8 ms·
Ask HN: One-person startups/SaaS that are profitable?
Hi,
I was wondering as I am starting startup, are there here any one person startup/SaaS?
And how do you manage marketing/sales/development, as I feel those are completely different skill sets.
Edit: If anyone is wondering my MVP is: https://sentimentscanner.com/- google play analytics/statistics/reports of comments by chatgpt
Edit2: I was inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072
- arthurcolle 3y agobuiltwith.com
- mrieck 3y agoBalancing marketing/sales with product development is one of my weaknesses, so I actually wrote a post about it on IndieHackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-product-has-been-launched-for-2-years-maybe-its-time-to-start-marketing-it-f0225b3a23 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-product-has-been-launch... That site also has a products page where you can search for solo founders making > $XXX revenue. There are tons of profitable solo SaaS.
- sentimentscan 3y agoThat's nice that you can succeed without social media, as I absolutely hate fb/x/whatever and that yo can do that without trying to pitch your every article in them.
- clay_the_ripper 3y agoI run a "one-person" saas that is profitable. I have an offshore contractor that helps me run the service, and one offshore support person to help with tickets. I do all of the marketing, product development, finances, sales & customer success. Do I recommend it? Probably not. I am very tired of doing everything myself and am excited to grow it to the point of hiring more team members. I recommend that when starting a startup to plan to build it big enough that you can afford not to do everything solo. It's stressful and lonely, but also strangely rewarding. A note on "offshore" team members: I hear a lot of people say offshore workers are low quality or don't care about the work yada yada. I have found the opposite to be true - offshore folks are the same as any other people you employ: pay your people well, treat them with respect and invest in their future and they will do great work. My support and ops team members have been with me for 3+ years.
- alex_lav 3y ago> I hear a lot of people say offshore workers are low quality or don't care about the work yada yada. IME it's just like everything else - you get what you pay for. Bulk offshore TCS consultants will be as bad as you'd expect (again, in my direct experience), but that doesn't mean any/all offshore labor should be instantly discredited.
- b20000 3y agowhere did you find them, and what country are they in?
- ian0 3y agoIm based in Indonesia and have built a few tech teams here over the years. Also know of a few dev houses based here with clients internationally, both in Europe & the US. Can vouch for what the OP says, if you take care of people, pay a decent salary for their region, people will be loyal and quality is very good. You will need to learn a bit about the local region and culture though if your hiring directly. This is especially true now as the local tech scene is loosing good senior folk through redundancies and forcing people back into the office.
- gwnywg 3y agoI'll chime in to share my experience, I was once looking for companies/startups looking to get offshore developer (I was offering my time) and remember I got direct link to the company through meetup app email distribution list for a python meetup in my city.
- ed_mercer 3y agoCheck out levelsio, a single guy pulling in ~200k MRR using pretty much outdated tech stacks https://twitter.com/levelsio https://twitter.com/levelsio
- sentimentscan 3y ago>jquery Nice, I almost forgot about it, however for after a few months. Jquery always resulted in huge mess with one insanely long file
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoAll his projects are in 1 file. Like 14k lines. What impressed by isn't that he's successful but that he can work in a mess like that. That's a whole lot of scrolling
- jasonjmcghee 3y agoUnless you lean heavily on the project tree, it's surprisingly not too different than a project, if you have reasonable tooling (search, LSP, ctags, etc) My personal preference is certainly using a reasonable folder structure.
- TheCapeGreek 3y agoindex.php is a bit of a meme at this point with his projects. It's not just one file anymore, but he does focus on radical simplicity with the tech.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoI think he commented ITT and said he had an epiphany of sorts where he realized the tech doesn't matter. People love debating the merits of one JS framework over another, debating back end languages/frameworks, etc. and in the end, for most solo SaaS none of that makes a difference in success as defined by MRR. I think, myself included, so many side-projects with the intent of revenue get lost in the SeaOfShinyThings™ and never find a port.
- 3y ago
- pouzy 3y agoI run one too. International, customers in Europe, us, south America. It's been running for almost 8 years, so now it's practically 'finished' - basically does the job for the niche it's targeting. But I'm tired of being solo, so I'm merging with other people that are more on the sales part. One of them also has a profitable company (not saaa - involves people transportation) and needs a tech to make everything smoother (insurances contacts etc) We'll see how it goes because we come from VERY different perspectives and need to bend our habits to be able to work together Having a profitable SaaS is awesome (I can work on it something like 2 days a month if I want to, just managing specific invoices) but you just get nuts working from home alone after a while. It was fun during COVID-19, can't say it is anymore
- jklein11 3y agoNot an answer to your question but why are you offering sentimentscanner for free?
