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Ask HN: SaaS Founders, What 3 advice would you give your younger selves?
To those currently operating or have built successful SaaS - what 3 lessons from experience have you learnt that you would tell your younger selves?
- dilowa 3y agoI am a developer with 24 years of experience. Looking to partner with a startup to build a saas product. Let me know if anyone is interested. Ruven.naidoo@dilowa.co.za
- dilowa 3y ago[flagged]
- ayandutta 3y agoStart earlier/younger. (I'm 33, just started building my own)
- ezekg 3y agoA couple years ago, I wrote 5 things I had learned [0] going from side project to a full-time business. Might be worth a read? [0]: https://keygen.sh/blog/5-things-ive-learned-in-5-years/ https://keygen.sh/blog/5-things-ive-learned-in-5-years/
- rockyperezz 3y agoThanks ezekg! Your article brought up some great points - can relate to what you specifically mentioned under "Don't waste your time" and not allowing anyone to overpay you (which can be a trap for new founders). You seem like a genuinely great person to have a long chat with on your experiences. I hope you have a great day!
- ruslan_talpa 3y agoWhat changed since the blog post? Employees? Cofounder?
- ezekg 3y agoNothing has changed! Just 2 more years of experience. I still agree with all of it.
- jokethrowaway 3y agoNot sure if I count but I could definitely uniquely live off my SaaS profits. The tips I would give to myself: 1. Don't ever stop trying: sure, getting a job instead will give you a few hundreds k per year - but it won't help you getting any closer to your freedom dream. No more worthless standups or stupid retros. 2. Don't kill your social network: I know the temptation to get rid of social media is strong, but you need to cultivate your network and turn it into an audience of potential customers 3. Keep writing: building a trace of reliable writing and showing skills is an invaluable marketing tool My view may be biased by having invested most of my life in up-skilling my skills (just because I enjoy it) and I find myself technically super strong but lacking in marketing. The tips I would give to the general population are: 1. Be balanced in how much time you spend learning tech / doing marketing / managing staff 2. Do what's best for the product and for getting to the customer. CREATE VALUE FOR SOCIETY 3. Keep growing your network
- digging 3y ago> Don't kill your social network Sucks, but you're probably right. And this is one of the biggest barriers to me working for myself - I have no network. Haven't had any social media in almost a decade, except linkedin which I avoid as much as humanly possible. Oh well.
- seanw444 3y agoPeople advertising their crap is one of the reasons I got rid of it in the first place, along with rampant celebration of total degeneracy, and it generally being a pointless timesink of short-term entertainment.
- jen729w 3y ago> 2. Don't kill your social network Where do you think that is these days? Politics aside, X/Twitter just isn’t what it was. Less people, less quality, and I’m reticent to trust a platform that changes on a whim. Which is a tragic shame because Twitter was it. Mastodon’s … fine. Nowhere near the reach and never will be. LinkedIn’s … ugh. I mean c’mon.
- old_sysadmin111 3y agoFounder here 1) I thought I could hire "head of sales" that would run the /department/ not need extensive hand holding, and worse, I did it more than once - went through several vp of sales. Of course they interview well, they are sales people. There has to be "verify" and really understand what is going on 2) The skills to get a product off the ground are very different than scaling a business; people have written about the "3 ceo's" but I think there is a similarity with technical founders; I had multiple co-founders but few stuck it out until the end, in retrospect they were needed at a given phase, not the whole time 3) know if you are trying be rich or king ( https://www.highalphainno.com/articles/rich-vs-king-the-corporate-founders-dilemma#:~:text=In%20his%20classic%20book%2C%20%E2%80%9CThe,returns%20(%E2%80%9CRich%E2%80%9D)%20or https://www.highalphainno.com/articles/rich-vs-king-the-corp... )
- ska 3y agoYour point (1) applies more broadly, I think. As you grow any company, you are at some point going to have to bring people in with more expertise in an area than you have. You need a strategy for this and to develop effective ways to evaluate performance outside of what you know closely. BS detector calibration can get you part way, but it takes more than that to efficiently differentiate "really good" and "really busy". Of course over time this tends to become clear, but you don't have that time.
