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I’m a one man show. I made a SaaS targeted towards a specific company. I did all the work up front, got them to trial it, and when they loved it they singed a c

I’m a one man show. I made a SaaS targeted towards a specific company. I did all the work up front, got them to trial it, and when they loved it they singed a contract for just over $100k/year. I have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue. I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about $1,000/m. All in it’s about $130k/year and it requires about 5 hours a week of my time. It has freed up the rest of my time to keep building similar projects that can both boost and diversify my MRR. I’m very grateful that I’m able to work on projects I enjoy now, but more importantly it’s given me time to spend with my family and be around for my kid.

akudha 7y ago
Can you broadly talk about how you came up with the idea, how you contacted the company?
- stanmancan 7y ago
  An acquaintance worked for the company and asked for help replacing an existing paper process with an excel document. I helped, but mentioned a web app would work much better. The company trialed the excel version but came back with some concerns. I talked it over with the friend and decided to spend my free time building it out. Once I had a beta ready they trailed it in their location and they loved it. We got it into 2 more locations (all free at this point) and everyone loved it. That raised interest and other stores in the district started asking for it. We launched it across the whole district and finally started to charge. After a year the company decided to launch it nationally. It was a risky move to do the work up front since it could have fizzled out, but it worked out in the end.
  - akudha 7y ago
    Beautiful! one again, "find Excel use case and replace with web app" seems to have worked :) Thank you for responding.
    - stanmancan 7y ago
      Absolutely, I think there’s plenty of money to be made finding problems companies don’t know they have. The hard part is identifying them, and picking one where the value added by a web app is worth paying for.
  - akudha 7y ago
    Asking here, unable to reply to the comment below. The hard part is identifying them, and picking one where the value added by a web app is worth paying for. As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this? I tried the cold email route (even made a friend this way, we still keep in touch after two years, though we haven't met and probably never will), but I didn't succeed. I probably could have, but it made me so uncomfortable writing to total strangers :(
    - adriand 7y ago
      > As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this? You need to develop contacts at companies! There are lots of different ways to build your network, but the bottom line is that to be successful with this line of work, which is essentially consulting (at least in the beginning stages), you need to meet people and earn their trust. If you are introverted this will likely feel awkward and uncomfortable (which is why it’s called getting out of your comfort zone). It takes a fair bit of effort to get someone to the point where they are willing to walk you through their business processes. Showing genuine interest in their operations and asking lots of good questions is key.
      - stanmancan 7y ago
        Yup this pretty much hits the nail on the head. Learning to listen is very important, and really understanding what people are saying. Lots of times they aren’t really complaining, they’re just talking about something and if you’re listening closely you can identify potential opportunities in their systems and processes. Often people don’t know what’s possible, so they don’t come at you directly with a problem. At an old job it was someone’s job to run a “install history report”, it was all the installs that were done the previous week (thousands) and read through it copying and pasting installs from specific cities into an excel sheet. It took about 12 hours a week. He explained this process whole asking a completely different question. I ended up writing a little script that completed this same task in a few seconds. He didn’t even know that was possible, so he didn’t know to ask.
  - cpach 7y ago
    Was it hard to negotiate/agree with them on the price?
    - stanmancan 7y ago
      Not particularly, I started a bit higher than I really wanted so they could negotiate down a bit, but it’s a reasonable price for what they get. I think the trick is pricing based on value provided by the solution; what’s it worth to them?
      - cpach 7y ago
        Cool. Well done!
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    What did your acquaintance get for their part? I had a kindof similar situation long ago, where a friend worked for a high-frequency trading company and I had been developing a low-overhead high-precision resource and system monitoring framework. I would supply him development builds of the agents and a web login to monitor and tune their trading systems while I got some free production testing in return, it seemed fair at the time. As things matured and I started exploring paths for monetization, when I approached that trading company about a possible contract my "friend" demanded half ownership stake in the business in return for their becoming the first paying customer. Nope.
    - stanmancan 7y ago
      Acquaintance got the recognition at work for the tool implementation. They also got a vastly superior solution to a problem they had at work. I had another opportunity to develop a similar tool for another company, but the person who pitched it wanted 50% despite having nothing to offer other than the idea, so I politely declined.
