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SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoSubmitHub founder weighing in here -- thanks for sharing, Courtland! If anyone has any questions about SubmitHub or Indie Shuffle (technical or business), feel free to ask :) Edit: in case you're curious, here's what the dashboard looks like for bloggers - http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png
- SwellJoe 10y agoMy first thought was that the list of places to submit to is overwhelming. How do you plan to curate that, or do you just assume people coming to you already know exactly who they want to reach out to?
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoGood question! Before submitting to blogs, users are required to filter the list by genre. They can then sort by the # of fans that outlet has, or -- even more handy -- there's a notes column in the far right that gives some vital statistics. You can see it here: http://i.imgur.com/pqMky6h.png http://i.imgur.com/pqMky6h.png If you visit the "directory of blogs" page, you'll see a full selection of the filters: http://www.submithub.com/blogs http://www.submithub.com/blogs
- XERQ 10y agoHave you considered charging by number of fans per outlet, instead of a flat $1/credit? Seems to me the value is in the blog's reach, similar to CPM in advertising. It goes against the simplicity of your platform, so you could make it very simple: $5 for high traffic, $3 for medium, $1 for low (or a variation of that).
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoI've considered it for sure -- holding off on something like that for now, tho.
- SwellJoe 10y agoI think there's a risk of this becoming a payola or pay-to-play sort of situation. I don't know that you're wrong, but it makes the model seem more predatory of musicians. Here's what I like about the very small flat fee: 1. It is small enough for even modestly successful musicians to cover it. It isn't a monetary barrier to entry. 2. It is likely large enough to prevent the shotgun approach. This is one of the bigger problems of finding new talent for record labels and music writers, especially in the digital age when emailing or messaging someone a link to your song approaches zero cost...you can't realistically listen to every unsolicited track, so you have to filter somehow. This, at least, insures you don't get a bunch of stuff in genres you don't care about or know anything about. People have to choose a little more carefully. 3. It provides an incentive for writers and musicians to form a relationship so they'll work together again (with the blogger getting tipped again and the artist getting more coverage or useful feedback); it starts out as a monetary transaction, but once they've connected up and like each other, they could work toward building a scene (and the network that comes with that). In music, a scene is a force multiplier for everyone involved (e.g., Seattle grunge, Madchester, Atlanta dirty south). Increasing the fee for big sites looks more like payola than merely a filtering tool to determine who has gone to the trouble to figure out the best handful of writers or labels to reach out to. If the profit of the site begins to come from the musicians they're reviewing, their incentives start to get lopsided in the wrong direction. I'm not saying all bloggers would do it, but there would be incentive to boost stats (with clickbaity stuff), and to get as many submissions as possible. Incentives should, IMHO, be directed toward increasing quality, maximizing the time a writer can spend on the artists they choose to cover, and providing the best feedback for the artists. Anything that gives incentive to cheat the system will break it and reduce the quality of the network...likely even killing it. If there's even a slight notion that people are scamming musicians with this, it will (maybe deservedly) die.
- jason-grishkoff 10y ago
- dorfsmay 10y agoWhere do you run it? IaaS I'm assuming, but which one(s)?
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoDigital Ocean (had to Google iaaS)
- dboreham 10y agoWhat do you pay in transaction fees to take that $1 user payment?
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoPayments are powered by Braintree (using their securely hosted iframes feature). Fee is 2.9% + $0.30. Same as Stripe and PayPal - they've all pretty much set this as a "standard" for the fee. Probably worth noting that the minimum transaction on SubmitHub is $5. https://www.braintreepayments.com/ https://www.braintreepayments.com/
- dboreham 10y ago>Probably worth noting that the minimum transaction on SubmitHub is $5. Ahhh, thanks. I was wondering how you were doing a service with a $1 charge (I didn't see the $5 minimum mentioned in the portion of the article I read).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- the-dude 10y agoExcuse me for hijacking your comment, but Stripe is actually 1.4% in EU. I can not comment on others, but the cap is an EU directive.
- dzjin 10y agoJust wanted to say that I use indieshuffle a lot, and I love it. I have it open when I'm at work, and I have the app when I'm driving. I wish the Chrome app was better, or if it had a standalone client wrapped in Electron or something.
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoI'm in the process of rebuilding the Android and iPhone apps from scratch using React Native. It's coming along really quickly :)
- 0898 10y agoGreat project. How do you make sure the other blogs give people who've paid $1 feedback?
