8 ms·

I run https://PhantomJsCloud.com https://PhantomJsCloud.com I started it as a free MVP about 2 years ago while in Thailand, and given that I was attracting a s

I run https://PhantomJsCloud.com https://PhantomJsCloud.com I started it as a free MVP about 2 years ago while in Thailand, and given that I was attracting a slow but steady stream of users I decided to build out a commercial v1 from it. The freemium SaaS went live in March and it's growing monthly. If I still lived in Thailand I would consider it very successful, but I am in the Seattle area now so it's ramen profitable. The biggest surprise I got was how slow organic growth takes. Every month I gain more users + MRR but discovery seems to be the biggest problem. I tried Google Adwords in June but Google decided to cost me upwards of $5/click for basic keyword targeting so gave that up. I tried Adwords again in November and now google thinks I'm more relevant, so I pay starting at $0.20/click for the same keywords that cost $5/click 6 months previous. I am currently doing experiments to see if the acquisition cost justifies that spend. From a effort perspective, the SaaS api+backend itself was about 50% of the effort. The subscription service + user dashboard was another 50%. From a skills perspective, I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets: Business management, UX, full-stack webdev, devops, sales, marketing, support. Thankfully I have some experience in all those (except sales) so I was able to either do or fake everything required. If you don't have all those skills, you are going to be increasingly reliant on luck, which isn't a winning strategy.

