing is ok, although we've being often told that this is too much. People want everything free today.

When we thought about our pricing, we looked at competitors, but also considered how much we ourselves would be willing to pay for such a tool.

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