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Ask HN: Are there really over 150,000 SaaS companies?

8 points by going_to_800 9y ago

By this article, there are over 150k unique apps connected to the cloud. https://www.cloudlock.com/blog/the-explosion-of-apps-27-are-risky/

solomatov 9y ago
I believe this to be true. There's a large number of products which are used by small groups of people. For example, https://breederoo.com/ https://breederoo.com/
haidrali 9y ago
http://fieldzipper.com http://fieldzipper.com another SaaS company
wayn3 9y ago
I'm running 3 on the side. Each could easily sell for $5M down the line. I have another 3 well researched ideas that can have similar outcomes. SaaS is super easy when you go niche and aim for the 50k-100k MRR. You don't have to sell into enterprises to do that. Just have 1k customers paying $100 each. Solve some stupid problem in marketing and you've got yourself a viable SaaS. There's no reason why there wouldn't be 100k engineers running a small SaaS on the side.
- samblr 9y ago
  >> I'm running 3 on the side. Each could easily sell for $5M down the line. That is cool! what are your cloud/infrastructure costs vs number of users ? And which cloud provider are you using ?
  - wayn3 9y ago
    All those businesses combined could easily fit on one $40 digitalocean instance. They are split for business reasons, but the costs are essentially $0.
    - samblr 9y ago
      Cool, $40 is really nothing - what about database servers ? How many max concurrent queries are made by users.
      - wayn3 9y ago
        without saying too much, the businesses all revolve around the fact that certain ad networks report data in such a way that its not usable by people. i pull the data once a day and create reports with a cronjob. the server is idle 99.999993% of the time and peak concurrent queries is 1. once people buy that service, they quickly realize that although the data is now presented in such a way that you can gain insights from it, they still can't do anything with it, because they don't really get math. because of that, i upsell some data analytics consulting where they basically get my skype and can ask questions. there are millions of super low hanging fruit services like that to be written, if youre willing to allow your TAM to be 1M ARR. on the consulting side of things, i spend about 5 minutes a day talking to people, which means that my hourly on that is ridiculous.

8 points by going_to_800 9y ago

By this article, there are over 150k unique apps connected to the cloud. https://www.cloudlock.com/blog/the-explosion-of-apps-27-are-risky/

solomatov 9y ago

I believe this to be true. There's a large number of products which are used by small groups of people. For example, https://breederoo.com/ https://breederoo.com/

haidrali 9y ago

http://fieldzipper.com http://fieldzipper.com another SaaS company

wayn3 9y ago

I'm running 3 on the side. Each could easily sell for $5M down the line. I have another 3 well researched ideas that can have similar outcomes. SaaS is super easy when you go niche and aim for the 50k-100k MRR. You don't have to sell into enterprises to do that. Just have 1k customers paying $100 each. Solve some stupid problem in marketing and you've got yourself a viable SaaS. There's no reason why there wouldn't be 100k engineers running a small SaaS on the side.

samblr 9y ago
>> I'm running 3 on the side. Each could easily sell for $5M down the line. That is cool! what are your cloud/infrastructure costs vs number of users ? And which cloud provider are you using ?
- wayn3 9y ago
  All those businesses combined could easily fit on one $40 digitalocean instance. They are split for business reasons, but the costs are essentially $0.
  - samblr 9y ago
    Cool, $40 is really nothing - what about database servers ? How many max concurrent queries are made by users.
    - wayn3 9y ago
      without saying too much, the businesses all revolve around the fact that certain ad networks report data in such a way that its not usable by people. i pull the data once a day and create reports with a cronjob. the server is idle 99.999993% of the time and peak concurrent queries is 1. once people buy that service, they quickly realize that although the data is now presented in such a way that you can gain insights from it, they still can't do anything with it, because they don't really get math. because of that, i upsell some data analytics consulting where they basically get my skype and can ask questions. there are millions of super low hanging fruit services like that to be written, if youre willing to allow your TAM to be 1M ARR. on the consulting side of things, i spend about 5 minutes a day talking to people, which means that my hourly on that is ridiculous.