7 ms·

HumanPredictions – Bootstrapping a SaaS app to $18k/mo in under a year

146 points by csallen 10y ago

dpick 10y ago
Hey everyone, I'm the CTO and Co-Founder of HumanPredictions happy to answer any questions anyone has about the article or the company in general!
- irishcoffee 10y ago
  "This site can’t provide a secure connection www.indiehackers.com sent an invalid response. Try running Windows Network Diagnostics. ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR" Chrome Version 54.0.2840.71 =//
  - dpick 10y ago
    :( I'll reach out to Courtland the guy who runs IndieHackers and see what's up.
- garysieling 10y ago
  I'm curious if you've received feedback from software developers on what the experience is like being recruiting with your tool. The agency spam approach you mention is irritating, but I would imagine that if you're correctly predicting when someone is looking to jump that would be less of a problem.
  - dpick 10y ago
    We actually do have a significantly better response from developers both because they're being reached out to at the right time, but also because a lot of our users are CTO's and Engineering managers who by the fact that they are technical can have a much better conversation with prospects.
    - garysieling 10y ago
      Cool, that makes sense. I think a big part of the spam problem is mass template emails, so if your customers are emailing people directly it would be much better.
      - dpick 10y ago
        Completely agree, one of our core goals from the beginning of HumanPredictions has been to kill mass template emails.
0xmohit 10y ago
The underlying assumption seems to be that everyone uses LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter. While it would be largely true, not everyone uses those. What would your tool say about them?
- dpick 10y ago
  Unfortunately because we are just looking at public data online (including Github, StackOverflow, and Meetup) if people don't use those services (or contribute to open source) we won't discover them or be able to a make a prediction about their likeliness to leave.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    Maybe you should start looking at Keybase [0] too. It might help you link personal websites, github, twitter, ... [0] https://keybase.io/ https://keybase.io/
    - dpick 10y ago
      Thanks! We do actually use Keybase for discovering social accounts as well.
- davidw 10y ago
  One of the things about a small, bootstrapped operation like this is that you have to pick and choose your battles. The answer may very well be "we require data from X, Y and Z". Sure, this cuts out a lot of the market, but you don't need a ton to do ok with a small business like that.
k2xl 10y ago
I wrote a similar tool for recruiters (only analyzes LinkedIn profiles that you are viewing). Mine is significantly cheaper at $9 per month: https://recap.work https://recap.work
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  Your site redirects (301) from HTTPS to HTTP!
- hluska 10y ago
  Your redirect seems broken (301 from https to http?), you have a number of really ugly grammatical errors, and there is nothing weaker than hijacking another thread to promote your own product.
hueving 10y ago
Would it be possible for a dev to see their own prediction (to prove ownership maybe leverage oauth of one of the sites: github, linkedin, etc)?
- dpick 10y ago
  We don't currently support that through the application, but it is on our roadmap and something we very much want to build. For now though if you reach out to me at david@humanpredictions.io I'd be happy to let you know what our current prediction for you is.
desireco42 10y ago
This is really cool idea, I like how it uses data to predict behavior. I have few recruiters that always hit me around the time when I get a little more free. They don't have this tool, just their spidey sense, but I bet they would like something like this.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  I heard of such tools a couple of years back. So I'm sure those exist. How well do those work if an entirely different issue.
  - desireco42 10y ago
    Well, if people use twitter, github etc, they will be findable and their trace can be used to predict if they are 'jumping ship'. It is common to start blogging around the time you are looking to change work for example.
kpwagner 10y ago
Wow! Maybe just me, hearing about a company bootstrapping to success instead of raising large rounds of financing is all the more inspiring.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  80% of the inc 500, the fastest growing private companies, haven't raised outside capital.
  - thenaturalist 10y ago
    Do you have a source for that?
    - dave_sullivan 10y ago
      Some inc article I saw on HN with Sam Altman talking about how important startups are to the economy, couldn't find exact one.
      - gexla 10y ago
