9 ms·

How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

233 points by hnjobaccount 5y ago

intrasight 5y ago
Honestly, I think this fails at the first bullet point: "Pick a niche that is already validated". My first bullet would be "Build a product that your existing customer says they need and they can't find." That's how all my SaaS as a solo have come to be.
- CodingPanda42 5y ago
  In a way that is the same point, just in your case you have already existing customers. But if you don't have a look at what other companies customer are doing and optimize for a segment of those can certainly be a good approach IMHO
  - intrasight 5y ago
    Sort of but not really. The article is mostly about differentiation. But if there's no existing solution to a customer problem, then you don't have to differentiate.
- cvhashim 5y ago
  Before that, how do I find customers and clients?
  - candiodari 5y ago
    Start on a job board. Get a freelance gig with your skills. Anything.
1cvmask 5y ago
So what's the SaaS that you created and managed to compete with big players as a solo founder?
- corobo 5y ago
  It feels rude to ask, but I wish people asked this more You see it a lot in the livestreaming/YouTuber circles too, 5 viewer channels advising 10 viewer channels how to grow Theory is great but it should really be marked as such. At least give examples of other companies doing this or something if you're acting solely in a research and present findings capacity
- welder 5y ago
  Here's his portfolio page: https://www.mikealche.com/portfolio https://www.mikealche.com/portfolio
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
    I looked at that page and then I asked the question to see if it was some other startup not listed on the portfolio page.
- keewee7 5y ago
  In the C++ world there is a dude with funny hair who makes a living by being a C++ expert. What is his real world C++ experience? Being a C++ expert.
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
    Ipso Facto wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipso_facto
artemonster 5y ago
arrrghhh this "find a niche" stuff again. what if I am a regular 9-5 engineer in a big company. where the hell am I finding those? By using random idea generator and getting "note taking add-in for excel for amputee ballerinas"? aw jeez, they dont have enough money, I must pivot to broker ballerinas
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  yeah, the "find a niche" advice falls flat without an addendum entitled "how to find a niche". I think fundamentally it comes from talking to people rather than theorising in a bubble, but unless you're already talking to people it's tricky to know how to begin.
  - lewisjoe 5y ago
    pg has an excellent essay on how to fine niches or startup ideas in general. My thumbrule: 1. Pick a market that already has money-making companies. If you can beat them by price & quality, even after considering the first-mover advantage - go for it. 2. [From pg's essay] Just experiene more in life, with different people facing different kinds of problems from different sectors. That's a sure shot way to eventually run into a market with less competition.
- omarhaneef 5y ago
  I thought this was implicit: you find a problem you deal with on a daily basis. This is probably why there are so many more startups pitching development tools than, for instance, something to make the lives of truckers a little easier. If you work as a regular engineer, you must come across dozens of daily problems any of which are not properly solved by your current tools. Even simple things like following up consistently, or checking to see if someone responded to an email to a third party etc Addendum: In response to many comments, I should add that this method is not supposed to guarantee you a good idea, but is a source for ideas to filter, refine, develop or abandon.
  - cvhashim 5y ago
moneywoes 5y ago
How big is the risk of some competitor just copying with business with 10x the engineers and taking your customers?
- dwrowe 5y ago
  They typically move more slowly - have more layers of design by committee than you will. They’ve already built a large ship that requires movement, you’re in a speedboat. Sure, they can crush you, if you move at the same speed and in the same direction - use your agility to move.
- MangoCoffee 5y ago
  low? lets use Zoom as an example. its competitors already doing exactly what Zoom does and yet they lost customers given they were in the market much much longer than Zoom.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    > lets use Zoom as an example. its competitor Zoom was started with over 40 ex-Cisco Webex managers and employees. So not only did Zoom have a remarkable expertise base (and significant investment), they gutted Cisco of talent on the same product. But it gets worse. I talked to an early Webex engineer, and he said that Cisco threw out their original roadmap after the takeover.
- marcos100 5y ago
  You're small enough that they don't care. If you grow big, then they buy your or copy your business and when that happens you'll have earned a lot of money, hopefully.
- count 5y ago
  For every company that will buy from them, there's a company that won't buy from them for 'religious' reasons. Deals are complicated, it's not always an 'engineering' decision.
- Kaotique 5y ago
  10+ engineers is also 3 designers, 2 online marketeer, 2 managers, etc. They would need so much more revenue than a solo dev.
256DEV 5y ago
I hate to be the stereotype of skeptical HN reader but I think this headline oversells the article. Specifically for me it doesn't speak at all to the differences between starting a SaaS like this as a team of founders versus as a solo founder. As a committed solo founder all I can say is that choosing solo founding is not something to be undertaken lightly! My startup CV is now roughly an equal length of being on a team of 4 founders and the current solo founder situation so I see the differences all the time. There are a lot of positives to both options but to write an article like this and not blend an awareness of the trade-offs between the two makes it much less interesting. I've really struggled with being a solo founder despite it being a strong preference and learning to face every aspect of the running the business with a very conscious awareness that you're +1 in certain things and -1 in others is the only way I've found to make it work. The idea you choose is a big part of this. I've seen thinking about your idea & solo founding preference described on twitter by @warikoo like this: 2x2 matrix X-axis: Do you have the core skill reqd for the startup? Y-axis: Are you a control freak? Y,Y: DON'T have a cofounder Y,N: Could get one, but with complementary skills N,Y: Hire people, might make them cofounders later N,N: You have to have one!
