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I've been running various online businesses, including SaaS, for eight years. There is no general answer to your question. Are those 8 customers paying you hun
by mherrmann 6y ago
I've been running various online businesses, including SaaS, for eight years.
There is no general answer to your question. Are those 8 customers paying you hundreds of dollars each per month, or tens of dollars? What's the reason you haven't gotten more? Have you lost motivation to work in this space / on that project?
I was in a similar situation to you a few years ago. I had started a clone of patio11's appointmentreminder.org for the Austrian market. After 2 years, I had 8 customers and €2k monthly recurring revenue. But it was very difficult to get new customers. I decided to stop growing this business. Since then, I've lost 4 of the 8 customers, but those that remain now pay me more for additional services, so I'm back at €2k MRR. I'm satisfied with my decision.
Another project I worked on is https://fman.io https://fman.io, a desktop application. There, I wish I had stopped sooner. I spent 3,000 hours and made <€20k. I actually recorded videos about this and the other business I mentioned above [1], [2].
In general, I suspect most founders keep going longer than they should. The fact that you are even asking the question indicates to me that you are losing motivation. Maybe it is time to move on.
If you'd like to talk about more details privately, feel free to reach out by email. You can find my address at http://herrmann.io http://herrmann.io. Good luck!
1: https://youtu.be/I1K3IkOlaVw https://youtu.be/I1K3IkOlaVw
2: https://youtu.be/NWCOwvp23uk https://youtu.be/NWCOwvp23uk
- bootloop 6y agoThanks for sharing. About your customers (not limited to SaaS), are they local (Vienna, Austria) or from all over the world? As I have the feeling here b2b is still done door-to-door. But of course this might depend on the target audience.
- mherrmann 6y agoThey're very, very local. My customers are doctors. They need face to face conversation to be convinced. The big sales effort was a big reason why I stopped.
- zerr 6y agoWhat do you think went wrong with fman.io? E.g. Total Commander is a one guy shop and he is doing fine for 20+ years now - so seems like people pay money for a good file manager. Does fman.io miss some features or is it wrong marketing?
- mherrmann 6y agoTC entered the market at a much better time. There was much less competition, huge demand and people were still used to paying for desktop software. For that reason, you can't really compare fman to it. Having said that, yes fman misses important features. It is I think the main reason why fman does not have more adoption. But adding the features would take another x,000h.
- kev2908 6y agoThanks Herrmann, for the videos! They are really nice. I think that a lot of "business" videos are made by guys in the US. I often wonder if business advices are applicable here in Vienna. But hearing this from a guy of my own hometown makes this very valueable information.
- mherrmann 6y agoHappy to hear you like them!
- iopuy 6y agoInteresting product in fman. May I ask what percent of the <20k came from one off sales (18 euros) vs paying for the ongoing updates? Trying to figure out how a license a product of mine. THanks