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How I took my SaaS from idea to sold in 14 months
- PaywallBuster 5y agoThe SaaS was only doing $218 MRR https://twitter.com/joemasilotti/status/1460706255874318338?s=20 https://twitter.com/joemasilotti/status/1460706255874318338?...
- aeturnum 5y agoI would be really interested to see a rough $/hr estimate from OP. Like, if he really did get $200/mo for 1-2 hours of work a month - that's ~$100/hr! It's a good rate! But any increase in time demands is going to sink this as a productive side gig and obviously it's unfit to use as a main gig.
- hackerfromthefu 5y agoBut also nothing per hour for the busy setup time - surely a more realistic assessment would be the total number of hours on the project divided by the total income?
- joemasilotti 5y agoI wish I had that data... sadly I didn't time track for this in the beginning when I was working on it the most. But in the end I was definitely making less than $100/hour before the sale.
- aeturnum 5y agoThat makes sense - and congrats on getting any revenue out of a side project! It seems like a good experience even if it's hard to judge it on economic grounds alone.
- joemasilotti 5y ago$218 MRR and damn proud of it, too!
- tofuahdude 5y agoHow much did you sell it for?
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y agoMaybe a 1000 or 2000. Not worth spending 14 months in my opinion.
- giarc 5y agoDefinitely more than that. I sold something doing $5MRR for $2000 on MicroAcquire.
- creeble 5y agoAny idea how the buyer did after that? I'm a big microacquire lurker.
- giarc 5y agoHard to say really. They revamped the webpage but left the product mostly the same (was a Google Sheet add-on). The only insight I have is the "# Users" that gets listed in the Google Workplace Marketplace. I think it's up to a few hundred, so likely they haven't made their money back yet.
- warent 5y agothe lessons learned are definitely worth if you apply it going forward. making successful products and wealth is a skill. that value snowballs into making one rich
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
- drorco 5y agolol my brain was automatically adding K each time MRR was mentioned. Completely missed that. Nevertheless, nice work.
- runako 5y agoPersonally, given the number of people who never even launch, I congratulate every dollar of MRR. Everyone has to start somewhere, and lessons are learned with every incremental win or loss.
- LenP 5y agoThis is actually an underserved niche, speaking from personal experience. Kudos to OP for acting on it! Family always comes first, I can’t help but think that OP could likely have 10-20x’d MRR with just a little more focus on marketing?
- rgbrgb 5y agoThat’s why there was a buyer!
- joemasilotti 5y agoMaybe! I just didn't have the appetite. And I know that the folks who bought it do – so let them grow it to what it can be.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago> This is actually an underserved niche I find this comment very interesting. The vast majority of SaaS businesses that are shown/sold/started here on HN are complete mysteries to me in terms of their domain and customer base. It's rare that I see a business about which I can say "OK, I can see a need for that product." This one is yet another example: I simply can't fathom ever finding a use for this feature. Please understand, I don't mean this in a negative sense. OP has definitely accomplished something to be proud of. It's just that my section of the industry (embedded systems) is so far removed from general web apps that I have no context for the use cases of a lot of what is introduced here.
- lloydjones 5y agoAny site that gets traffic from social sharing on Twitter / Facebook. The visits via those sources are competing with other tweets/posts in the feed. If there's a visually compelling social image, the likelihood of the URL being visited and/or shared increases. Source: https://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-massively-boost-your-blog-traffic-with-these-5-awesome-image-stats/#Twitter-summary-cards https://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-massively-boost-your-blog-t... (Obviously this doesn't 'prove' that a more-visually-compelling image does better than a basic one, but it seems like it'd follow, given the inclusion of the image at all performs better than no image).
- erikbye 5y agoOn HN we're used to seeing Show HNs like Dropbox's which turn into billion-dollar companies. So, sure, it's easy to dismiss posts like this one. But here's a 2022 challenge for everyone: Start something new and get your first paying customer. You have exactly 1 month from now. I look forward to your Show HN.
- altdataseller 5y agoHow much did your SaaS sold for in terms of multiple of annual revenue?
- sonofaragorn 5y agoI'm pretty sure that's what everyone who clicked on the link was interested in LOL
- Rastonbury 5y agoTapered growth so I'm guessing 2x-4x (high), at $218 MMR that's $5-10k after 14 months. Person put in 1-2 hours of work after the first two months.
- rgj 5y agoSo basically it was not worth their time. Why is this framed as a success and not a failure?
