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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

#91

Post by charlesdm »

PacifyFish wrote: post #87
beberlei wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Margins in software businesses are high. All those things combined (especially in Belarus) aren't going to run higher than say 20% of revenue.

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

#92

Post by brianwawok »

kumarm wrote: post #65
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…

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-...

What? That is plenty to pay 7 employees in the US. Not in SF and not all senior developers.

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

#93

Post by jerrre »

ksahin wrote: post #25

Congrats :) And thanks for the blog post. How did you go from 0 to 20K mrr ? It's not really clear in the charts. Looks like the most difficult step for many boostrapers, the difference between "Default alive" and "Default dead" as PG says.

http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html to save the next person looking it up

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

#94

Post by charlesdm »

evermike wrote: post #82
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.

Do you think having access to "cheaper" talent (I don't mean they're worse in skill, but I guess there are less opportunities for capable engineers in Belarus) is a huge competitive advantage?

Do you think you would have been able to build the same business in say London?

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

#95

Post by evermike »

sleepless_on wrote: post #90

Congrats with your milestone and nice landing page you have there. Did you start a business before everhour?

We were running a small web development company - Weavora for a couple of years. At first were 100% dedicated, then tried a few ideas (i.e. combined existing business and new initiatives) and only now we are mostly a product company.

At some point just stopped accepting new quotes and switched employees to the product.

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

#96

Post by ernsheong »

k__ wrote: post #55
briandear wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate browser extensions because the product now forces me to use a particular browser. Rarely do products like this support Safari for example. It also requires a strong level of trust as well.

Aren't extensions standardized for a years now?

Safari hasn’t joined the standards yet. You can do one code base for FF and Chrome, but Safari is a totally different beast.

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

#97

Post by ernsheong »

evermike wrote: post #46
ernsheong wrote: post #44

Browser extensions are underrated, and ideal for such use cases! More people should consider it as part of their tech arsenal. Congrats!

I agree. And once again I will note that browser extension was the crucial idea behind our growth. But there are some difficulties. For example, sometimes our customers do not understand that the extension is needed and delete it :) Or, for example, they have several computers and on each, they need to install our extension. And they simply forget it.

Interesting real challenges. Definitely the cons of an extension for a product like Everhour.

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

#98

Post by evermike »

ksahin wrote: post #25

Congrats :) And thanks for the blog post. How did you go from 0 to 20K mrr ? It's not really clear in the charts. Looks like the most difficult step for many boostrapers, the difference between "Default alive" and "Default dead" as PG says.

To be honest, the whole secret is in the product itself. At the very beginning we wanted to do everything faster - more features, more blog posts, more visitors, more backlinks etc. Did not work well.

Then we decided to stop - pause any ads and promotion and 100% concentrate on the product, improve everything we have, do not add any big features. We talked a lot with our customers, found out what they liked/disliked the most. I would say that this is what helped our product. At that time we completely rewrote the whole project.

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

#99

Post by GordonS »

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?

Serious question: why would you assume profits are shared among employees, rather than the 99% case of them simply being paid a salary?

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

#100

Post by jorisw »

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.

Hi Mike!

Thanks for sharing your story and congratulations on your success.

I have two questions:

1 - How should I reconsile your statement that you should be the user of your own product, with pivoting several times due to misunderstanding market demands? Were you still your own customer after those pivots?

2 - Since you mention pivots, have you been applying lean startup / customer development practices?

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