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Content Snare: Leaving a job to build a SaaS business
- koverda 8y ago$1k per month? Is that revenue? Doesn't sound like it's doing too great.
- jimmyrose 8y agoThat's actually an old figure. About 5x that now. Sure growth could be stronger but it's about 10% a month at the moment
- krallja 8y agoI read it as $1k growth per month.
- fardo 8y agoI think a lot of developers forget, perhaps due to their current annual salary and due to high costs of living, that a geography-independent $1K a month is nothing to sneeze at. For example, rent in Michigan for a three bedroom apartment is about $1,200 a month [1], meaning your rent would be $400. Let’s say you spend $200 a month on groceries, and spend $400 a month on insurance, gas, bills, and other mandatory expenses. Congratulations: you’re short term net financial neutral! In theory, as long as your acquisition rate is neutral or positive compared to churn, you now live for free, without a boss and without an expectation of a 40 hour workweek. In theory, you can now retire. In practice, you can grow revenue, and nothing’s stopping you from starting business two and increasing your “retirement’s” margin. For the right person, these conditions are life-changing. [1] https://smartasset.com/mortgage/the-cost-of-living-in-michigan https://smartasset.com/mortgage/the-cost-of-living-in-michig...
- justboxing 8y ago> a geography-independent $1K a month is nothing to sneeze at. Right. Also, it's not very obvious, but it looks like the creator is from Australia, likely lives there (as the address listed in about page is also an Aussie address). Not sure about Cost of Living, but definitely gotta be less than Bay Area / Silicon Valley... James ( Jimmy?), if you are reading this, you might wanna update your about page with some story about you (builds trust), instead of a testimonial from a random user... https://contentsnare.com/about/ https://contentsnare.com/about/
- gitgud 8y agoI also thought that was weird? The about page is not for testimonials, it's generally a place for information about who made the site/business right?
- glangdale 8y agoAgreed on the reaction to the "about" page. Cost of living in Australia isn't always great (real estate close to Sydney is nuts, and there was even a brief period where SF looked like a bargain a few years ago). But Brisbane isn't that bad.
- King-Aaron 8y agoFYI $1k / month in Australia would be extremely difficult to live comfortably on.
- kondro 8y agoWith mean Average Weekly Earnings (for salary earners) approaching AUD$85k/year[1] before tax (not sure what average household income is), I'd say $1k is basically impossible to live on. And for some context, I currently can't hire any mid-to-senior software developers in Sydney for less than $150k/year package. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/average-australian-weekly-pay-2018-2 https://www.businessinsider.com.au/average-australian-weekly...
- jimmyrose 8y ago
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoIn my experience, ramping to $1k/month is the toughest part. Getting from $1k to $10k/month is much easier. You have momentum, traffic, and some authority.
- jimmyrose 8y agoHere's hoping. It's been a pretty hard slog to get from 1k to 5k but something seems to have happened in the last month and growth has ramped up considerably. Wish I knew what actually caused that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- projectramo 8y agoDepends on how long they've been around. If you launched an hour ago and you have $1k/mo run rate that is mind blowing. If you launched a year ago, its decent. If you launched 10 years ago, its abysmal.
- kondro 8y agoCool product, looks like it solves an annoying problem for agencies!
- julienmarie 8y agoUsing it since last month. It really helps our fulfillment teams. Still a young product, but it solves the need quite well.
- jimmyrose 8y agoThanks Julien!
- justboxing 8y agoThe actual site link is buried at the very bottom of the long post, so here it is, in case you are looking to see just the site (like I was) https://contentsnare.com https://contentsnare.com I had the same exact problem this site solves. Built a website for my Boxing Trainer (for free) with content placeholder and a landing page video. He never gave me the content like Services, Testimonials, Certifications etc... for months at end, despite a lot of pestering from my end and despite servicing a lot of happy clients who were only too glad to provide testimonials. Then he TXT-ed me one day and said that a Gym that was looking to hire him told him that his website looks "empty" and he was mad at me.
- anitil 8y agoApologies for the low value comment, but I loved the little comic on that page. Precisely described the problem and makes me want to throw money at them to make it go away, despite it being completely irrelevant to me.
- jimmyrose 8y agoHaha those started because I drew up some extremely crappy stick figures to send to a designer to do up properly. People in our Facebook group were like "OMG THEY ARE AMAZING KEEP THEM" Now they're on the home page
- mrfusion 8y agoThe best part of this service is that it nags the clients for you and they won’t hold the annoyance against you. I’m thinking maybe building a similar service for managing people. Call it tasksnare. Take all the confrontation out of management. You just set up a task on tasksnare and it will keep checking up with the worker until it’s done? What do you guys think?
