Why pay tens of dollars per month on AWS for side projects? A 5$ linode is the max I'll pay for any side project - especially if it does not make money.
My experience releasing failed SaaS products
91–100 of 104 posts
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
A brief exercise in shipping an MVP and seeing if it gets traction before refining the feature set =). Thanks for reading my ramblings despite the lack of proofreading hopefully its a bit better for others now.
"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead". As a "tech guy", I never understood the notion of MVPs. Sure, start small makes sense, but delivering something half baked just demonstrates one doesn't care enough for their readers/customers. Why would anyone like to put himself in such a position?
Because people emphasize "minimum", when the important part was "viable product".
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#93One potentially valuable analysis of this issue is Ralph Grabowski's Marketing to Engineering ratio. Engineering is required to make a product, but marketing is required to understand potential customers and how to express the benefits of the product. Marketing is like the tires on a vehicle. No matter how good the product it is still necessary to know who is going to buy the damned thing and how to reach them so they know about it. Early on in development successful projects spend put more money and focus on marketing than engineering because customers needs and vocabulary need to influence development as soon as possible.
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#94I wrote about my experience creating a SaaS product in 2018: https://medium.com/@david_39141/after-15-years-im-finally-re... Like the OP, the first version of my service launched to crickets (though I had spent almost two full years building that beta version). The 3,500 people who had signed up for e-mail updates took a quick look, and then left, never to return, when they realized that the service was very bare-bon…
If you don't like Medium, here's a version of that write-up hosted on our blog: https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2018/04/09/launching-after-15-y...
As a result of this HN post, 158 people visited the blog post I linked to, and only 112 people visited the Medium story. This is despite the fact that the blog link is buried in a child post, and only appeared later.
Moral of the story: when posting to HN, avoid Medium links.
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#95From what I can perceive, he has a poor habit of not sticking to something. Yes, there are ups and downs in all entrepreneurial journeys. Focusing and persevering as opposed to becoming emotional (both in the ups and downs) paves success.
"If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:"
-'If' by Rudyard Kipling
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#96I am just wondering how someone can build something that people actively hate? And then for people to create a thread where people are tearing the app and the person apart? This just gobsmacks me. Especially since, I'm building things and no one really seems to care enough to do anything. So they've obivously manage to stroke enough emotion that people care enough to write about him and his products.
> I am just wondering how someone can build something that people actively hate? And then for people to create a thread where people are tearing the app and the person apart?
Maybe you didn't get to the part where he said this:
> at this time I would learn and do anything to get more users to my site, to the point where I was getting banned from multiple forums for posting after people told me to get lost for promoting content.
My takeaway is that he came across as a scammer and as a result a few users warned about his product on the forums he was spamming.
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#97Spamming forums, and requiring people to surrender PII in exchange for a trial product, is anti-marketing. Delivering a product that crashes on install, is anti-marketing. Writing a blog-post that is hard to read due to lack of critical editing and poor grammar and punctuation is anti-marketing. There's probably a reason this guy hasn't given any information about what his failed products were supposed to do: it didn…
I don't disagree with asking for a email in exchange for a trial product, but I do disagree with his overall mentality. This person never cared about his users. He cared how they made him feel, that's a huge difference. Nothing about this leads me to believe that he wanted them to succeed, or to help them in any way. He wanted his ego stroked and his bank account increased.
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#98I have been building and failing multiple websites/mobile apps since 2006. To this day, I don't think I could ever be in that situation of creating something that somehow takes off. Theres gotta be a place for failed web/mobile app developers to get together and figure out a way to make it, anyone know of such a place?
Why not simply work at a company?
I suspect that most other failed devs are indeed working at a 9-5 but looking to get the F U money from a side project and enjoy life, at least that is my situation. Also FU money is relative, I am not looking for 1B, just a small 3M nest egg is enough for me to retire.
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not simply work at a company?
I suspect that most other failed devs are indeed working at a 9-5 but looking to get the F U money from a side project and enjoy life, at least that is my situation. Also FU money is relative, I am not looking for 1B, just a small 3M nest egg is enough for me to retire.
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Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#100I have been building and failing multiple websites/mobile apps since 2006. To this day, I don't think I could ever be in that situation of creating something that somehow takes off. Theres gotta be a place for failed web/mobile app developers to get together and figure out a way to make it, anyone know of such a place?
By the nature of it, only a few apps/products will ever be successful. The number of people/companies trying to create such apps/producs is very large today as software has the lowest possible initial investment of any kind of business (essentially zero if you have the skills already). But the number of people/companies willing to pay for some new product they don't already have is tiny. It is extremely difficult for…
I don't fully subscribe to this train of thought; I believe the pie is big enough for everyone. Now I don't have a definitive answer on why some make it and some dont, obviously, and not sure if anyone does.