- old_sysadmin111 3y agotrue, but I'll just say I had trouble with this from sales and marketing in a way that didn't manifest in say legal or HR or vendor management
- ska 3y agoOne thing about legal and financial is that there is more accreditation and industry guardrails around them - HR too to a lessor degree. I think this makes it easier to get to "this person can definitely do the work" than some other functions.
- winslett 3y agoFinding a business / product that actually is working is unique. When you find it, stick with it. Nothing is perfect, and shit is going to be hard, it’s just the next level of the company. Be optimistic — look for what’s working and do more of what’s working. Don’t let pessimism get routed in the way you think. All of that, and fight the urge to build first — sell first.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoNot a SaaS business, but an entrepreneur nonetheless. One thing I learned early is that having a co-founder with a serious b2b sales background, especially in a mid-tier company (big enough to bag F500 clients, small enough to work with small businesses) is a superpower. My co founder was able to close deals I wouldn’t even know how to approach. Don’t discount sales and marketing. Unless your tech is really revolutionary (chatGPT tier) or leagues ahead of the competitors (Figma), your biggest problem will be distribution and discovery, not tech.
- mikeyhfounder 3y agoThat's a really cool note. I am currently non-technical and working to find a B2b Sales job selling to mid-market and enterprise organizations so it's good to know that having these skills would be a superpower for a startup. I know I want to be a founder one day and since I'm 27 years old I've thought that instead I can learn sales skills until I figure out the startup idea worth pursuing.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI don't know where you are on the "non-technical" scale, or the kind of ideas you want to implement, but with all these new AI-powered tools, you can create a surprisingly competent prototype with very little coding skills - at least I did. I'd say that with 6 months of dedicated effort and $20/month of Cursor.so prompts, you can create most basic product ideas you can imagine.
- elie1 3y agovery interesting thanks for sharing, can you share what you were able to build ?
- spaceman_2020 3y agoSorry, can’t do that without doxxing myself, but its a platform where advertisers and influencers in a very narrow niche can connect with each other. Used NextJS, NodeJS, Express and Mongodb
- tschellenbach 3y agoDepends on the stage: Seed stage. Focus on engineering and talking to customers. Ignore everything else. Do the sales and marketing work yourself till $1M in ARR at least. Many startups fail since they try to hire for these essential roles and its rare for non-founders to take it from 0 to 1. A/B round stage. Build an in-house recruiting team early. I scaled to 150 people too fast over at Stream, next time i'd take more time with hiring. I'd also recommend doing final interviews with everyone yourself, don't let the company hire people without you interviewing them. Be on top of MQL definitions when you scale marketing, otherwise things will go wrong. Sales enablement is essential when you get beyond 3 AEs. Read Saastr :)
- lulznews 3y agoCan you expand on MQL definitions and what can go wrong?
- ushercakes 3y agoMarketing is more important than product. MVP doesn't need to be perfect, but the core product should work. Get it in users hands ASAP, get feedback ASAP, or see no traction and move on, ASAP
- jensneuse 3y agoDon't hire a single non founder before PMF. Don't build anything without real commitments from customers. Focus on distribution, go to market and product in this order.
- RamblingCTO 3y agoDon't listen to advice on the internet and think about the situation you're in, it's always individual. Advice from the internet will always paint in big strokes. But also regarding code: If you think you will need it later, you probably won't. Build simple and don't overengineer. Chance is, you do it even though you think you don't. If it overgeneralizes something because you think it might be a requirement in two weeks, do it when the need arises, not now.
- methyl 3y agoHire CFO once making significant money ($1M/yr or so). Start hiring PMs as soon as you see that you can have two product teams working together in parallel.
- rdli 3y agoAt $1M ARR, I think a CFO is overkill (and hideously expensive). In my experience: - $0 - $1M-ish, hire a part-time bookkeeper - $1M - $5M-ish, get a director of finance / controller, who can manage AR/AP, audit, ASC 606, basic financial modeling, and your key rev benchmarks. - $5M+ is when I'd consider hiring a CFO, but it really depends on your growth rate. You can probably get to $10M+ with a good dir of finance if you get them to hire a good FP&A person.
