My experience releasing failed SaaS products

> That was a painful read, sorry.

Agreed. The article felt to me like a reaction to the common refrain that, in tech, you can either be a founder or you can be a wage slave, and the former is clearly better. The product itself is secondary; the only important decision is, do you go the route of passive income ("lifestyle business"), bootstrapped business or VC-backed startup. As someone squarely in the latter camp of boring corporate coder, it can be hard to muster up much empathy, which I realize is a bit ugly of me.

The part I did find interesting was their discussion towards the middle of their free browser extension, and how the joy of others using their creation was exhilarating, while at the same time the feeling of negative criticism can be crushing. As someone who got into professional coding first by uploading code-like creations (the Native Instruments Reaktor user library) and having the same experience, I can vouch that this is the best feeling I've experienced coding and building things, and the criticism can actually help you learn to deal with such things better. It was unfortunate to me that the article then went back into some of the uglier parts about chasing money, clicks and SEO.

My most successful side project - by traffic volume and by usage - is a viral site idea which consistently generates over 1 million users in July of every year, those users generate about 20k in revenue yearly. It solves a problem I had in high school, and lots of other students have too. The project revolves around seeing location locked test scores up to 2 days early.

I think the important aspect that keeps the project useful is by using the same metrics that you would use to evaluate any business. I’m able to run this company completely in my spare time, and it’s reached a point where only a week of work is needed per year to keep it stable. Traditional metrics, front end analytics and some anonymized data collection, as well as social media sentiment review show extremely positive user feedback. As well as continued growth every year.

It’s important to remember that it’s your baby and your idea still has to follow traditional success metrics. And also, for a side project, success metrics don’t have to exclusively be “billion dollar company with VC funding in 3 months that is my full time job that I’ve invested my whole life into.”

Check my other reply to the sibling of my original post for a little more detailed story. I need to check out IndyHacker. B2C products have a longer growth cycle if you’re not full time, as prices are lower but the markets are bigger. My main recommendation is to follow a lot of the advice given for B2B - just involve users in more of the process. I think B2C is traditionally harder for devs because it’s a lot more personal and human than B2C, and requires usually a lot more of the BS work that others have diminished in the comments here: finding and becoming active in relevant communities to your product, creating content and perfecting SEO to use Google to drive natural growth, etc.

Thanks for your kind words. :-)

This post could be written better, but a lot of it resonates with me as a solo technical founder who has gone through dozens of failed projects over the last five years.

I do have a strong tendency to start with an interesting concept instead of a concrete problem, but I run into a lot of walls taking the problem-first approach:

- The problem already has a dozen solutions because the SaaS space is at least 10 years old now and hyper competitive, there'a almost no good solution you could come up with that hasn't been built already.

- If all the good or obvious solutions have been tried already, you could try to build something better still. But in my experience I could only come up with marginally better solutions or I would run into intractable technical challenges (intractable for me, at least).

- How do you even find a valuable problem to solve? I tried keeping a list of problems I encountered in my day job for a year and the solutions for almost all of them required skills well outside of my wheel house.

I think this is because, when I try to take a problem-first approach I tend to think about the solution space linearly. This leads to solutions that are obvious to any reasonably smart engineer, but because they're obvious they've been done or are intractable.

That's why I think there is some value in starting with interesting concepts or solutions, because what you're really looking for is a creative solution to a relatively common problem. It seems just as hard to start with a problem and back into a creative solution as it is to start with a creative concept and find a problem you can solve with it.