27 ms·
One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
- RangerScience 2y agoInspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)
- taxman22 2y agoIf you’re not pushing code/changes the likelihood of incidents is significantly less. Also, not having a few enterprise contracts that make up most of the revenue, helps ease customer support load.
- mickael-kerjean 2y agoDo you know what a typical enterprise contract for a nice tool like this could go for? I have an open source saas tool in a different niche but so far the biggest contract I have is 500$ per month and that's for companies who need a lot of customisations, a very white glove service and a few days o work to morph the tool onto exactly what it is they want (typically via plugin so changes are easily manageable). One one hand it feels great to charge 500$ per month but then you sometime see numbers from companies like gitlab who are able to charge 100x that or even more, it's very hard to know how much to charge for something in the b2b sass space and I have that feeling that 1 large enterprise customer is the only thing you need in some spaces to sustain a company of 1 or even 2 that are not aiming for unicorn level
- throwaway2037 2y agoFor any enterprise customer, I would recommend to increase their annual fees by two times the rate of inflation (or more if you like). Also: Ask yourself if you can afford to lose some customers during this process.
- dflock 2y agoGitLabs pricing is hilariously, insanely, astronomically high. I'd love to move our org off BitBucket the GitLab, but it's just absolutely not possible, given their pricing.
- xyst 2y agoProbably just uses some on call pager support (PagerDuty, xMatters, …) and configure it to alert if infra goes down. Then just remote into systems, and fix issues. He’s pretty much “on call” 24/7/365
- selcuka 2y ago> if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved? They probably set up a HealthChecks.io alert.
- ramraj07 2y agoOne man army apps are generally dead simple to maintain and bug-fix. You write all the code, so when someone pings you with a problem you know exactly what caused it without any need to check for anything. I’ve maintained apps like that for years and have sometimes pushed a code change directly on the GitHub app on the phone and just checking if the site is fixed after. Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete - thus you actually get fewer bugs. In my experience most issues in software come because the engineer misunderstood the requirements that someone else wrote anyway.
- xiaoape 2y ago> Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete This is so true. To me, finishing writing the code means releasable code. I have done the testing along the way.
- prmoustache 2y agoThat is not answering the question. How do you do to get alerted of your service going down when: - you are in the wilderness, ouside or with little cell coverage - drunk and dancing in a wedding with music at full blast These are just 2 small examples out of many others. Also it means you need to stay connected when taking a plane, be able to stop and/or swap drivers if your are in a long driving trip so that you can fix your service in a rest area or while your partner is driving, etc. I am pretty sure outages are very rare but if that happens the day your are out of cell coverage and unable to react, you might lose a lot of trust from your customers. I am also suprised he relies on only one hosting service. I would have thought you might not want to have everything in the same basket.
- _xnmw 2y agoEven Google has outages sometimes. The chances of an outage happening at that exact moment when you are "drunk and dancing at a wedding" are probably lower than "catastrophic deployment failure at FAANG, multi-hour outage", especially because you are certainly not deploying any changes at that time. And if the outage is due to a third-party dependency failing then you can blame it on them and there's not much you could do even if you were online anyway.
- talldatethrow 2y agoI also have a one man show Saas with 34 companies paying that pays my bills. It runs on namecheap shared hosting. If it goes down, I trust namecheap to fix it asap. If it goes down and someone called me, I don't really know what I would do anyway.... In 6 years it has never been a problem. PHP and jQuery. I use phpmyadmin via cpanel to manage the database.
- arrowsmith 2y agoCare to share the product here?
- talldatethrow 2y agoNot really, Id open myself up to countless nerds testing and poking.
- southwesterly 2y agoI swear to god that this is the future.
- fm2606 2y agoHere's my upvote!
- reassess_blind 2y agoNot OP, but it is something that I've had to deal with. I essentially need to be within X hours of my laptop and a solid internet connection, where X is the maximum acceptable downtime. I'd love to travel to a remote island, or do a 2 week hike out of cell service but it's difficult. The odds are incredibly low that downtime occurs in that window, but Murphy's Law and my anxiety won't allow it. The pros greatly outweigh the cons though. While I can't do those remote trips, I can still travel wherever else and just ignore things unless there's a downtime alert or an urgent support ticket.