jerrygoyal 5y ago
> A good ballpark to get started is creating three plans around $47, $97 and $249 each. just like that. really? no matter what kind of SaaS you're running?
- ogjunkyard 5y ago
  I thought the same thing. Current major players in the market I'm going after offer their products/services for free, and niche players offer their products for $5/month or $20/year. Charging $47+/month is a nonstarter as customers are price conscious.
  - jerrre 5y ago
    You could also take that as a signal it's not a good market to be in? Depending on how easy it is to find customers, and your goals/options regarding to scale of course.
    - ogjunkyard 5y ago
      In this case, serving the market is about scale and no-touch/incredibly-low-touch sales. The companies not charging anything are making money on the backend through data, analytics, and sale of information to 3rd parties. There's definitely money to be made, it just depends on who you are asking for that money from.
  - ezekg 5y ago
    Honest question -- are you trying to build a sustainable business on $20/yr per customer? That sounds very ... challenging.
    - thih9 5y ago
      Could you elaborate? It seems to me that $20/year could be a good lowest tier price, especially for products targeting individual customers (as opposed to businesses). There are successful solo founder projects in that range (notably pinboard.in, $22/year).
kureikain 5y ago
If you want to compete with the big players, you have to solve the most important pain point and work upward from that small use base. My case: I work on https://hanami.run https://hanami.run (will soon move to https://mailwip.com https://mailwip.com due to hanamirb.org conflict) and email forwarding is very competitive. Big and old players are all over the place because at the end of day, setting up email forwarding isn't hard and many open source project did it, heck you can spin up AWS lambda for incoming email in no time. The pain point is: email will drop sometime, time to time no matter how good an email forwarding service is because they have to scan spam, have false positive, or because of strict DMARC/SPF rule. And I have no tools available to help me out there. So I focus strongly on my maillog features with many level of privacy: - no log at all: defaut - only log spam email: give you another chance to read email on our UI - log meta data - log meta data + subject - log whole email Then, next steps is regex forwarding. Again, I learned this from reddit, forum search of those use base. Basically I focus on those small features that big player doesn't have. Then I was able to obtain a very small user base who has issues with big providers. Then I work upward from there to spin out given now that I had a working and good product that people are willing to pay for. The rest is just iteration.
- codazoda 5y ago
  Hi. Good to see you kicking around. I’m a happy customer that had trouble with those big providers. Lately I haven’t even thought about your service (it’s just working).
  - kureikain 5y ago
    Hey, Thanks for your kind words Codazoda. Much appreciate :-)
going_to_800 5y ago
that's exactly what we did and doing very well. After trying lots of stuff in the last 12 years and actively participating in the indie communities, that's the easiest way to make it work. Find a popular product, pick a growing niche that product serves not so well (you can see that in reviews, twitter, etc) and build a specialized version of that product with a friendly and modern UI. When serving different niches, usually products require different configurations for each and get quite heavy and confusing. You can fix that by specializing on one niche.
matchagaucho 5y ago
"Solo Founder" seems like a proxy that just acknowledges that Software Development is now a Profession. We don't refer to Doctors, Lawyers, and Accountants as "Solo Doctors", etc... They are simply people who have studied their area of expertise for years, are disciplined and principled in their approach, likely carry some form of E&O insurance to warrant their work, and are perfectly capable forming their own legal entity and opening their own "office". Broadly speaking, these professionals belong to networks of other professionals, who occasionally collaborate on projects. Reading the article in this context then, focusing on a niche makes perfect sense for any Professional.
- paxys 5y ago
  There's a difference between working a job and being an entrepreneur. The solo founder vs partnership debate comes up in every profession you mentioned, e.g. when starting your own law practice or medical clinic from scratch. Particularly for lawyers the standard advice is to at minimum have a group of partners with complementary skills (deep technical knowledge of laws, experience in a courtroom, ability to schmooze clients), not very different from what you'd hear from a tech VC.
ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
I find it amusing that this article has reached the front page with quite a positive vote count yet just about every comment I've read is quite negative about it.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  It's actually one of the best SaaS startup overviews I've seen. The nice menu idea by team is the first time I've seen that focused on. The negative comments are from programmers thinking from a builder perspective, rather than as a SaaS businessperson. An article doesn't owe anybody a startup idea, or how to differentiate that idea from existing businesses.