        Here is a link to the HN discussion to the article I assume you are thinking about. The wording was a bit different, which may have been why you didn't find it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642
        dave_sullivan 10y ago
        That's the one. The exact quote: > Only twenty per cent of the Inc. 500, the five hundred fastest-growing private companies, raised outside funding.
gizmo 10y ago
This type of data mining of personal information feels kind of icky to me.
vsloo 10y ago
Great story and many great lessons. Being "intentional about the people you work with" is a great piece of advice and one that we usually like to stress too when talking to aspiring entrepreneurs. We wrote about some of this too in a previous HN thread https://betterthansure.com/answer-hn-growing-a-side-project-30f17f6a10da#.ntvqg0q7z https://betterthansure.com/answer-hn-growing-a-side-project-....
philip1209 10y ago
It's great to hear about your success! For discussion's purposes, it's worth pointing out that there is a venture-funded company that is doing the same thing (but with a big data science team): https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/entelo https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/entelo
hiou 10y ago
He basically gets a spot in the family business which he uses as a launchpad to creating a SaaS product. Come on, this title is so far off from reality. No problem with what he did and it sounds like he does a great job, but let's at least keep the titles from indiehackers somewhat accurate. It gives a lot of people thinking about starting their own company really unrealistic expectations.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- soneca 10y ago
  I understand and partially agree with you. But imagine a wannabe entrepreneur that is attracted by the title and go on to read the interview on how to do it. He/she will actually have a very clear expectation on how to "bootstrap a business into $18k monthly". Indiehackers, in my opinion, provides a very valuable service of providing a reality check for those dreaming with "easy" revenue from digital products. "Oh, this guy actually built an audience for years before launching the business", "Oh, this other guy actually had a successful business to work as launchpad of his business", "Oh, thi guy actually started from scratch, but his revenue is in the hundreds per month for now and I have doubts if even that is sustainable". If someone is planning to launch a bootstrapping business and stumble upon Indiehackers I have no doubt he/she will be better prepared to do it after reading these interviews.
- gregorymichael 10y ago
  As someone who has known Elliot from the Chicago scene for the last ~10 years, I have to push back on this. Elliot hustled his ass off doing his own thing, working recruiting for Groupon, working as one of the founding employees of DevBootcamp Chicago to get graduates gigs (and doing so with great success), and then back to his own recruiting before launching Human Predictions based on feedback from his clients and experiences. He became, at least in my circles, the most trusted recruiter amongst developers. Many thought of him as more of an "agent" than a recruiter. Someone you could grab coffee with every six months who'd keep you in mind if the perfect gig came up. I referred friends to him all the time without concern that he'd spam them, hard-sell them, put them in whatever spot that was open just to reap the commission. He's always had the developer's interest in mind first and foremost. I understand the sentiment that these stories can sometimes over-simplify the journey. Yes, he had the privilege of learning the family business at a young age. But it's not as if "having a dad that does X" makes it a trivial effort to launch a SaaS that does X. In Elliot's case, there was at least ten years of self-motivated hustle in-between.
iamleppert 10y ago
Now just let me come up with a product I can sell to developers that camouflages them to this product by simulating activity on these sites... I wonder what their next line of business is at this company...selling this data to current employers to see when their employee is about to jump ship?
shostack 10y ago
I noticed the UTM tags you had on this link. How is Hacker News performing as part of your interview promotion?
- csallen 10y ago
  Just started using UTM query params a few days ago, so I'll have more data when I write my monthly review for November! But in October, direct links from HN accounted for around half of my total traffic. More details here: https://goo.gl/FMxdpc https://goo.gl/FMxdpc.
soheil 10y ago
Sounds like very similar to my start up NetIn[1] We also look at public profile updates and other signals to tell if a candidate is on the move. We also got to HN frontpage last night for our candidate job portal[2]. If there are people who would like to talk about what we've accomplished so far feel free to reach me at s@netin.co [1] https://netin.co https://netin.co [2] https://netin.co/candidates https://netin.co/candidates