- WA 2y agoNot OP, but this works for me: - No phone number for support - Extensive FAQs to let people help themselves first - Vacation: take laptop along, check emails every couple days (but I haven’t tried remote vacation without internet ever) Generally speaking: outsiders vastly overestimate the support burden of a one-man business. Maybe I’m lucky, but I only receive 2-3 emails per day with 25k active users.
- ozim 2y agoPeople who don't have experience running servers imagine that you have to baby sit the servers like every 5 mins something happens. In reality if you don't deploy new version or don't change config or don't post your product to HN server will be there simply running. In big companies you might have bunch of people doing config changes all the time on different levels and you might never know when someone will break something you rely on.
- cuu508 2y agoThat's the trade-off of going alone – laptop travels with me, and I cannot leave cell-phone coverage area for too long. Also there have been times when monitoring alerts start blaring at 3AM, and there's no more sleep that night. Thankfully does not happen very often :-)
- racl101 2y agoThis seems like it would be the dream. Work on your own thing and actually be successful at it. Really cool.
- localfirst 2y ago[flagged]
- tacker2000 2y agoWhats OPM?
- yieldcrv 2y agoOther People’s Money
- atsaloli 2y agoOther People's Money
- mypalmike 2y agoOne Punch Man
- tycoon177 2y agoIt seems to mean other people's money based on a cursory web search.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- iamsam123 2y agoApparently taking outside money can 100X MRR with no trade offs! Awesome!
- selcuka 2y agoYeah, and the author is pretty clear about their rationale: > I do not want to manage or be managed. A cofounder or employee would mean regular meetings [...]
- localfirst 2y agoIt really is that easy. The trade-offs are no less annoying then answering customers emails or calls. In some cases you don't even have any sort of "checking in" arrangements if you've demonstrated good profitability. Like I'm not sure why you are so upset and sarcastic here. I get that the author doesn't care and thats fine. But there are already many scaling their existing revenues coming in and then tradeoff is small bit of your equity for 100x MRR which is common with SaaS where multiplies in its sales pipelines is very easy once you've identified where your customers are!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- metadat 2y agoThe linked email story was also interesting: https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactional-email/ https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr... The author's end solution goes against all common HN wisdom (!) This is the way things should work. There should be millions of email senders and receivers, not just 32 mafiosas (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, MailChimp, etc). There are endless counter-examples on HN advocating against hosting something as simple as email yourself, see: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=self-host+email https://hn.algolia.com/?q=self-host+email
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago“As simple as email…” You could at least be realistic instead of blatantly sounding like a zealot.
- varispeed 2y agoWith things like https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ it is actually simple.
- throwaway48540 2y agoThe difficulty has never been about the SMTP service software itself.
- varispeed 2y agoYou need good IP and set all the certs and whatnot. But that is mostly do and forget, apart from refreshing certs once a year. Never had an issue with it, emails get delivered fine.
- troyvit 2y agoThe notes on self-hosting[1], from somebody making $14k/month relying on Maddy, says it pretty realistically. The author goes into a fair amount of detail covering what he did and it sounds pretty simple compared to what it was ten years ago. I'm not sure zealotry is the best way to push back against conventional wisdom, but otoh the parent comment didn't sound zealous to me. In fact the more I read about Maddy[2] the more it seems to simplify running a mail server compared to when I did it back in the day. I mean you still have to worry about landing an IP address with a bad reputation but it takes care of soooo much of the rest of it. [1] https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactional-email/ https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr... [2] https://maddy.email/faq/ https://maddy.email/faq/
- jwr 2y agoWow, this reads almost as my story. Similar goals, similar time frames, even the hosting provider and the payment processor we use is the same. I have to contact my new-found twin!
- brandly 2y agoSimilar MRR?
- axelthegerman 2y agoDidn't see it in this article, which payment processor is that?
- cuu508 2y agoThe payment processor is Braintree.