- underdeserver 5y agoBecause he got to learn and to experience something he wanted. Why not?
- ganoushoreilly 5y agoBecause the term “exit” has a different meaning to those that haven’t actually run / managed a startup. Same reason you see kudos to startups for their exit or acquisition, when the reality is they were going under and or where an acquihire. Not that it’s bad, but it’s not the crazy exit they project it to be.
- darkwater 5y agoBeing a tiny side project to scratch an itch he had, I wouldn't say it was a failure even at 5k.
- paxys 5y agoLaunching a real product, earning a single dollar in revenue from customers and selling a business for >0 are feats most entrepreneurs here are never going to be able to achieve. Just because it wasn't a billion dollar exit doesn't make it a failure.
- mandeepj 5y agoGood job and effort, but $100 MRR. I think there should be a threshold for claiming a 'acquired\sold' tag
- allendoerfer 5y agoHe could clearify, that he sold a SaaS project, not a whole company. But he did sell the software.
- joemasilotti 5y agoI sold the domain, the IP, the design, and the marketing tactics along with the code. What more is there in a company?
- andi999 5y agoTechnically the name.
- jonathankoren 5y agoNames are IP
- andi999 5y agoI meant the name of the company.
- jonathankoren 5y agoThat’s IP. Do you think Supreme has anything valuable beyond its logo mark?
- allendoerfer 5y agoAt least in Western law, a company a legal entity, but that is just me being pendantic. More importantly, a company to me is something which has employees and is at least somewhat able to sustain them, even only by burning money. So I would not even count self-employment as having a company, only in the strictly legal sense. To me, you literally need company to have a company. Edit: Still congratulations to you and thank you for sharing!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- javajosh 5y agoCool story, although I can't help but notice that the product is a tool to automate twitter, and twitter turned out to be a critical piece in marketing the product, and later, marketing (and even selling) the business. That is, it all seems very self-referential, revolving around twitter, and this is why the turn-around was so fast. Also, it was all very low stakes. This comment probably sounds a little like sour grapes. But let me clear: this was a remarkable and laudable accomplishment. The time and place were right for OP, and it's bad sportsmanship to take anything away from a pilot that tacks with the wind to win the race.
- rhizome 5y ago"Your company makes equipment used to build roads, yet at the same time you use roads built by other companies. Interesting."
- coorasse2 5y agoActually this is supported also on Telegram for example. I guess also other platforms?
- joemasilotti 5y agoIt's supported on any platform that works with Open Graph tags, which is most social networks. Twitter was the primary target because I spend most of my time there and that's where my audience is.
- joemasilotti 5y agoHuh, that's a really good point. I never thought about it like that! To farther prove your point, my audience is also entirely on Twitter, so building in public worked really well _for me_.
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago> "That is, it all seems very self-referential, revolving around twitter, and this is why the turn-around was so fast. Also, it was all very low stakes." Aren't those a couple of useful lessons to draw from the story?
- aerovistae 5y agoFrankly, I always find these stories miraculous. Even though I'm a full-time web developer, I find it daunting merely to design a landing page with user sign-up, let alone a feature worth paying for and an account subscription flow. There's just so much to do. It seems like years of work. I know there's things like SaaS pegasus, but that forces Django. SaaS Pegasus and Bullet Train are also very expensive with no real options for trial. I wish tools like that - automating the basics of an ecommerce business - were more developed and available, preferably open source in the long run. I feel like it's the future we're slowly moving towards but we aren't there yet. We have widely-used open source frameworks for technical foundations - rails, django, etc - but no higher-abstraction equivalent that handles "features" like subscriptions and accounts. It is infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010, and I'm hoping the time between now and 2030 represents a similar jump. edit: found this list though https://github.com/smirnov-am/awesome-saas-boilerplates https://github.com/smirnov-am/awesome-saas-boilerplates
- rockbruno 5y agoI think the key is having at least something done. Nowadays, most of my new projects are done by copy pasting things I've done in previous ones. This reduces the time spent setting things up considerably.
- joemasilotti 5y agoI didn't build this app on it, but if I did it again I would probably use Jumpstart. https://jumpstartrails.com https://jumpstartrails.com There's also an open source version that handles a good chunk of the stuff needed to get a Rails saas up and running.