146 points by csallen 10y ago

dpick 10y ago

Hey everyone, I'm the CTO and Co-Founder of HumanPredictions happy to answer any questions anyone has about the article or the company in general!

irishcoffee 10y ago
"This site can’t provide a secure connection www.indiehackers.com sent an invalid response. Try running Windows Network Diagnostics. ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR" Chrome Version 54.0.2840.71 =//
- dpick 10y ago
  :( I'll reach out to Courtland the guy who runs IndieHackers and see what's up.
garysieling 10y ago
I'm curious if you've received feedback from software developers on what the experience is like being recruiting with your tool. The agency spam approach you mention is irritating, but I would imagine that if you're correctly predicting when someone is looking to jump that would be less of a problem.
- dpick 10y ago
  We actually do have a significantly better response from developers both because they're being reached out to at the right time, but also because a lot of our users are CTO's and Engineering managers who by the fact that they are technical can have a much better conversation with prospects.
  - garysieling 10y ago
    Cool, that makes sense. I think a big part of the spam problem is mass template emails, so if your customers are emailing people directly it would be much better.
    - dpick 10y ago
      Completely agree, one of our core goals from the beginning of HumanPredictions has been to kill mass template emails.

0xmohit 10y ago

The underlying assumption seems to be that everyone uses LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter. While it would be largely true, not everyone uses those. What would your tool say about them?

dpick 10y ago
Unfortunately because we are just looking at public data online (including Github, StackOverflow, and Meetup) if people don't use those services (or contribute to open source) we won't discover them or be able to a make a prediction about their likeliness to leave.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  Maybe you should start looking at Keybase [0] too. It might help you link personal websites, github, twitter, ... [0] https://keybase.io/ https://keybase.io/
  - dpick 10y ago
    Thanks! We do actually use Keybase for discovering social accounts as well.
davidw 10y ago
One of the things about a small, bootstrapped operation like this is that you have to pick and choose your battles. The answer may very well be "we require data from X, Y and Z". Sure, this cuts out a lot of the market, but you don't need a ton to do ok with a small business like that.

k2xl 10y ago

I wrote a similar tool for recruiters (only analyzes LinkedIn profiles that you are viewing). Mine is significantly cheaper at $9 per month: https://recap.work https://recap.work

0xmohit 10y ago
Your site redirects (301) from HTTPS to HTTP!
hluska 10y ago
Your redirect seems broken (301 from https to http?), you have a number of really ugly grammatical errors, and there is nothing weaker than hijacking another thread to promote your own product.

hueving 10y ago

Would it be possible for a dev to see their own prediction (to prove ownership maybe leverage oauth of one of the sites: github, linkedin, etc)?

dpick 10y ago
We don't currently support that through the application, but it is on our roadmap and something we very much want to build. For now though if you reach out to me at david@humanpredictions.io I'd be happy to let you know what our current prediction for you is.

desireco42 10y ago

This is really cool idea, I like how it uses data to predict behavior. I have few recruiters that always hit me around the time when I get a little more free. They don't have this tool, just their spidey sense, but I bet they would like something like this.

0xmohit 10y ago
I heard of such tools a couple of years back. So I'm sure those exist. How well do those work if an entirely different issue.
- desireco42 10y ago
  Well, if people use twitter, github etc, they will be findable and their trace can be used to predict if they are 'jumping ship'. It is common to start blogging around the time you are looking to change work for example.

kpwagner 10y ago

Wow! Maybe just me, hearing about a company bootstrapping to success instead of raising large rounds of financing is all the more inspiring.

dave_sullivan 10y ago
80% of the inc 500, the fastest growing private companies, haven't raised outside capital.
- thenaturalist 10y ago
  Do you have a source for that?
  - dave_sullivan 10y ago
    Some inc article I saw on HN with Sam Altman talking about how important startups are to the economy, couldn't find exact one.
    - gexla 10y ago
      Here is a link to the HN discussion to the article I assume you are thinking about. The wording was a bit different, which may have been why you didn't find it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642
      - dave_sullivan 10y ago
        That's the one. The exact quote: > Only twenty per cent of the Inc. 500, the five hundred fastest-growing private companies, raised outside funding.

