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One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

blog.healthchecks.io

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Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#91

Post by timcambrant »

theultdev wrote: post #76
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could, you know, have a normal job.

A normal job for some is working for themselves. It's unbearable to have to work for someone imo. I wish to be in charge of my life as much as possible.

Sure, but Narhem's comment read as if only self-employment and Big Tech exists. Most developers are employed at smaller firms and are living comfortable lives and don't feel overwhelmingly exploited.

Personally, I would love to be self-employed. But I am addicted to stability and am afraid of sales and sadly can't see myself in that role ever.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#92

Post by tuyenhx »

chubs wrote: post #80

I've tried creating a few one-man SaaS's in the past and have always struggled to get customers to visit (let alone try it out and pay), any tips from people here who have had success? Thanks :)

The key is putting your SaaS in front of people who need it. Here are something I did: - Find a group that your potential customers there (on Reddit, Facebook,) ... post your work there. - Create content on IG/Tiktok/Facebook/... - Final is using paid ads FB ads/Google Ads/...

They call these works are "marketing".

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#93

Post by seanhunter »

asdev wrote: post #62
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #58

Earlier 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.

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.

What if he doesn't actually want to dominate the market?

The idea of an "economic moat" comes from Warren Buffett[1] and it was/is part of his investing philosophy to look for companies with some sort of unique feature which allows them to dominate markets and create effective monopolies on their particular niche. It makes sense in that context but it doesn't necessarily apply everywhere.

What if you're just trying to create a business that gives you a good lifestyle and you're not looking to dominate? Maybe the market is big enough that if you just take a piece of it that's plenty. There are plenty of businesses out there that are offering a product that is one of a range but the market is large enough to sustain multiple offerings.

Not everyone needs a moat because not everyone is trying to build a castle.

[1] I believe he first used it here in his shareholder letter where he describes GEICO's low costs as creating a moat that competitors couldn't cross. May have been earlier but most people credit the invention of the term to him anyway https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2016ltr.pdf

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#94

Post by arrowsmith »

talldatethrow wrote: post #67
RangerScience wrote: post #2

Inspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)

I also have a one man show Saas with 34 companies paying that pays my bills. It runs on namecheap shared hosting. If it goes down, I trust namecheap to fix it asap. If it goes down and someone called me, I don't really know what I would do anyway.... In 6 years it has never been a problem. PHP and jQuery. I use phpmyadmin via cpanel to manage the database.

Care to share the product here?

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#95

Post by arrowsmith »

MrDresden wrote: post #90
abrookewood wrote: post #77

He 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?

The blog post by Peteris Caune includes a link to the Mastodon thread by Dave Anderson. The post you're replying to reposts the same Mastodon link, although it kind of implies that it was written by the same person who wrote the blog post, which isn't true.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#96

Post by [deleted] »

yao420 wrote: post #78
billllll wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt "literally" every software you used or worked for has multiple competitors doing the "exact" same thing. VC money can temporarily prop up multiple competitors doing the same thing, but over time, winners definitely spring up. A lot of software that on the surface does the "exact same thing" often has different nuances, either to the business or the product that makes them appeal to different niches in…

I can’t think of a single software that does not have fierce competition. Just today, YouTube, slack, chrome, Claude, burpsuite, interm, obsidian, nest, outlook, Zillow, AWS, cloudflare,GitHub, Roborock, jetbrains. They could all be replaced and do 90% of the job immediately and a week later figure out the last 10%. As as for work, coinbase is not the only exchange, square is one of many, meta is another social media…

[deleted]

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#97

Post by edanm »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #58
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #33

Really intrigued by how he got into this: “I thought I could do it just as well and cheaper,” effectively trading product market fit issues for direct competition.

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.

It's not "strange" nor an "affectation". Most software startups are consciously trying to innovate, create a new product that didn't exist before. That's a perfectly valid thing to try and do.

The fact that it's not what most new businesses try to do is true, but doesn't mean anything. 99% of people who go to university don't do it to create new science, but 1% eventually go the academic route and do create new science (hopefully). That's not an affectation, it's just a different goal.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#98

Post by stevoski »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #83

I 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.

The idea of hiding your business makes no sense. You need people to hear about it if you want customers.

Getting mentioned on forums like HN is exactly how a business like this gets more customers.

Re: One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

#100

Post by reassess_blind »

In a similar boat, a run a few SaaS’s as a one man band. Around 1,000 subscribers. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, being responsible for uptime while you’re sleeping can be stressful, thinking you may have overlooked a massive security vulnerability is constantly in the back of your mind. I wouldn’t trade it for anything though, it’s a very fortunate position to be in.

I also don’t feel the pressure to grow the product features anymore similar to OP. In fact I struggle sometimes now from being overly comfortable and feeling stagnant.

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