- weaksauce 5y agoyeah I was going to plug that too... the open source one handles a basic devise, admin backend and some other things. the pay one adds stripe and payments and stuff like that. but the open source one is really nice for hitting the ground running
- DanHulton 5y ago
- shrimpx 5y agoMy question is will this product be successful in the hands of the new owner? The signal of success is so low -- a few hundred dollars in revenue -- that it could well be random noise. I'd like to see any data showing the success rate or these projects post "micro acquire".
- joemasilotti 5y agoI'm confident that it will continue to be a successful product. Lot's of the paying customers have been around since the beginning and churn is pretty low, especially for a $9/mo service.
- micahcc 5y ago
- joemasilotti 5y agoHa, I'm with you there. But everyone I spoke to said it resonated so I kept it.
- jtap 5y agoThere are a couple negative comments here. Don't let that get you down. You've done more than most. You built a product, validated, and made real money on that product. Then you exited with a positive payout. Great job!
- joemasilotti 5y agoAppreciate it – thank you!
- system2 5y agoNegative comments aside, can you please tell us how much you sold it for? It is really pointless to discuss this achievement unless people understand the ROI of this. If you sold it for $500 it would be worthless, if you sold it for $50,000 then it is another subject. People also want to know how much is $200 MRR site should be sold for. Multiple times asked in this thread, maybe you can give a range instead of an exact number, instead of ignoring the questions.
- kirso 5y agoThis... you pretty much did more than 99% of the people on the planet and produced something.
- dm03514 5y agoI see that the author is affiliated with https://jumpstartrails.com https://jumpstartrails.com in some way (not sure whether they are a contractor or user or w/e). Does anyone have any direct successes with jumpstartrails or any other similar all in one frameworks? I started a company a couple of years ago and sunk weeks/months into the boilerplate, eventually to abandon the project, package the core product as an CLI and open source it. Hoping to avoid that again in the future :p
- aantix 5y agoJumpstart is incredibly productive and well tested. You get full access to the codebase, so anything can be changed/customized. The scaffolds are already updated to utilize the latest Rails 7/Hotwire patterns . I'm currently developing with it on a personal project.
- joemasilotti 5y agoI'm in charge of Jumpstart iOS! It's a similar template but for Turbo Native-powered iOS apps. Jumpstart takes care of a _lot_ of the boilerplate code in building a saas. I think it's worth the investment, but I'm involved in the project, so I'm pretty biased.
- excid3 5y agoCreator of Jumpstart Pro here! There have been a couple huge successes with it. One of them is processing millions in revenue a month. A lot of others are doing well and chugging along. Can't share the exact ones without permission, but I've been blown away it. At the end of the day, it's nice to help people focus on their unique business features and not payments, teams, etc.
- joshmlewis 5y agoThanks for all you do for the Rails community with videos, etc. besides Jumpstart. It was actually a smart way to market Jumpstart (even though that wasn't the original intention).
- 5y ago
- sabhiram 5y agoAnyone who has boiled water understands the difference between the working enough to make steam vs working enough to keep the water hot. Regardless of how much this made, the OP sold a business and crossed a chasm many find very uncomfortable to cross. Congrats on breaking past the inertia to ship, and then sell; it is truly commendable regardless of the naysayers.
- stuckkeys 5y agoHow much did you sell it for?
- saasly 5y agoCan't help but feel like you should have kept the SaaS and grew it more and sold it later, or at least keep it running and leverage it for an llc/business/tax deductions.
- giarc 5y agoNot OP, but as someone with multiple projects on the go, I can attest to the feeling of release when you offload a project regardless of the size.
- allynjalford 5y agoCheers.
- uxcolumbo 5y agoCongrats and well done. Not easy taking something to completion and get some customers.
- dt3ft 5y agoCongrats! If someone told me that there are people willing to pay for images generated by crawling a website (not even rendered, just opengraph/metadata), I’d say they were pulling my leg.
- TeeWEE 5y agoHow much did you sell it for? I'm interested, since i'm running a product that does around 2k MRR, 10k MAU. However profit margin is only around 20% de to user acquisition costs/ operational costs.
- fasteo 5y ago>>> But over the next six months MRR doubled and I didn’t put in more than an hour or two of work every month. >>> My life goal quickly became: how can I spend as much time as possible with my family? Wasn't Mugshot just like passive income at that point ?
- mrintellectual 5y agoFirst off, congrats on your success. One question - I know you mention in the article that your project was becoming a bit of a burden, but do you think you could've taken it further with a bit more time?