    - readhn 7y ago
      ... so you got nothing at the end?
101008 7y ago
Wow, those number sound so high for a third world country that I can't help thinking that if I were in your situation I would give half of that salary (5k monthly) to my brother and father so they wouldn't have to worry about money again. Congratulations for being in that situation!
- arkitaip 7y ago
  Parent didn't get where he is today by giving away half (!) of his salary.
  - adele11 7y ago
    He didn't get there by not giving half of his salary.
- spottybanana 7y ago
  Coming from scandinavian welfare state, it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income. Especially if you earn it by working, and the reasoning being so that they don't have to worry about money = have less pressure to work. I don't want to judge anyone, just wanted to state that there is clearly quite a big cultural gap here. I don't know anyone around here who would do similar things.
  - newswasboring 7y ago
    Your country has a welfare net. For the third world countries usually children are the welfare net. It's not that hard to understand.
    - nolok 7y ago
      There is factually/intellectually understanding it, and then there is being able to see things through that point of view, which opens up in depth discussions from it. As parent said, he may have the first type, but not the second, so it's hard for him to answer on it without making it sound like a culture clash.
zakki 7y ago
Please write a blog post for us to learn from you.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  Don't take this the wrong way. What if you read what he did, do a lot of research on how to get similar results to him and blog about it so others can learn from you? Don't wait for things to happen; go out and make them happen yourself.
aerovistae 7y ago
The "site with ads" is the one that really interests me. Can you give some details on that? What kind of site it is, how you grew traffic, what you use for ads? (Just AdWords?)
- stanmancan 7y ago
  I made an API for myself in 2011 that I could consume at work. I made a site that lets people query it from a web app and docs on the API. Didn’t think anyone would actually use it though. Tossed an ad on it and forgot about it. The API has been rewritten a few times now, it gets over 300 million requests a month. All organic growth, I can’t take any credit for it because I honestly have done nothing to aid it. Only use Google AdWords and it runs on a $40/m VPS. We introduced paid plans a year ago and had a few sign ups. I think the paid accounts are about $440MRR but I split it with a friend who did all the work around paid accounts. (I didn’t think it would be worthwhile, he did, so he did the work around paid subscriptions)
  - rhlsthrm 7y ago
    What's the API do if you don't mind sharing?
    - stef25 7y ago
      In his submissions on HN there's a link to macvendors.com Pretty cool simple idea.
      - crobertsbmw 7y ago
        I visited the site, and turned off my adblocker, but am not seeing any ads. Are the ads hidden somewhere? What does one have to do to see ads these days? Edit - Nevermind, I thought I had my ad blocker off, but apparently incognito mode didn't turn it off like I expected it would.
  - stef25 7y ago
    Adwords, as in you pay to advertise the site on Google? I found your project since you previously posted it on HN and linked to it in an answer below (hope you don't mind, I'll remove it if you want).
rhlsthrm 7y ago
What type of hosting/maintenance are you doing for clients and how did you find these clients? Interesting you were able to find opportunities for hosting services when there are so many easy PaaS options out there now.
- stanmancan 7y ago
  Most companies don't know what hosting options they have. They'll take the first recommendation from their "tech person" or whoever developed their site. The problem is, that's a shit experience for your average company. They rarely touch their site since they don't know how. Someone will create an account, they'll write the username and password down for all the various hosting providers they need to know, and things will usually go smoothly until their credit card expires, their domain name expires (which they don't even know is possible) or some other problem that results in a bunch of downtime and panic from everyone involved. I pitch it as a worry free solution. I manage their domains renewals, DNS, hosting, security updates, framework updates, all things they don't know they have to do. Their framework will remain current, so if they want something done in 5 years they'll have the latest version of the framework, not some archaic thing that requires PHP 5.1 and relies on a weird MySQL bug from whatever version their host is using. On top of that, they get a couple hours of maintenance included every month, so if they need a few small changes made to the site it's all included, no extra invoices, no quoting, no needing to get budget approvals or sign offs. They just shoot me an email and I make the changes. (hours don't roll over)
Pete-Codes 7y ago
Awesome numbers! Did you do CS at college?
- stanmancan 7y ago
  Nope all self taught. Nothing I’ve done is very complex.
thepredestrian 7y ago
What kind of site do you run that generates $1.5k/month in ad revenue? High traffic niche blog?
- stanmancan 7y ago
  One of many MAC address lookup services, https://macvendors.com https://macvendors.com

akudha 7y ago

Can you broadly talk about how you came up with the idea, how you contacted the company?