jimbokun 10y ago
"From a skills perspective, I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets: Business management, UX, full-stack webdev, devops, sales, marketing." Thanks, that is a very important insight.
- novaleaf 10y ago
  fyi, I did a small edit: I forgot to mention "support" which is arguably the most important role once you have an actual product. I solicit users to email whenever they have a question/comment/issue and reply to everything. Overall I think I have provided email support to aprox 50% of my paying customers, and maybe half of the support was provided before they decided to pay, so it is very important :)
  - jimbokun 10y ago
    Yes! Support is also the part most potentially terrifying to me, considering starting something while still employed at a full time job. Seems like it could quickly become a massive time sink and source of stress.
    - novaleaf 10y ago
      it's actually a really great way to understand your customer's needs, and your products actual (in the eyes of the user) deficiencies. I also use uservoice to help the highly-desired features/requests to "bubble up" but if a customer asks for something and it's an easy enhancement I go ahead and implement it. Likewise if the same problem is annoying a bunch of people, I need to either document a workaround or make it easier.
    - donmatito 10y ago
      I love doing support actually. I love talking to users, understand how they use my app. I have 600 Slack threads open with them. Any confusion, bug fix, etc... is an occasion to improve the app and learn from them. What I hate is writing content :-)
samsolomon 10y ago
This is a cool project. I'm mostly a designer, but am familiar with PhantomJS. I don't see a blog on your site. Have you considered writing about the technology? I'd think search would be a great growth mechanism for something like this. Certainly there are a ton of people searching for questions related to Phantom. I'd look around Stack Overflow and possibly Quora for topic ideas and then write posts answering those questions.
- novaleaf 10y ago
  Yes, "inbound marketing" (a blog) is probably the biggest accelerator to growth I can (and should) do. I'm holding off for now though, as I need to make the product more friendly to business users first. Right now PhantomJsCloud is focused on developers, so I need to make some non-dev friendly tooling first. That's my excuse at least. Regarding StackOverflow, yes, that's actually how I validated the free MVP (answering SO questions and if my product might be beneficial, providing a link to my product) but generally those traffic sources don't seem to scale very well past MVP validation. I haven't tried Quora though, I will add that to my todo list :)
  - edw 10y ago
    I don't want to second guess your strategy—but here I go. If your tool is appealing to developers _and_ you have identified a way to reach developers, then I think you should seriously consider focusing on that. Consider for a moment Dropbox: For a very long time they and their competitors catered to the needs of designers and other freelancers who had to share large files with clients. Was Dropbox anathema to IT departments? Yes, totally. But building a product that appeals to corporate IT departments has been a huge undertaking. If your goal is to build a successful business, the easiest way to do that may be reaching critical mass with developers and then maybe finding ways to offer more value to your exiting (developer) customers and charging accordingly.
    - novaleaf 10y ago
      As I love self-deprecation, I also love it when people second-guess me :) Thanks for the feedback, yes you are right actually. I want to provide better tooling so that it requires less development effort (and make it easier for less sophisticated devs to use) but I am wrong to lump in "business users" as you are absolutely right that it would be a distraction to entertain that demographic.
DanHulton 10y ago
That is a neat idea, and a neat site. Can I offer just a tiny bit of design advice though? You really ought to have more vertical whitespace going on there. It feels very, very crowded, especially with your h1 rubbing up against your logo at the top there. Basically, anywhere there's a large block of stuff, you should double or more the whitespace around it. Though it may not be a winning strategy, good luck anyway! It never hurts to have it.
- sh87 10y ago
  In addition to the vertical whitespace, also (I feel) there's too much text there. I would just put "Headless Browser Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that's free for light use, and cheap for heavy use." in as big a font as I can without it being annoying and move everything else lower, visible when the page is scrolled. Add a diagram if you could that supports the core product offering. Don't add carousels (please.) Little bits help in ways we could never measure.
  - novaleaf 10y ago
    Thanks for the feedback guys, the marketing+ux roles are definitely in my "fake it" category :) I will try improving this.
    - dntrkv 10y ago
      Some more design advice if you're interested: In between the big 3 sections, I would do at least 40px. In terms of spacing between the heading and the content below, I generally use a variation of the rule of thirds. It's not a steadfast rule, but generally if you have 60px above a heading, something like 20px between the heading and the content it belongs to would work. Also make your primary CTA bigger and keep it to one line. Put that 500 pages free text outside of the button: Sign up now and get 500 pages free [ SIGN UP NOW ] I agree with the too much text comment as well, especially above the fold. Keep it simple and then provide a section where the users can go for more info if they need it. Your headings and boxes are not aligned on the left side. Change those example buttons into regular links. 40px+ between navbar and the h1, also make the h1 medium/bold weight. It looks weird when you have headings of the same font family alternate between bold/light.
mars4rp 10y ago
very interesting, I will defiantly will be a customer, I have a question, how fast is requestSingle page? is there any guaranteed response time? Edit: adding a suggestion, if in your pricing you include a dedicated worker it would be very cool. you could price it hourly (8 hours a day, or monthly) this way I don't worry about number of request that I am sending, you don't worry about page size and amount of JS in the page! and I can keep sending requests in the rate I am getting responses.
- novaleaf 10y ago
  The request time is pretty much what you would expect running PhantomJs on a Amazon/Google/Msft VM, which is roughly 2x longer than running the same request in your desktop browser. Regarding your suggestion on dedicated workers, the main benefit (USP) of PhantomJsCloud is the scaleability to hundreds/thousands of requests, so I think dedicated workers is a bit counter to that. However if I can figure out a nice way to securely let people run PhantomJs directly (remote code execution), dedicated workers would undoubtedly open up a lot more interesting use cases.
  - mars4rp 10y ago
    I don't need the scaleability feature of PhantomJsCloud, for me the benefit is not dealing with setting up a PhantomJs and configuration and using your nice API instead, I will gladly pay a premium for a dedicated VM so you configure it for me. this way you open up the gate to lots of people that are frustrated configuring PhantomJs ;) either way I will be a customer. thank you for creating this. it will save me couple of days of frustration.
    - novaleaf 10y ago
      ok thanks for the feedback, you are right, and a lot of people want more control of the phantomjs process (or a long-lived process) so it is something I should consider more highly. I'll add it to my feature todo list. if you sign up, i'll send an email when various new features are ready.
nbrempel 10y ago
Side note: try Bing ads as an alternative to Adwords for cheaper clicks. Might be the wrong audience given that you're advertising a dev tool but I found it pretty useful. If you search around, Bing has a $100 coupon right now that you can use to play with the service.
- novaleaf 10y ago
  Thank you for the suggestion, I think I will give it a try :)
nikon 10y ago
This looks cool, how do you handle ip rotation? I'm scraping around 1TB a month and currently manage my own proxies. If you could offer something to replace that it would certainly be something I'd be interested in.
- IanCal 10y ago
  I've used crawlera for a few years, but not at the same scale. Might be worth checking out, anyway: https://scrapinghub.com/crawlera/ https://scrapinghub.com/crawlera/
- novaleaf 10y ago
  Right now I do limited IP rotation (once per day) so if you need proxies you'd need to use an external proxy provider (you can specify the procxy to use via the PhantomJsCloud api) I'm toying with some built-in proxy options, but nothing public at the moment. As mentioned, Crawlera is pretty nifty, but unfortunately it doesn't work with PhantomJs on HTTPS sites.
enraged_camel 10y ago
I really, really like the "what can you do with it" section on the front page. I'm only vaguely familiar with PhantomJS, so I was getting ready to close the tab, but after reading that section I realized this is something I can actually use.
rokhayakebe 10y ago
Your Pages/Day should probably be Pages/Month. You are solving a very very time consuming problem to fix.
eldavido 10y ago
> From a skills perspective, I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets I think this is what's changed from a few years ago. Expectations of usability, design, support, number of platforms, etc. have all gone up even from casual users. 37signals, probably the most-celebrated bootstrapper shop, grew up in the 90s. Imagine getting started today. You need a responsive, high-design website. You need to navigate an incredibly complex web of user acquisition channels spanning web search, paid and earned social, community, etc. You need some kind of mobile support (even if just an optimized website), real-time synchronization features, etc. It just doesn't end. I'm not sure it's possible at all to build something yourself these days. You pretty much have to have a team, and pay them in stock/revenue share, or cash upfront, to get a real revenue-producing company going. I think the one-man software shop is really on the decline.
- jraby3 10y ago
  I'm not sure. It's pretty easy to build a Wordpress site, use various plugins, and outsource stuff you can't or don't want to do to upwork. Expectations are higher but buildout is much easier IMO.
  - novaleaf 10y ago
    I think for a SaaS, the most important aspect of validating demand is if anyone is willing to pay for your product. I didn't use Mashape (I tried, but they kept churning their product which turned me off), but that might be a good way to validate. I ended up giving the service away for free, but officially stated that the $10/mo tier was free during beta, and if you wanted more to subscribe at $50/mo. I got enough actual revenue out of that to justify continuing.
kt9 10y ago
Congratulations on building something and launching as a single founder! Very nice! I'm in seattle and a founder as well - ping me if you'd like to connect and chat. I'm happy to help in any way that I can - details in profile.
donmatito 10y ago
> I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets: Business management, UX, full-stack webdev, devops, sales, marketing, support. This is so true. But look at it from a personal growth perspective. You get to learn so much! Crash course in server-down-at-2am, in contradictory-marketing-advices, and in my-pricing-is-really-screwed :-)
blazespin 10y ago
I've often though the real hard core startup community should be in Chiang Mai living in 250$ per month condos. Pretty easy to get to Ramen profitable..
- spraak 10y ago
  waives hello from CM
  - blazespin 10y ago
    sweet. Are you in startup mode?
    - spraak 10y ago
      Kinda.. it didn't turn out so well. Leaving soon :/
- novaleaf 10y ago
  I suppose I wasn't very hardcore. I ran (and failed) a game studio in Bangkok, and was experimenting with other business ideas when I finally decided to move back to the USA for family reasons. I don't know about Chiang Mai, but for a single expat I think anything less than $800/mo in bkk would be very enjoyable. I have a family though :P
  - blazespin 10y ago
    Lol, I wouldn't get any work done in bkk...

