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Yes, PartsBox is (Electronic parts inventory & production: https://partsbox.io/ https://partsbox.io/). Some key points I would have told my former self: * Do n
by jwr 8y ago
Yes, PartsBox is (Electronic parts inventory & production: https://partsbox.io/ https://partsbox.io/). Some key points I would have told my former self:
* Do not expect any kind of explosive growth, especially in B2B. Expect linear growth. Search for "slow SaaS ramp of death" for a pretty good description of what to expect.
* Marketing is a huge problem. If you look around, you will see lots of marketers talking about marketing. In. Short. Sentences. With. Deep. Meaning. But then you'll notice that they mostly talk about marketing marketing apps for marketers. Unless you are building apps that help marketers market, much of this advice will be useless. And the short sentences are annoying.
* Paid ads are a waste of money, though I heard that with 4-5 digit budgets you can make them work. I never could.
* It is extremely difficult to get a working SaaS business at price points below $20/month. If you look around, businesses with these price points are VC-sponsored and are burning through investor money. I would not start a sustainable SaaS with price points below $40/month.
* When thinking about pricing, remember about support. There is no such thing as "no support", every product needs it, and it costs time and money.
* It's hard. Everything is hard. And there is always too much to do.
* Anxiety eats at you. No matter how good you are at keeping it at bay (I was pretty good), it will eventually catch up with you. I still don't have a good solution to that.
* If you pick a good niche, you can live in a world with nice and smart customers. It's a good world!
* When planning, be careful to set goals based on realistic financial assumptions. If this is to be your full-time job, it needs to support your business (including all hardware and office costs), you (your salary, insurance, retirement savings) and your family. People tend to vastly underestimate how much revenue is needed, especially if their past experience is mostly living with parents or surviving on ramen as a college student.
* I would not trade this for a "normal" job, ever :-)
- paulstovell 8y ago> But then you'll notice that they mostly talk about marketing marketing apps for marketers I loved this point! It’s so true. They go on about how such and such strategy worked so well for HubSpot. Of course it did, HubSpot has an easy audience: marketers! Turns out those strategies work a lot less well for technical or more discerning audiences.
- stevoski 8y ago> Anxiety eats at you. No matter how good you are at keeping it at bay (I was pretty good), it will eventually catch up with you. I still don't have a good solution to that. Same feeling here. Something that works pretty well for me is having a mentor a generation older than me, who has been running a business for decades. I tell them about my anxiety, ask them if they had it, and listen to how they dealt with it. Strangely, every time I have that conversation the anxiety drops significantly for a while. Anyone have other techniques for dealing with the startup anxiety they can share?
- laydn 8y agoWe're waiting for an on-premise version of PartsBox to be released :-) Is that wishful thinking???
- jwr 8y agoI'm afraid so. On-premises is expensive (VERY expensive). I tried to estimate the necessary pricing for on-premises deployment and the final price was never attractive to customers. In all cases it turned out the need for on-premises deployment was not a business need (we must deploy this locally because of X and Y, which implies a value of Z in USD), but rather a point of view (I'd rather have this locally because that's what I prefer). Why is it expensive? On-premises deployment means maintaining a separate version of the software, a complex arrangement to make upgrades, inability to fix potential upgrade problems by modifying the database, having to maintain deployment documentation, having to always have code that creates a database from scratch (rather than migrating an existing one), extending legal arrangements for third-party services, additional configurations that need to be tested and much more. It constrains development in many ways.
- therealdrag0 8y agoYou are very wise. The last company I worked for started as a SaaS product but in an industry that was on-prem. They were unable to resist customer demands for on-prem, so now have mostly hybrid solutions that are very costly and terrible to support.