stanmancan 7y ago
An acquaintance worked for the company and asked for help replacing an existing paper process with an excel document. I helped, but mentioned a web app would work much better. The company trialed the excel version but came back with some concerns. I talked it over with the friend and decided to spend my free time building it out. Once I had a beta ready they trailed it in their location and they loved it. We got it into 2 more locations (all free at this point) and everyone loved it. That raised interest and other stores in the district started asking for it. We launched it across the whole district and finally started to charge. After a year the company decided to launch it nationally. It was a risky move to do the work up front since it could have fizzled out, but it worked out in the end.
- akudha 7y ago
  Beautiful! one again, "find Excel use case and replace with web app" seems to have worked :) Thank you for responding.
  - stanmancan 7y ago
    Absolutely, I think there’s plenty of money to be made finding problems companies don’t know they have. The hard part is identifying them, and picking one where the value added by a web app is worth paying for.
- akudha 7y ago
  Asking here, unable to reply to the comment below. The hard part is identifying them, and picking one where the value added by a web app is worth paying for. As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this? I tried the cold email route (even made a friend this way, we still keep in touch after two years, though we haven't met and probably never will), but I didn't succeed. I probably could have, but it made me so uncomfortable writing to total strangers :(
  - adriand 7y ago
    > As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this? You need to develop contacts at companies! There are lots of different ways to build your network, but the bottom line is that to be successful with this line of work, which is essentially consulting (at least in the beginning stages), you need to meet people and earn their trust. If you are introverted this will likely feel awkward and uncomfortable (which is why it’s called getting out of your comfort zone). It takes a fair bit of effort to get someone to the point where they are willing to walk you through their business processes. Showing genuine interest in their operations and asking lots of good questions is key.
    - stanmancan 7y ago
      Yup this pretty much hits the nail on the head. Learning to listen is very important, and really understanding what people are saying. Lots of times they aren’t really complaining, they’re just talking about something and if you’re listening closely you can identify potential opportunities in their systems and processes. Often people don’t know what’s possible, so they don’t come at you directly with a problem. At an old job it was someone’s job to run a “install history report”, it was all the installs that were done the previous week (thousands) and read through it copying and pasting installs from specific cities into an excel sheet. It took about 12 hours a week. He explained this process whole asking a completely different question. I ended up writing a little script that completed this same task in a few seconds. He didn’t even know that was possible, so he didn’t know to ask.
- cpach 7y ago
  Was it hard to negotiate/agree with them on the price?
  - stanmancan 7y ago
    Not particularly, I started a bit higher than I really wanted so they could negotiate down a bit, but it’s a reasonable price for what they get. I think the trick is pricing based on value provided by the solution; what’s it worth to them?
    - cpach 7y ago
      Cool. Well done!
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  What did your acquaintance get for their part? I had a kindof similar situation long ago, where a friend worked for a high-frequency trading company and I had been developing a low-overhead high-precision resource and system monitoring framework. I would supply him development builds of the agents and a web login to monitor and tune their trading systems while I got some free production testing in return, it seemed fair at the time. As things matured and I started exploring paths for monetization, when I approached that trading company about a possible contract my "friend" demanded half ownership stake in the business in return for their becoming the first paying customer. Nope.
  - stanmancan 7y ago
    Acquaintance got the recognition at work for the tool implementation. They also got a vastly superior solution to a problem they had at work. I had another opportunity to develop a similar tool for another company, but the person who pitched it wanted 50% despite having nothing to offer other than the idea, so I politely declined.
  - readhn 7y ago
    ... so you got nothing at the end?