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoSimple, really: they earn the majority of that $1 for providing feedback :) To build on that, for most of these blogs this is the first time they're earning any mentionable revenue from running their websites. Not only is it making their lives easier -- it's actually rewarding them for their passion yada yada.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago"To build on that, for most of these blogs this is the first time they're earning any mentionable revenue from running their websites." So, you monetized websites that previously weren't with product their users will enjoy. Sounds like a nice design pattern for bootstrapping businesses on non-profit organizations or sites. One to remembet. I especially like you keep it win/win.
- idiehacker 10y agoHey Jason, congrats on the success. I know that blogs are looking for the submissions but aren't they also trying to charge for featuring artists? I mean, if I have a music blog I would charge artists to publish their work and so on. If it is not a thing among music bloggers, I can understand that.
- napoleoncomplex 10y agoJust wanted to chime in and say Indie Shuffle is one of the best resources I've found for new music out there (for my taste). While I have no need for SubmitHub's main purpose, the Popular tab looks like it can serve as another source of fresh stuff. All in all, massive respect for your work promoting new music. As a sidenote, I'd happily donate some money through Patreon/whatever to support an ad-free version of the site (I know, I know, one in a million :).
- raywu 10y agoDitto, this popular chart is very cool: ranked by approval, http://www.submithub.com/popular http://www.submithub.com/popular To me it seems like expanding on the playable features could make SubmitHub itself a very meta/cool place to submit through. A place to engage other artists. It's like HackerNews for music.
- copperx 10y agoStupid question: any particular reasons you picked Meteor and React? Also, can you give us details on the backend/infrastructure? Thanks!
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoBecause it seemed cool. I think I'd seen it pop up on HckrNews and Reddit a few times, so I wanted to give it a whirl. The stack is something along the lines of: nginx + docker + Meteor (node/mongodb) + React.
- asenna 10y ago+1 for Meteor. I'm pretty sure Jason uses Mupx for deployment to DigitalOcean (https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-up/tree/mupx https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-up/tree/mupx). For anyone interested, this package makes it super easy to setup all the tools and deploy to the servers (almost as easy as pushing to Heroku!). I've had good experience in scaling using Mupx and Cluster (another package from the same team - https://github.com/meteorhacks/cluster https://github.com/meteorhacks/cluster)
- b0ner_t0ner 10y agoThought it was meteor hanging (never seen it scale properly), but there are bugs on your FAQ page (duplicate IDs/anchors).
- alcuadrado 10y agoAs an Indie Shuffle user, I feel happy for you!
- rsmoore215 10y agoCongrats on your success so far!! What's next for SubmitHub? Scale and build out the business or keep it small and more of a lifestyle business?
- krisgenre 10y agoHow much does it cost you to run the service?
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoIt's pretty minimal. The most expensive component is usually technical development, and given that I do all that myself... well, that's a big "cost saving" :)
- lmenus 10y agoGood job!
- hnsummarizer 10y agoTldr: "I was born in South Africa and moved to California just before the start of high school, graduating from the University of California, San Diego in 2007 before working a corporate job in DC that ultimately landed me a sweet gig at Google. My responsibility once there was to figure out how much to pay the company's executives, which meant I was lucky to enjoy face time with many of the top brass.,One of the biggest frustrations of running my music blog was that by the time I took it full-time, I was receiving upwards of 300 email pitches a day from artists, record labels, and publicists, all looking to have their music featured on Indie Shuffle.,Then, toward the end of last year, I decided that a good way to learn some new coding languages would be to try and solve this problem by developing a website to streamline the process."
- jordache 10y agowhat does the google background and details about the job role there have anything to do with this?
- gist 10y agoGoing forward I will upvote almost anything that you summarize that I see. Reading it and the responding comments will be a great time saver.
- bbcbasic 10y agoYou could write a bot for that :-)
- 10y ago
- rhizome 10y agoI'm finding that when some resources hang -- I got it with images.unsplash and cloudfront on different pageloads -- it freezes Firefox completely such that it must be killed. Is this a side effect of React/Meteor?
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoRuh roh. There are more than 100 people actively using the site right now, and I haven't heard this issue before. The whole website does hinge on one single .js file, which is hosted by Cloudfront. So if that doesn't load, it's going to crash. The unsplash image would only be coming up if you were getting a 501/404/whatever via nginx. Where are you based?
