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Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

petekeen.net

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Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#81

Post by voltagex_ »

ronaldx wrote: post #60
bluedevil2k wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no compelling reason to believe that the parent commenter has any smaller chance of success than any other business Really? He stated in his comments that he doesn't plan to do anything for this site. No marketing, no publicity, nothing. His goal is to not lose money. Not to make money, just simply to not lose any. Do you think that has the same chance as success as someone who's only goal is to make money? I…

> Do you think that has the same chance as success as someone who's only goal is to make money? Yes, or at least maybe. The viability of businesses is extremely low in almost all circumstances. Doing something creative and putting it out there with a will to get some income from it perhaps has no lower chance than a more aggressive business strategy. By reducing the cost of running the business to near-zero, you exte…

The only tech business I can think of that meets your description is Pinboard - how do you assess the apps/sites/businesses against your criteria?

Thinking about it some more, most things I "fund" are a bit like this:

* Mailpile

* HabitRPG

* Ubuntu Phone (RIP)

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#83

Post by marincounty »

ma2rten wrote: post #39
nonchalance wrote: post #37

I apologize in advance if I sound snarky, but I (and I suspect many others here) hadn't heard of Marginalia until today. How much did you spend on ads and where did you advertise?

Don't be silly. When he said he spend a lot on advertising he didn't mean that put up a superbowl ad. He probably spend it on Google Adwords for people who where searching for related terms.

Being on this page was his best advertising--ironic?

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#84

Post by njr123 »

Just as an aside, if you have a project that you're not sure is going to take off, there is no reason to shell out $29/month for it. Shared hosting will do the job for $5 - $10 a month. No its not super reliable, but if you have no users, who cares? And if you do get popular, my experience has been that they can handle bursts of traffic surprisingly well, until you can move to proper hosting.

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#85

Post by zachsnow »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #6

This was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". Launching without an audience means nobody shows up. It's a very true statement. One of my favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.

I would rephrase as N customers, where N is enough to earn some significant percentage of your costs. For many kinds of businesses N might be only a handful, it completely depends on your market. For others 30 is nowhere near enough I'd imagine.

Of course, determining significance is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#86

Post by andyidsinga »

falcolas wrote: post #68
egomaksab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually $9/month for Heroku Basic DB plan and $20/month for SSL endpoint not cert (you can use your own domain and SSL cert). You can always piggyback on yourapp.herokuapp.com for free SSL cert.

This is probably my background in sysops talking, but $29 a month for an nginx frontend, rails daemon and PostgreSQL instance sounds like highway robbery...

certainly - I think I paid 3 bucks for my cert for a year and amazon doesn't charge me anything extra for turning on SSL with my node code. I use a micro instance ..with swap ;)

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#87

Post by BetaCygni »

falcolas wrote: post #68
egomaksab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually $9/month for Heroku Basic DB plan and $20/month for SSL endpoint not cert (you can use your own domain and SSL cert). You can always piggyback on yourapp.herokuapp.com for free SSL cert.

This is probably my background in sysops talking, but $29 a month for an nginx frontend, rails daemon and PostgreSQL instance sounds like highway robbery...

Seriously? $29 doesn't register as real money to me. Especially from a business perspective.

Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

#88

Post by ronaldx »

voltagex_ wrote: post #81
ronaldx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think that has the same chance as success as someone who's only goal is to make money? Yes, or at least maybe. The viability of businesses is extremely low in almost all circumstances. Doing something creative and putting it out there with a will to get some income from it perhaps has no lower chance than a more aggressive business strategy. By reducing the cost of running the business to near-zero, you exte…

The only tech business I can think of that meets your description is Pinboard - how do you assess the apps/sites/businesses against your criteria? Thinking about it some more, most things I "fund" are a bit like this: * Mailpile * HabitRPG * Ubuntu Phone (RIP)

Pinboard is a nice example, I have an account there.

Ethical criteria are not high on my list, but I try to apply them to the best of my knowledge when two competing services both meet my needs. E.g. LibreOffice vs Microsoft Office, and Starbucks vs local coffee house (if you count that as tech related), I tend to have an ethical preference for small and/or local businesses: I think it benefits me to support diversity and the local community.

Some nice tech companies that I'm aware of:

* Hog Bay Software

* 7 Generation Games

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