- Kagerjay 8y agoImo It woudlnt work, because contentsnare is content as a deliverable whereas a task can be very vague and nonconcrete Theres already things like followupthen.com. also a few tokls for monitoring if your emails are replied to in gmail i think already
- gargarplex 8y agoDaily standup meeting There are un-intrusive bots for that
- mikekchar 8y agoI think there are much better ways of solving this problem. I'm only really experienced with software developers, so I'll stick to that, but I think it's probably similar in a lot of other situations. Measurement in processes is a kind of Heisenberg situation. Every time you measure something, you have potential for affecting it. For example, if I go to a developer and repeatedly ask if they are done yet, there is a good probability that the developer will decide to be "done" just to get me off their back. Later when you discover that important things were skipped in order to get it out the door quickly, you will have a problem. Because of this, it is better to have "passive" measurement. In other words, the activity itself should indicate whether or not it is done. If we were watching someone dig a ditch, we could decide if the ditch were dug just by looking at it. If it wasn't done, we could get a feeling for how long it will take by looking at how much was done so far. If we do that discretely, then the worker is not affected. Of course, with software, this is not really feasible most of the time. You could insist that people check in their code often and follow the progress, but most management does not want to be so involved. Instead, it's better to have a shared document where a developer marks that they have started development on something and marks when they have finished (i.e. the code is merged and is or can be shipped). As long as the developers are good about indicating this (and, as a manager, you should be strict about making sure this is done), then you know when tasks are started and finished. What's missing is "how much longer". Again, it is not a good idea to ask the developer. Instead we should rely on statistics. Each task will take a certain amount of time. We can estimate that time. The estimate is a random variable with a certain distribution. I'm not sure what that distribution will be, but let's consider a case where each task is set up so that it is expected to take about the same amount of time. The time between completions might reasonably be governed by an exponential probability distribution. In other words, over time it becomes more and more likely that the task will be complete. For each task, there is an average completion time. Furthermore, if we group the tasks into a reasonably sized iteration (say 30 or more tasks), we can measure the average of these averages over many iterations. As an example, say we have 10 iterations, each with 30 tasks. Each iteration will have an average duration for the task over the 30 tasks. We can then compute the average of those averages over the 10 iterations. The cool thing is that no matter what the distribution of the individual tasks, the average of the average is normally distributed. This distribution has the wonderful property that half of the distribution lies to the left of the mean and half lies to the right. This allows you to predict pretty closely when an iteration will finish (though not individual tasks!). In other words, you can take that average of the average, multiply it by 30 (the iteration size) and 50% of the time you will complete the iteration in under that amount of time. If you also look at the variance you can calculate the 70%, 90% or whatever completion rate you desire. Of course, it doesn't always work -- only when your team works well together and when they aren't pressured or pestered all the time. It's the manager's job to ensure that this happens -- let the statistics predict completion time. You may be wondering, "What if I want to know the completion time of an individual task"? My answer: as a general rule, don't do that. It's a terribly horrible idea. It breaks your team. Of course there are times when you absolutely need to do it, in which case you can pester them in person. You should do it so infrequently that using a service would seem ludicrous. If you absolutely must micro-manage your team for every task, then you have broken your team and no tool is going to save you.
- cm2012 8y agoAs a marketing consultant, this looks really useful. Signed up. Separate note, do you have an affiliate program? Would love to try to drive conversions for % revenue. My email is in my profile. I specialize in targeting SMBs on Facebook.
- jimmyrose 8y agoSure do. I'll shoot you an email but there's also an affiliate application form at https://contentsnare.com/affiliate-application/ https://contentsnare.com/affiliate-application/
- andyakb 8y agoFirst, I just want to say that building anything and getting paying customers is never easy so it's impressive to see what these guys have done. While there is definitely a large market of agencies suffering from this problem, I don't think this is the "true" solution. Clients hire an agency because they just want to pay somebody to build them a website (or whatever it actually is). When approaching this, they are almost definitely not thinking at all about having to do anything other than tell the agency what they want. This is the client having unrealistic expectations, but they aren't supposed to be the experts, so it should be on the agency to be clear about those expectations. Even if you think you're clear about the about of work required of them, most client will drag their feet to no end on delivering the content. This is because they have 1,000 other things to do, don't really know where to even begin, and are getting frustrated because the reason they went to an agency was because they didn't have the time to deal with this. Looking at setting up endless reminders as a solution misses the reason they came to you and loses out on a ton of value. Clients don't want to do this. Find a way so that they don't have to and then charge for that. If a client doesn't want to pay to have you do it at the start, give them a deadline for the content, if they don't get it to you by then, they can either get the site as-is or pay to have you do it for them. What content do you need from the client? Figure out what questions you have to ask them to create that content, schedule a call, then ask them those questions, get a transcript, and give it to a copywriter. Then give the result to the client along with a timeline of "if this isn't approved or edited by X, then it is going live as-is." I get where Content Snare is coming from, but I think it misses a much bigger underlying point of why this is such a problem.
- apatters 8y agoIt's definitely not a universal scenario that the agency can produce 100% of the content for the client. Sure the content should be part of the planning and budgeting up front, and the agency should do as much of it as they can. But a common example of where you may need content from the client is a hotel that wants to do a new photoshoot for their new website. They know that photos are incredibly important to their marketing, they often have a preferred photographer they want to work with directly, even if you're local and offer to conduct the photoshoot for them, they can probably do a better job producing those assets than you can because they know their property inside and out. That's a classic case where you have to depend on the client for content and a tool like Content Snare might be useful.
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoSlightly off-topic, but if you're in the building phase, I HIGHLY recommend setting up a placeholder website and putting up some content and getting some backlinks. If you have 12+ months of content and backlinks, you will have a much better foundation for getting organic traffic once you do launch.
- jakoblorz 8y ago"The original idea was actually completely different to what we ended up building." Nearly every internet-startup, ever