jimbokun 10y ago

"From a skills perspective, I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets: Business management, UX, full-stack webdev, devops, sales, marketing." Thanks, that is a very important insight.

novaleaf 10y ago
fyi, I did a small edit: I forgot to mention "support" which is arguably the most important role once you have an actual product. I solicit users to email whenever they have a question/comment/issue and reply to everything. Overall I think I have provided email support to aprox 50% of my paying customers, and maybe half of the support was provided before they decided to pay, so it is very important :)
- jimbokun 10y ago
  Yes! Support is also the part most potentially terrifying to me, considering starting something while still employed at a full time job. Seems like it could quickly become a massive time sink and source of stress.
  - novaleaf 10y ago
    it's actually a really great way to understand your customer's needs, and your products actual (in the eyes of the user) deficiencies. I also use uservoice to help the highly-desired features/requests to "bubble up" but if a customer asks for something and it's an easy enhancement I go ahead and implement it. Likewise if the same problem is annoying a bunch of people, I need to either document a workaround or make it easier.
  - donmatito 10y ago
    I love doing support actually. I love talking to users, understand how they use my app. I have 600 Slack threads open with them. Any confusion, bug fix, etc... is an occasion to improve the app and learn from them. What I hate is writing content :-)

samsolomon 10y ago

This is a cool project. I'm mostly a designer, but am familiar with PhantomJS. I don't see a blog on your site. Have you considered writing about the technology? I'd think search would be a great growth mechanism for something like this. Certainly there are a ton of people searching for questions related to Phantom. I'd look around Stack Overflow and possibly Quora for topic ideas and then write posts answering those questions.