233 points by hnjobaccount 5y ago

Honestly, I think this fails at the first bullet point: "Pick a niche that is already validated". My first bullet would be "Build a product that your existing customer says they need and they can't find." That's how all my SaaS as a solo have come to be.

CodingPanda42 5y ago
In a way that is the same point, just in your case you have already existing customers. But if you don't have a look at what other companies customer are doing and optimize for a segment of those can certainly be a good approach IMHO
- intrasight 5y ago
  Sort of but not really. The article is mostly about differentiation. But if there's no existing solution to a customer problem, then you don't have to differentiate.
cvhashim 5y ago
Before that, how do I find customers and clients?
- candiodari 5y ago
  Start on a job board. Get a freelance gig with your skills. Anything.

1cvmask 5y ago

So what's the SaaS that you created and managed to compete with big players as a solo founder?

corobo 5y ago
It feels rude to ask, but I wish people asked this more You see it a lot in the livestreaming/YouTuber circles too, 5 viewer channels advising 10 viewer channels how to grow Theory is great but it should really be marked as such. At least give examples of other companies doing this or something if you're acting solely in a research and present findings capacity
welder 5y ago
Here's his portfolio page: https://www.mikealche.com/portfolio https://www.mikealche.com/portfolio
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  I looked at that page and then I asked the question to see if it was some other startup not listed on the portfolio page.
keewee7 5y ago
In the C++ world there is a dude with funny hair who makes a living by being a C++ expert. What is his real world C++ experience? Being a C++ expert.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  Ipso Facto wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipso_facto

artemonster 5y ago

arrrghhh this "find a niche" stuff again. what if I am a regular 9-5 engineer in a big company. where the hell am I finding those? By using random idea generator and getting "note taking add-in for excel for amputee ballerinas"? aw jeez, they dont have enough money, I must pivot to broker ballerinas