101008 7y ago

Wow, those number sound so high for a third world country that I can't help thinking that if I were in your situation I would give half of that salary (5k monthly) to my brother and father so they wouldn't have to worry about money again. Congratulations for being in that situation!

arkitaip 7y ago
Parent didn't get where he is today by giving away half (!) of his salary.
- adele11 7y ago
  He didn't get there by not giving half of his salary.
spottybanana 7y ago
Coming from scandinavian welfare state, it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income. Especially if you earn it by working, and the reasoning being so that they don't have to worry about money = have less pressure to work. I don't want to judge anyone, just wanted to state that there is clearly quite a big cultural gap here. I don't know anyone around here who would do similar things.
- newswasboring 7y ago
  Your country has a welfare net. For the third world countries usually children are the welfare net. It's not that hard to understand.
  - nolok 7y ago
    There is factually/intellectually understanding it, and then there is being able to see things through that point of view, which opens up in depth discussions from it. As parent said, he may have the first type, but not the second, so it's hard for him to answer on it without making it sound like a culture clash.

zakki 7y ago

Please write a blog post for us to learn from you.

HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
Don't take this the wrong way. What if you read what he did, do a lot of research on how to get similar results to him and blog about it so others can learn from you? Don't wait for things to happen; go out and make them happen yourself.

aerovistae 7y ago

The "site with ads" is the one that really interests me. Can you give some details on that? What kind of site it is, how you grew traffic, what you use for ads? (Just AdWords?)

stanmancan 7y ago
I made an API for myself in 2011 that I could consume at work. I made a site that lets people query it from a web app and docs on the API. Didn’t think anyone would actually use it though. Tossed an ad on it and forgot about it. The API has been rewritten a few times now, it gets over 300 million requests a month. All organic growth, I can’t take any credit for it because I honestly have done nothing to aid it. Only use Google AdWords and it runs on a $40/m VPS. We introduced paid plans a year ago and had a few sign ups. I think the paid accounts are about $440MRR but I split it with a friend who did all the work around paid accounts. (I didn’t think it would be worthwhile, he did, so he did the work around paid subscriptions)
- rhlsthrm 7y ago
  What's the API do if you don't mind sharing?
  - stef25 7y ago
    In his submissions on HN there's a link to macvendors.com Pretty cool simple idea.
    - crobertsbmw 7y ago
      I visited the site, and turned off my adblocker, but am not seeing any ads. Are the ads hidden somewhere? What does one have to do to see ads these days? Edit - Nevermind, I thought I had my ad blocker off, but apparently incognito mode didn't turn it off like I expected it would.
- stef25 7y ago
  Adwords, as in you pay to advertise the site on Google? I found your project since you previously posted it on HN and linked to it in an answer below (hope you don't mind, I'll remove it if you want).

rhlsthrm 7y ago

What type of hosting/maintenance are you doing for clients and how did you find these clients? Interesting you were able to find opportunities for hosting services when there are so many easy PaaS options out there now.

stanmancan 7y ago
Most companies don't know what hosting options they have. They'll take the first recommendation from their "tech person" or whoever developed their site. The problem is, that's a shit experience for your average company. They rarely touch their site since they don't know how. Someone will create an account, they'll write the username and password down for all the various hosting providers they need to know, and things will usually go smoothly until their credit card expires, their domain name expires (which they don't even know is possible) or some other problem that results in a bunch of downtime and panic from everyone involved. I pitch it as a worry free solution. I manage their domains renewals, DNS, hosting, security updates, framework updates, all things they don't know they have to do. Their framework will remain current, so if they want something done in 5 years they'll have the latest version of the framework, not some archaic thing that requires PHP 5.1 and relies on a weird MySQL bug from whatever version their host is using. On top of that, they get a couple hours of maintenance included every month, so if they need a few small changes made to the site it's all included, no extra invoices, no quoting, no needing to get budget approvals or sign offs. They just shoot me an email and I make the changes. (hours don't roll over)

Pete-Codes 7y ago

Awesome numbers! Did you do CS at college?

stanmancan 7y ago
Nope all self taught. Nothing I’ve done is very complex.

thepredestrian 7y ago

What kind of site do you run that generates $1.5k/month in ad revenue? High traffic niche blog?

stanmancan 7y ago
One of many MAC address lookup services, https://macvendors.com https://macvendors.com