novaleaf 10y ago
Yes, "inbound marketing" (a blog) is probably the biggest accelerator to growth I can (and should) do. I'm holding off for now though, as I need to make the product more friendly to business users first. Right now PhantomJsCloud is focused on developers, so I need to make some non-dev friendly tooling first. That's my excuse at least. Regarding StackOverflow, yes, that's actually how I validated the free MVP (answering SO questions and if my product might be beneficial, providing a link to my product) but generally those traffic sources don't seem to scale very well past MVP validation. I haven't tried Quora though, I will add that to my todo list :)
- edw 10y ago
  I don't want to second guess your strategy—but here I go. If your tool is appealing to developers _and_ you have identified a way to reach developers, then I think you should seriously consider focusing on that. Consider for a moment Dropbox: For a very long time they and their competitors catered to the needs of designers and other freelancers who had to share large files with clients. Was Dropbox anathema to IT departments? Yes, totally. But building a product that appeals to corporate IT departments has been a huge undertaking. If your goal is to build a successful business, the easiest way to do that may be reaching critical mass with developers and then maybe finding ways to offer more value to your exiting (developer) customers and charging accordingly.
  - novaleaf 10y ago
    As I love self-deprecation, I also love it when people second-guess me :) Thanks for the feedback, yes you are right actually. I want to provide better tooling so that it requires less development effort (and make it easier for less sophisticated devs to use) but I am wrong to lump in "business users" as you are absolutely right that it would be a distraction to entertain that demographic.

DanHulton 10y ago

That is a neat idea, and a neat site. Can I offer just a tiny bit of design advice though? You really ought to have more vertical whitespace going on there. It feels very, very crowded, especially with your h1 rubbing up against your logo at the top there. Basically, anywhere there's a large block of stuff, you should double or more the whitespace around it. Though it may not be a winning strategy, good luck anyway! It never hurts to have it.

sh87 10y ago
In addition to the vertical whitespace, also (I feel) there's too much text there. I would just put "Headless Browser Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that's free for light use, and cheap for heavy use." in as big a font as I can without it being annoying and move everything else lower, visible when the page is scrolled. Add a diagram if you could that supports the core product offering. Don't add carousels (please.) Little bits help in ways we could never measure.
- novaleaf 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback guys, the marketing+ux roles are definitely in my "fake it" category :) I will try improving this.
  - dntrkv 10y ago
    Some more design advice if you're interested: In between the big 3 sections, I would do at least 40px. In terms of spacing between the heading and the content below, I generally use a variation of the rule of thirds. It's not a steadfast rule, but generally if you have 60px above a heading, something like 20px between the heading and the content it belongs to would work. Also make your primary CTA bigger and keep it to one line. Put that 500 pages free text outside of the button: Sign up now and get 500 pages free [ SIGN UP NOW ] I agree with the too much text comment as well, especially above the fold. Keep it simple and then provide a section where the users can go for more info if they need it. Your headings and boxes are not aligned on the left side. Change those example buttons into regular links. 40px+ between navbar and the h1, also make the h1 medium/bold weight. It looks weird when you have headings of the same font family alternate between bold/light.

mars4rp 10y ago

very interesting, I will defiantly will be a customer, I have a question, how fast is requestSingle page? is there any guaranteed response time? Edit: adding a suggestion, if in your pricing you include a dedicated worker it would be very cool. you could price it hourly (8 hours a day, or monthly) this way I don't worry about number of request that I am sending, you don't worry about page size and amount of JS in the page! and I can keep sending requests in the rate I am getting responses.

novaleaf 10y ago
The request time is pretty much what you would expect running PhantomJs on a Amazon/Google/Msft VM, which is roughly 2x longer than running the same request in your desktop browser. Regarding your suggestion on dedicated workers, the main benefit (USP) of PhantomJsCloud is the scaleability to hundreds/thousands of requests, so I think dedicated workers is a bit counter to that. However if I can figure out a nice way to securely let people run PhantomJs directly (remote code execution), dedicated workers would undoubtedly open up a lot more interesting use cases.
- mars4rp 10y ago
  I don't need the scaleability feature of PhantomJsCloud, for me the benefit is not dealing with setting up a PhantomJs and configuration and using your nice API instead, I will gladly pay a premium for a dedicated VM so you configure it for me. this way you open up the gate to lots of people that are frustrated configuring PhantomJs ;) either way I will be a customer. thank you for creating this. it will save me couple of days of frustration.
  - novaleaf 10y ago
    ok thanks for the feedback, you are right, and a lot of people want more control of the phantomjs process (or a long-lived process) so it is something I should consider more highly. I'll add it to my feature todo list. if you sign up, i'll send an email when various new features are ready.