beaconstudios 5y ago
yeah, the "find a niche" advice falls flat without an addendum entitled "how to find a niche". I think fundamentally it comes from talking to people rather than theorising in a bubble, but unless you're already talking to people it's tricky to know how to begin.
- lewisjoe 5y ago
  pg has an excellent essay on how to fine niches or startup ideas in general. My thumbrule: 1. Pick a market that already has money-making companies. If you can beat them by price & quality, even after considering the first-mover advantage - go for it. 2. [From pg's essay] Just experiene more in life, with different people facing different kinds of problems from different sectors. That's a sure shot way to eventually run into a market with less competition.
omarhaneef 5y ago
I thought this was implicit: you find a problem you deal with on a daily basis. This is probably why there are so many more startups pitching development tools than, for instance, something to make the lives of truckers a little easier. If you work as a regular engineer, you must come across dozens of daily problems any of which are not properly solved by your current tools. Even simple things like following up consistently, or checking to see if someone responded to an email to a third party etc Addendum: In response to many comments, I should add that this method is not supposed to guarantee you a good idea, but is a source for ideas to filter, refine, develop or abandon.
- cvhashim 5y ago

moneywoes 5y ago

How big is the risk of some competitor just copying with business with 10x the engineers and taking your customers?

dwrowe 5y ago
They typically move more slowly - have more layers of design by committee than you will. They’ve already built a large ship that requires movement, you’re in a speedboat. Sure, they can crush you, if you move at the same speed and in the same direction - use your agility to move.
MangoCoffee 5y ago
low? lets use Zoom as an example. its competitors already doing exactly what Zoom does and yet they lost customers given they were in the market much much longer than Zoom.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > lets use Zoom as an example. its competitor Zoom was started with over 40 ex-Cisco Webex managers and employees. So not only did Zoom have a remarkable expertise base (and significant investment), they gutted Cisco of talent on the same product. But it gets worse. I talked to an early Webex engineer, and he said that Cisco threw out their original roadmap after the takeover.
marcos100 5y ago
You're small enough that they don't care. If you grow big, then they buy your or copy your business and when that happens you'll have earned a lot of money, hopefully.
count 5y ago
For every company that will buy from them, there's a company that won't buy from them for 'religious' reasons. Deals are complicated, it's not always an 'engineering' decision.
Kaotique 5y ago
10+ engineers is also 3 designers, 2 online marketeer, 2 managers, etc. They would need so much more revenue than a solo dev.

256DEV 5y ago

I hate to be the stereotype of skeptical HN reader but I think this headline oversells the article. Specifically for me it doesn't speak at all to the differences between starting a SaaS like this as a team of founders versus as a solo founder. As a committed solo founder all I can say is that choosing solo founding is not something to be undertaken lightly! My startup CV is now roughly an equal length of being on a team of 4 founders and the current solo founder situation so I see the differences all the time. There are a lot of positives to both options but to write an article like this and not blend an awareness of the trade-offs between the two makes it much less interesting. I've really struggled with being a solo founder despite it being a strong preference and learning to face every aspect of the running the business with a very conscious awareness that you're +1 in certain things and -1 in others is the only way I've found to make it work. The idea you choose is a big part of this. I've seen thinking about your idea & solo founding preference described on twitter by @warikoo like this: 2x2 matrix X-axis: Do you have the core skill reqd for the startup? Y-axis: Are you a control freak? Y,Y: DON'T have a cofounder Y,N: Could get one, but with complementary skills N,Y: Hire people, might make them cofounders later N,N: You have to have one!

jerrygoyal 5y ago

> A good ballpark to get started is creating three plans around $47, $97 and $249 each. just like that. really? no matter what kind of SaaS you're running?