gizmo 10y ago

This type of data mining of personal information feels kind of icky to me.

vsloo 10y ago

Great story and many great lessons. Being "intentional about the people you work with" is a great piece of advice and one that we usually like to stress too when talking to aspiring entrepreneurs. We wrote about some of this too in a previous HN thread https://betterthansure.com/answer-hn-growing-a-side-project-30f17f6a10da#.ntvqg0q7z https://betterthansure.com/answer-hn-growing-a-side-project-....

philip1209 10y ago

It's great to hear about your success! For discussion's purposes, it's worth pointing out that there is a venture-funded company that is doing the same thing (but with a big data science team): https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/entelo https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/entelo

hiou 10y ago

He basically gets a spot in the family business which he uses as a launchpad to creating a SaaS product. Come on, this title is so far off from reality. No problem with what he did and it sounds like he does a great job, but let's at least keep the titles from indiehackers somewhat accurate. It gives a lot of people thinking about starting their own company really unrealistic expectations.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
soneca 10y ago
I understand and partially agree with you. But imagine a wannabe entrepreneur that is attracted by the title and go on to read the interview on how to do it. He/she will actually have a very clear expectation on how to "bootstrap a business into $18k monthly". Indiehackers, in my opinion, provides a very valuable service of providing a reality check for those dreaming with "easy" revenue from digital products. "Oh, this guy actually built an audience for years before launching the business", "Oh, this other guy actually had a successful business to work as launchpad of his business", "Oh, thi guy actually started from scratch, but his revenue is in the hundreds per month for now and I have doubts if even that is sustainable". If someone is planning to launch a bootstrapping business and stumble upon Indiehackers I have no doubt he/she will be better prepared to do it after reading these interviews.
gregorymichael 10y ago
As someone who has known Elliot from the Chicago scene for the last ~10 years, I have to push back on this. Elliot hustled his ass off doing his own thing, working recruiting for Groupon, working as one of the founding employees of DevBootcamp Chicago to get graduates gigs (and doing so with great success), and then back to his own recruiting before launching Human Predictions based on feedback from his clients and experiences. He became, at least in my circles, the most trusted recruiter amongst developers. Many thought of him as more of an "agent" than a recruiter. Someone you could grab coffee with every six months who'd keep you in mind if the perfect gig came up. I referred friends to him all the time without concern that he'd spam them, hard-sell them, put them in whatever spot that was open just to reap the commission. He's always had the developer's interest in mind first and foremost. I understand the sentiment that these stories can sometimes over-simplify the journey. Yes, he had the privilege of learning the family business at a young age. But it's not as if "having a dad that does X" makes it a trivial effort to launch a SaaS that does X. In Elliot's case, there was at least ten years of self-motivated hustle in-between.

iamleppert 10y ago

Now just let me come up with a product I can sell to developers that camouflages them to this product by simulating activity on these sites... I wonder what their next line of business is at this company...selling this data to current employers to see when their employee is about to jump ship?

shostack 10y ago

I noticed the UTM tags you had on this link. How is Hacker News performing as part of your interview promotion?

csallen 10y ago
Just started using UTM query params a few days ago, so I'll have more data when I write my monthly review for November! But in October, direct links from HN accounted for around half of my total traffic. More details here: https://goo.gl/FMxdpc https://goo.gl/FMxdpc.

soheil 10y ago

Sounds like very similar to my start up NetIn[1] We also look at public profile updates and other signals to tell if a candidate is on the move. We also got to HN frontpage last night for our candidate job portal[2]. If there are people who would like to talk about what we've accomplished so far feel free to reach me at s@netin.co [1] https://netin.co https://netin.co [2] https://netin.co/candidates https://netin.co/candidates