nbrempel 10y ago

Side note: try Bing ads as an alternative to Adwords for cheaper clicks. Might be the wrong audience given that you're advertising a dev tool but I found it pretty useful. If you search around, Bing has a $100 coupon right now that you can use to play with the service.

novaleaf 10y ago
Thank you for the suggestion, I think I will give it a try :)

nikon 10y ago

This looks cool, how do you handle ip rotation? I'm scraping around 1TB a month and currently manage my own proxies. If you could offer something to replace that it would certainly be something I'd be interested in.

IanCal 10y ago
I've used crawlera for a few years, but not at the same scale. Might be worth checking out, anyway: https://scrapinghub.com/crawlera/ https://scrapinghub.com/crawlera/
novaleaf 10y ago
Right now I do limited IP rotation (once per day) so if you need proxies you'd need to use an external proxy provider (you can specify the procxy to use via the PhantomJsCloud api) I'm toying with some built-in proxy options, but nothing public at the moment. As mentioned, Crawlera is pretty nifty, but unfortunately it doesn't work with PhantomJs on HTTPS sites.

enraged_camel 10y ago

I really, really like the "what can you do with it" section on the front page. I'm only vaguely familiar with PhantomJS, so I was getting ready to close the tab, but after reading that section I realized this is something I can actually use.

rokhayakebe 10y ago

Your Pages/Day should probably be Pages/Month. You are solving a very very time consuming problem to fix.

eldavido 10y ago

> From a skills perspective, I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets I think this is what's changed from a few years ago. Expectations of usability, design, support, number of platforms, etc. have all gone up even from casual users. 37signals, probably the most-celebrated bootstrapper shop, grew up in the 90s. Imagine getting started today. You need a responsive, high-design website. You need to navigate an incredibly complex web of user acquisition channels spanning web search, paid and earned social, community, etc. You need some kind of mobile support (even if just an optimized website), real-time synchronization features, etc. It just doesn't end. I'm not sure it's possible at all to build something yourself these days. You pretty much have to have a team, and pay them in stock/revenue share, or cash upfront, to get a real revenue-producing company going. I think the one-man software shop is really on the decline.

jraby3 10y ago
I'm not sure. It's pretty easy to build a Wordpress site, use various plugins, and outsource stuff you can't or don't want to do to upwork. Expectations are higher but buildout is much easier IMO.
- novaleaf 10y ago
  I think for a SaaS, the most important aspect of validating demand is if anyone is willing to pay for your product. I didn't use Mashape (I tried, but they kept churning their product which turned me off), but that might be a good way to validate. I ended up giving the service away for free, but officially stated that the $10/mo tier was free during beta, and if you wanted more to subscribe at $50/mo. I got enough actual revenue out of that to justify continuing.

kt9 10y ago

Congratulations on building something and launching as a single founder! Very nice! I'm in seattle and a founder as well - ping me if you'd like to connect and chat. I'm happy to help in any way that I can - details in profile.

donmatito 10y ago

> I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets: Business management, UX, full-stack webdev, devops, sales, marketing, support. This is so true. But look at it from a personal growth perspective. You get to learn so much! Crash course in server-down-at-2am, in contradictory-marketing-advices, and in my-pricing-is-really-screwed :-)

blazespin 10y ago

I've often though the real hard core startup community should be in Chiang Mai living in 250$ per month condos. Pretty easy to get to Ramen profitable..

spraak 10y ago
waives hello from CM
- blazespin 10y ago
  sweet. Are you in startup mode?
  - spraak 10y ago
    Kinda.. it didn't turn out so well. Leaving soon :/
novaleaf 10y ago
I suppose I wasn't very hardcore. I ran (and failed) a game studio in Bangkok, and was experimenting with other business ideas when I finally decided to move back to the USA for family reasons. I don't know about Chiang Mai, but for a single expat I think anything less than $800/mo in bkk would be very enjoyable. I have a family though :P
- blazespin 10y ago
  Lol, I wouldn't get any work done in bkk...