- for_i_in_range 3y agoI'm doing roughly $20k/mo. with a physical monthly newsletter delivered to people's doorsteps. Here's the old-school salesletter for it: https://www.scottscheper.com/free-trial https://www.scottscheper.com/free-trial Here's a picture of my Stripe account from last month: https://cloud.scottscheper.com/3k3Yry2V https://cloud.scottscheper.com/3k3Yry2V Happy to share how this model works. There's a lot of subtleties to it.
- iancmceachern 3y agoI read the link, but couldn't quote figure out what the newsletter is about?
- for_i_in_range 3y agoKnowledge Management, Writing, and Marketing.
- kordlessagain 3y agoYou had me at font.
- for_i_in_range 3y agoI Courier New you were the one for me.
- saaaaaam 3y agoGenuinely curious who your customers are and what the price point is. The market clearly isn’t me because I hated your landing page and copy within 20 seconds. Not a criticism, I have products where I wrote copy in a way that hits an audience that is very much not aligned with me or people I know. But curious.
- for_i_in_range 3y agoThey're People interested in Zettelkasten and already know/like me. They understand my use of old school font/letter. Otherwise to a cold audience (like yourself) it's definitely cringe.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- talldatethrow 3y agoI make about $10k a month with a one person saas. Self taught via YouTube and stackoverflow. Sales background career wise, although I was a Basic/VB nerd as a kid. Php, jQuery, running as a SPA technically with php server side rending the html I have jquery squeeze into whatever div makes sense. Runs on a $4 a month namecheap server, only because I ran into a stupid limitation on the $2 server. Faster than most modern SPAs or websites you find on the internet.
- pacomerh 3y agoWhat service are you offering?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- talldatethrow 3y agoSome kind of project management/CRM type saas for a specific industry. Highly tailored to that industry from my dad's lifetime experience working in it. Currently have 34 paying companies with about 300 employees total using it daily. I probably don't charge enough but then again I barely support it and barely on board people.
- edcastano 3y agoCongrats on your success. I'd love to learn more. Please DM if you would entertain selling or just open to a conversation.
- singhrac 3y agoIf I recall correctly https://www.listennotes.com https://www.listennotes.com is a one-person operation. The owner has posted about it a few times: https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behind-a-one-person-23/ https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behin...
- umen 3y agohow does he monetize the site ?
- edweis 3y agoI am profitable with https://garnet.center https://garnet.center This Shopify app turns your e-commerce store into a marketplace. Happy to answer any question.
- moralestapia 3y agoWhat's the difference between an e-commerce store vs. a marketplace?
- svnt 3y agoPresumably a store is somewhere you sell things and a marketplace is somewhere others can also sell things.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- edweis 3y agoA marketplace is an e-commerce store. A marketplace aggregates the best possible products of an industry into one place. To do so, they have to find and attract the best vendors (individuals and/or businesses) to bring rarer products on their platform. Another type of e-commerce store is drop-shipping, which instead bring value by finding a new market (or a new branding) to a product. Traditionally, an e-commerce store is an online store of a brand managed by the maker(s) of that product. Marketplace are now trendy because it's an efficient solution for customers that are looking to shop local and second-hand products.
- sochix 3y agoRecently I hit 200k ARR with my SaaS for Microsoft Teams -> https://perfectwiki.com https://perfectwiki.com Basically it's a knowledge-base fully integrated with Microsoft Teams. - I'm working on it alone for the last 3 years - I don’t raise any investments - I achieved this number only by organic growth To get more details on how I achieved it you could read my AMA on r/SaaS. https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/15tnt60/i_built_microsoft_teams_app_that_makes_200karr_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/15tnt60/i_built_micro... P.S Small self promotion -> I created a Telegram channel where I share tips & tricks on how to build SaaS for Microsoft Teams. Join me here -> https://t.me/teams_development https://t.me/teams_development
- rozenmd 3y agoAfter 5 years and probably like a dozen failed attempts, I run a profitable one-person SaaS. I initially thought "it was about the tech" and tried remaking levelsio's remoteok as a serverless app, and was surprised that no one cared what I built it in, and that traction/marketing was everything. I wrote up an article each year about the journey: - https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-business https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-busine... - https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-start-an-internet-business https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-star... - https://maxrozen.com/indiehacking-3-year-review https://maxrozen.com/indiehacking-3-year-review - https://maxrozen.com/2021-strangers-paid-my-macbook https://maxrozen.com/2021-strangers-paid-my-macbook - https://maxrozen.com/2022-just-keep-shipping https://maxrozen.com/2022-just-keep-shipping
- physicsguy 3y agoOvercast
- acuozzo 3y agoAre you the Overcast guy? If so, thank you for keeping the web app up!
- hakanderyal 3y agoCheckout #buildinpublic on Twitter if you haven't already. Many profitable solo builders sharing what they learn.