- koliber 3y agoSelling is harder than building. At least for a builder. Go out and sell, even before you build.
- greenie_beans 3y agoi'm definitely a builder/creative type but have found that selling is kind of enjoyable. as long as you approach it as, i'm going to talk to these people so i can hear about their problems. i enjoy hearing about peoples' problems and thinking about how i can help.
- artembugara 3y ago+1. No matter what your product is. Founder should be able to sell. No one will sell your product better than you.
- szundi 3y agoOh my GOD, could not be further from the truth. Jobs + Wozniak. Neither of then would be successful on their own no matter how big geniuses they were.
- pc86 3y agoYou're not saying anything that disproves the GP. Both Jobs and Woz were founders and understood some level of technical detail of everything, at least in the early stages. GP is talking about the equivalent of Woz building all the engineering from 0 by himself, then going out and finding Jobs and saying "hey sell this for me please, thanks" which isn't what happened by any stretch.
- grvdrm 3y agoHonest question: is there a situation in which you can identify a deficiency in your selling ability (as a founder) that subsequently makes sense to delegate to someone else? Obviously, if your product doesn't sell, then your story isn't working. But what stories are out there where the founder didn't do the best job selling and someone came and crushed it as a chief member of the exec or early sales effort? Forget big famous companies - what about the folks here?
- tomcam 3y agoRead and apply “The Mom Test” or you aren’t doing it right.
- gervwyk 3y agoMaybe not only SaaS specific. But Naval is GOLD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-TZqOsVCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-TZqOsVCNM
- creativedg 3y agoIt took me 5 months to build my first SaaS from scratch, which is way too much. For example, I could use this time to focus on marketing. During my development process, I realized that 80% of the features I implemented were also present in other SaaS products. This is why I created Nextless.js, a SaaS Boilerplate that includes all the necessary features for launching a successful SaaS.
- marcopicentini 3y agoDo not take VC money.
- streblo 3y ago1. Set an aggressive (but achievable) revenue goal for your first year. If you're having trouble figuring out what that might be, I suggest 500k ARR, because that will put you on a path to raising a series A. You should be able to hit this goal with fewer than 5 people in your first year. You should take a very hard look at your business and what's going wrong if you don't hit that goal. 2. Don't raise too much money for your seed. Plain and simple, you just do not need much money to build and validate your business plan. Whatever your number is, consider whether you'd really be much worse off if you raised half as much. 3. Start by providing professional services before you have a product. This will help you generate some early revenue, it will validate that someone is willing to pay for your services, it'll help you understand the requirements for your product before it's built, and most importantly, it'll help you build early relationships with crucial clients. Streamline these professional services by automating them with your early product. Over time, replace the professional services entirely with your product.
- goatherders 3y ago1. Learn how to sell. At all costs, learn how to sell. 2. Determine a pricing structure then raise your prices. 3. Resist hiring anything but engineers for as long as possible. Good luck.
- sailorganymede 3y agoYou don’t have to go nuclear big to be successful. Decide your own goals, don’t let someone decide it for you.
- bag_boy 3y agoYep - this was hard for me to learn
- bag_boy 3y ago1. Call local customers 2. Listen to teammates 3. Learn how to enjoy the unfun work
- satisfice 3y agoINVEST IN TIME TRAVEL. TIME TRAVEL IS POSSIBLE. YES THIS REALLY ME.
- eastbound 3y ago- It takes 7 months to recruit someone. 1 for the interview, 3 waiting at the old job, 3 months of ramp-up. - Hire. Business will grow. - You need to love your employees like a father does. That means, they’re gonna be shitty, they’re gonna be losers, they’ll waste your money, and some will be exceptionally good. But you need to love them all equally. - You’re not gay. Girls just don’t like shy men under 25. Keep chasing girls, success will come.
- moltar 3y agoSell before build