- rhizome 10y agoSF
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoStumped. Not sure why that would be happening.
- rhizome 10y agoHold fire, it just happened on an unrelated site. I had updated Debian Testing this morning and it turns out a couple other things are hinky, so it's likely not to be your fault.
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoFire held :-D
- sgdesign 10y agoSomething that I think is worth pointing out: that site doesn't have a recurring revenue model and also charges very low fees, two things that go against the common wisdom of "just get people to pay you every month, and add an enterprise plan in there for good measure". The truth is that the classic three-tiered SaaS business model is just one of many possible business models, yet many developers-turned-entrepreneur adopt it without stopping to think whether it's a good fit or not for their product.
- scribu 10y agoActual tl;dr: Founder built a webapp for streamlining music submissions made by artists to music blogs. One important element of success was having a popular music blog himself.
- mathgeek 10y agoWhich translates to "after years of work to establish a brand, this founder turned that brand into a successful business opportunity." A great story and excellent business sense, to be sure. The "10 months" part is typical headline speak.
- cantbecool 10y agoRight, and it doesn't hurt to say he worked for Google either.
- dwightgunning 10y agoOn the contrary, I thought this was a strange and irrelevant fact to include in the article. There's no indication that his role at Google had any bearing on the success of the business. Perhaps if he'd worked on Google Music (or other music related area of the business) or the referenced exposure to "top brass" opened some doors... but it seems unlikely this is the case. There's certainly correlation between Google employees and successful initiatives... but not much beyond that.
- edoceo 10y agoAfter working at BigCo and saving steady pay while nurturing your startup at night for a few years. You have a visibility to traction. And a cushion against failure. So you can take the "risk". It's easy to take a "risk" when it's not really there. It's not like this founder started with $100 and made an ongoing business employing a few others. Started on second, scored on as RBI and media talks about your Grand Slam.
- 10y ago
- wyc 10y agoKudos! I get really excited when I learn about people working hard at creative and useful things like this. I also think it's important to note that, while this is surely no small feat, it sounds like this is the fruition of the author's accumulated experiences, network, and reputation "[over] the course of my ~7 years running a blog", and probably even longer with a strong passion for music and the people in music. This comment is not to downplay the author's accomplishments--I think keeping to something for even 5 years is ridiculously hard, and that should be commended, especially if it resulted in something that people find valuable. Rather, I hope that people reading this won't lose hope when, 10 months into their own businesses, they don't see the same levels of popularity or financial success. This project seems to be the tip of an iceberg. I think luck is also a strong component, but it definitely favors the prepared.
- petercooper 10y agowhile this is surely no small feat, it sounds like this is the fruition of the author's accumulated experiences, network, and reputation True for most success stories. Overnight success is so rare (and often fleeting - all of the rapid online successes I can think of are underwater now - all the best things were slow burns, including this very site). It's about accumulating bricks here and there and building the wall over years. People who never lose hope and who keep building those bricks will reap the rewards in the end.
- textread 10y agoCongratulations Jason Why did you pick Digital Ocean over Meteor Galaxy hosting ? Would you point me to some resources that you looked into while setting up Digital Ocean for Meteor hosting ?
- jason-grishkoff 10y ago1) price; 2) they had a really good tutorial for setting up Meteor on Digital Ocean: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-deploy-a-meteor-js-application-on-ubuntu-14-04-with-nginx https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl...
- textread 10y agoThanks man
- steve-benjamins 10y agoI used SubmitHub to share my music and it's a great experience. It fixes an exhausting cold-outreach process. (I used it to get some pretty major coverage— for me, at least— when a well-known blog sent 25,000 listens after covering my song).
- fiatjaf 10y agoThe guy had a very successful music blog and used that to kick off the network effect needed to make SubmitHub work. There is zero chance SubmitHub would work without the music blog, so unless you have a very successful blog yourself this article will not help you in any practical manner.
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoI'd like to think that the part about launching and iterating -- getting your product out there rather than trying to make it perfect before launch -- is quite a useful tip for solo founders (and small teams). But, to each their own!