ogjunkyard 5y ago
I thought the same thing. Current major players in the market I'm going after offer their products/services for free, and niche players offer their products for $5/month or $20/year. Charging $47+/month is a nonstarter as customers are price conscious.
- jerrre 5y ago
  You could also take that as a signal it's not a good market to be in? Depending on how easy it is to find customers, and your goals/options regarding to scale of course.
  - ogjunkyard 5y ago
    In this case, serving the market is about scale and no-touch/incredibly-low-touch sales. The companies not charging anything are making money on the backend through data, analytics, and sale of information to 3rd parties. There's definitely money to be made, it just depends on who you are asking for that money from.
- ezekg 5y ago
  Honest question -- are you trying to build a sustainable business on $20/yr per customer? That sounds very ... challenging.
  - thih9 5y ago
    Could you elaborate? It seems to me that $20/year could be a good lowest tier price, especially for products targeting individual customers (as opposed to businesses). There are successful solo founder projects in that range (notably pinboard.in, $22/year).

kureikain 5y ago

If you want to compete with the big players, you have to solve the most important pain point and work upward from that small use base. My case: I work on https://hanami.run https://hanami.run (will soon move to https://mailwip.com https://mailwip.com due to hanamirb.org conflict) and email forwarding is very competitive. Big and old players are all over the place because at the end of day, setting up email forwarding isn't hard and many open source project did it, heck you can spin up AWS lambda for incoming email in no time. The pain point is: email will drop sometime, time to time no matter how good an email forwarding service is because they have to scan spam, have false positive, or because of strict DMARC/SPF rule. And I have no tools available to help me out there. So I focus strongly on my maillog features with many level of privacy: - no log at all: defaut - only log spam email: give you another chance to read email on our UI - log meta data - log meta data + subject - log whole email Then, next steps is regex forwarding. Again, I learned this from reddit, forum search of those use base. Basically I focus on those small features that big player doesn't have. Then I was able to obtain a very small user base who has issues with big providers. Then I work upward from there to spin out given now that I had a working and good product that people are willing to pay for. The rest is just iteration.

codazoda 5y ago
Hi. Good to see you kicking around. I’m a happy customer that had trouble with those big providers. Lately I haven’t even thought about your service (it’s just working).
- kureikain 5y ago
  Hey, Thanks for your kind words Codazoda. Much appreciate :-)

going_to_800 5y ago

that's exactly what we did and doing very well. After trying lots of stuff in the last 12 years and actively participating in the indie communities, that's the easiest way to make it work. Find a popular product, pick a growing niche that product serves not so well (you can see that in reviews, twitter, etc) and build a specialized version of that product with a friendly and modern UI. When serving different niches, usually products require different configurations for each and get quite heavy and confusing. You can fix that by specializing on one niche.

matchagaucho 5y ago

"Solo Founder" seems like a proxy that just acknowledges that Software Development is now a Profession. We don't refer to Doctors, Lawyers, and Accountants as "Solo Doctors", etc... They are simply people who have studied their area of expertise for years, are disciplined and principled in their approach, likely carry some form of E&O insurance to warrant their work, and are perfectly capable forming their own legal entity and opening their own "office". Broadly speaking, these professionals belong to networks of other professionals, who occasionally collaborate on projects. Reading the article in this context then, focusing on a niche makes perfect sense for any Professional.

paxys 5y ago
There's a difference between working a job and being an entrepreneur. The solo founder vs partnership debate comes up in every profession you mentioned, e.g. when starting your own law practice or medical clinic from scratch. Particularly for lawyers the standard advice is to at minimum have a group of partners with complementary skills (deep technical knowledge of laws, experience in a courtroom, ability to schmooze clients), not very different from what you'd hear from a tech VC.

ChicagoBoy11 5y ago

I find it amusing that this article has reached the front page with quite a positive vote count yet just about every comment I've read is quite negative about it.

redis_mlc 5y ago
It's actually one of the best SaaS startup overviews I've seen. The nice menu idea by team is the first time I've seen that focused on. The negative comments are from programmers thinking from a builder perspective, rather than as a SaaS businessperson. An article doesn't owe anybody a startup idea, or how to differentiate that idea from existing businesses.