Thanks for the great writeup and inspiration. Nothing much more here to add, but I like the idea of hobbit software that you presented and the fact that you stick to what you want to do. It's a great thing to see someone not search for growth at all costs.
One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
81–90 of 221 posts
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#82Congrats!
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#83I wish the best for OP but I really wonder if advertising your one-man-SaaS to the wider world is a good idea. Especially on a forum like HN where competent people are few clicks away from stealing your idea.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#84Earlier 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.
> Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately.
In theory? Maybe.
In reality? Your scale and delivery depend on the competence of your devs and your processes and there's a very good chance you could do it better than all the big companies from your garage as a solo dev if it has a relatively small feature set.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#85I wish the best for OP but I really wonder if advertising your one-man-SaaS to the wider world is a good idea. Especially on a forum like HN where competent people are few clicks away from stealing your idea.
* Unlike how technical people often understand these stories, development is a smaller part of the story. From my own experience, it is a huge journey to understand marketing and sales. We generally undervalue marketing and sales in programming forums. Every founder has to pay their dues to cross this chasm and see success.
* Very few startups, probably a infinitesimal number, are overnight successes. Startups are actually a long grind. There are a lot more lows than highs and the lows tend to be really low. The effect is even worse when you go solo. It took the author 5 years to breach the 5K MRR ceiling. That's a long timeframe and it takes a great amount of fortitude, patience and persistence to stay focused, keep learning and handle uncertainty in the face of lack of visible progress (you are actually learning even in failures but it often doesn't feel good).
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#86I wish the best for OP but I really wonder if advertising your one-man-SaaS to the wider world is a good idea. Especially on a forum like HN where competent people are few clicks away from stealing your idea.
Stealing ideas is a lot of work.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#87I wish the best for OP but I really wonder if advertising your one-man-SaaS to the wider world is a good idea. Especially on a forum like HN where competent people are few clicks away from stealing your idea.
healthchecks.io seems like a service which gets recommended on the web enough so that larger or even better competitors would have a hard time stealing his customers. It could lead to a slowdown in growth, but I suspect the growth so far is largely a result of success story posts like this.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#88This is both inspirational and aspirational!
Can the more knowledgeable members of the forum guide on how to find and validate such idea and start with the execution?
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#89Earlier 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
there's no moat. Indie hackers can build a tool like this in a month and i think there are already many copycats.
Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
#90He 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? S…
I'm confused. The article's author name is Pēteris Caune while the account you link is of one Dave Anderson.
What is the connection between the two?