- gloverkcn 10y agoIf you look at any marketing funnel, the first hurdle is awareness. Getting people aware of a saas product is very difficult. Getting them to try it is even harder. Having the blog provided both a vehicle to get the target market aware, and the credibility that the product is worth trying. It's really smart to be an active member of a community, and then provide services to the community. It's also very difficult, and takes a lot of effort. I think the post you responded to is someone who understands the amount of work you had to put into your blog to make it successful. I don't think this is a negative, but a really good take away for new entrepreneurs. - How will you market and sell your product? The "If you build it, they will come" tactic doesn't work. - How do you know it's a problem people want solved? - How do you know your solution adequately solves the problem ? Your approach answered all these questions and you got to work on something you're passionate about. Congrats on the success!
- blazespin 10y agoHe missed the advice of launch and iterate below the radar with a very narrow group of customers. For example: on the app store you can launch your app/game in countries other than the US (australia, canada). Iterate, and once you're satisfied, than launch in the US. Launching and iterate in the fully public eye of your customer base is a risky thing to do for your general brand value.
- z3t4 10y agoThis could be used for other branches too, not just music blogs. For example Indie Games.
- esfandia 10y agoMy thought as well: I could see this for novels/short stories, or even could revolutionize the academic publishing system.
- goodJobWalrus 10y agoI have a question for the guy running indie hackers. Do you periodically update those revenue figures?
- reagan83 10y agoI ran my first startup with Jason 15 years ago. Since then, he's gone on to do some amazing things and seeing him on HN today makes me realize: 1) how lucky I was to work with him for those 2 years. 2) how small our industry is. Congrats Jason on the well deserved success.
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoNice to from you Reagan! :)
- sp527 10y agoI think another important lesson to draw from this is that you should build things for domains and problems in which you have a legitimate interest/curiosity. That was something I took away from this that's difficult to accept, because it means you're probably going to be limited if you want to work solo.
- jason-grishkoff 10y agoIf you're going to spend 8+ hours a day on something, you'd best enjoy the subject matter :)
- theunixbeard 10y ago1.) Build an audience (~6 years) 2.) Build your business (a few months...) That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover & Product Hunt: https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a1a2c0 https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a... The title was "Product Hunt's Rise: An overnight success 1,834 days in the making"... Same exact story here except growing Indie shuffle took closer to 2,190 days!
- deepGem 10y agoCannot allude to this more. Building an audience is the toughest part of any business. Not just SasS or PH. People get swayed by perceived overnight successes and attempt to replicate the same.
- erikb 10y agoIt's funny how this blog post probably explains quite well how the indiehackers (the site this article about indie shuffle is hosted on) guy builds his community.
- theunixbeard 10y agoQuite meta! Would be nice to hear csallen's thoughts on it. Once big difference I think is that csallen is focused on writing specifically for the Hacker News audience as a way to bootstrap traffic from an existing large audience. Product Hunt didn't really use that strategy from what I can tell. Similarly to Indie Hackers, I wrote my Product Hunt article with the aim to bootstrap off of Ryan Hoover's large existing audience (40K twitter followers at the time, compared to my paltry 100). He was the first to tweet about it after I brought it to his attention and it spread organically from there (26K views currently). My next Internet Archaeology article is already in the works and I plan to use the exact same strategy as before (bootstrap off of my subject's existing audience).
- erikb 10y agoSounds good. I love your archeology work. Saves me a lot of time.It was a little too long for a coffee break read and now I'm behind my work schedule, though. Maybe you can split one article into smaller chunks, which may also increase your overall traffic. ;-)
- gtirloni 10y agoQuestion to the moderators: Shouldn't IndieHackers posts be "Show HN"?
- csallen 10y agoCurious why you think this. What makes it particularly different from any other curated source of articles, e.g. Medium or TechCrunch?
- mherrmann 10y agoAs seems to be common on Indie Hackers, the title is extremely disingenuous: 1) It took him 6 years to build an audience before turning it into a business. The title makes it sound like the entire process only took 10 months. 2) $46k/mo of what? Revenue or profit? If the latter, at least half immediately goes to the music blogs. 3) Where exactly does the $46k/mo number come from? It's only mentioned in the title and explained nowhere. Is it a projection, an average, the best month, ...? Courtland, you have a great site and I really enjoy your articles. Please don't spoil your awesome content with vagueness and clickbait.
- gregormck 10y agoWell said.
- pjwal 10y agoSo, why not democratize this a bit more given the application and the current audience. Why not charge (and deliver) 1000 user reviews of music for $1 as well? Obviously, established music sites are a distribution channel that works right now. But it seems apparent to me the natural extension right now is direct to music lovers?