The gist: I wouldn’t try to sell SaaS/software to individuals. My business-oriented startups have been successful. My consumer-oriented one wasn’t (at least as

The gist: I wouldn’t try to sell SaaS/software to individuals. My business-oriented startups have been successful. My consumer-oriented one wasn’t (at least as a business), because I thought that people would be willing to pay some amount to save time or get more done. Turns out that even if a user states that an app saves them hours per month, the vast, vast majority won’t spend any amount of their own money for it. The product got users - some who used it hundreds of times per month - but even among those who said they loved it, they used it constantly, and it saved them hours, very few would pay even ~$35/year. People are fairly good at valuing other people’s time (as businesses do every day). People are unbelievably awful at valuing their (our!) own time. That’s not anyone’s fault, it’s human nature. This only comes out as a revealed preference, that is, by asking a happy active user to pay, not asking whether they would pay. Almost every “consumer” company actually makes most of their revenue from businesses. The exceptions that don’t have millions of free users - like 1Password when it was licensed software and FastMail in its early days - are exactly that: exceptions. Most remain fairly small until or unless they start serving businesses too. Asking individuals to spend their own money on a software/Web product (rather than a physical object or music/video content) is next to impossible and I wouldn’t do that again. Sell to businesses or find another revenue stream.