- LeonenTheDK 2y agoAbsolutely living the dream! Being a sustainable one man SaaS is what I'd ultimately love to be, but not only do I have no ideas about what to SaaS, I highly doubt I'd have the drive to follow through if I did. Kudos to you, and to another 9 years! Also I'm stealing the term Hobbit software, talk about comfy.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fm2606 2y agoEXACTLY the same feeling here. No ideas and unsure of follow through.
- i-cjw 2y agoHealthchecks.io has saved me on more occasions than I care to remember. Simple, effective, and works flawlessly.
- sam_perez 2y agoVery cool, are you one of the paying users or are you on the free version?
- Narhem 2y agoInspired beyond belief. Personally I'd rather commit suicide than work for the slave drivers at apple and google who screwed my life over then gave me jobs proving their guilt.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoOr you could, you know, have a normal job.
- theultdev 2y agoA normal job for some is working for themselves. It's unbearable to have to work for someone imo. I wish to be in charge of my life as much as possible.
- timcambrant 2y agoSure, but Narhem's comment read as if only self-employment and Big Tech exists. Most developers are employed at smaller firms and are living comfortable lives and don't feel overwhelmingly exploited. Personally, I would love to be self-employed. But I am addicted to stability and am afraid of sales and sadly can't see myself in that role ever.
- kapitalx 2y agoThanks for posting. It was a great read and reminded me of the old @patio11 year in review posts which i also used to enjoy reading: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software-year-in-review-2014/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software-year...
- the_arun 2y agoCongratulations! This is awesome!
- happybuy 2y agoAm in a similar situation running a 1 person SaaS B2C product. Recently wrote up a similar review post about the fears, failures and successes I experienced over the past year: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review-2024/ https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...
- dsissitka 2y agoI'm really glad to see he's doing well. I love Healthchecks. It's open source and easy to set up if you'd like to go that route. His free tier is more than enough for my self hosting shenanigans and it's been one of the most reliable parts of my setup.
- scubakid 2y agoI really respect your choice to optimize for balance and enjoyment. My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!" Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day! When I was a corporate engineer, I would get the sunday scaries every week and find any excuse to push back bedtime another hour. But now, I wake up excited and energized to work on a project I love... and maybe someday I'll give myself permission to do that less than 7 days a week. Anyway, I digress. I'm so happy to hear your SaaS is going strong after 9 years. Cheers! And here's to 9 more!
- nicbou 2y agoThat's a skill you can work on. You can also progressively structure your business so that you never need to be working at a given time. It took a me few years of observing what brings my attention back you work and what controls my schedule the most, and many little practices to deal with that. Now the thing runs itself, and I can take much longer vacations. It was worth the effort.
- rvnx 2y agoHe found the right niche, a passive product-led no-stress B2B low-maintenance & non-critical tool (because it is monitoring). It is so difficult to find such niches, so congrats for the success!
- prakashn27 2y agoCongrats. Same with me. On my one year mark as a one person saas with 123x.dev . Helping Monday and Atlassian customers with custom apps.
- mglikesbikes 2y agoThat’s the dream
- xyst 2y agoGood to see simple services generating 5 digit revenue! I would have liked to see a breakdown of expenses per month and profit though.
- rvnx 2y agoInfrastructure costs 500 EUR / month of servers, then on top you have to add the tools (e-mail, etc), so should be between 500 and 1000 EUR / month.
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoReally intrigued by how he got into this: “I thought I could do it just as well and cheaper,” effectively trading product market fit issues for direct competition.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoThat's how essentially 99% of businesses get started. The obsession with PMF and being "unique" is a very strange affectation specific to software startups.
- billllll 2y agoUnlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately. You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper. Otherwise, your competitors are just a click away. I'd argue the author HAS found PMF, just not the kind that gets you to $1b.
- yao420 2y agoLiterally every software I have ever used or company I worked for has had multiple competitors doing the exact same thing.
- billllll 2y agoI really doubt "literally" every software you used or worked for has multiple competitors doing the "exact" same thing. VC money can temporarily prop up multiple competitors doing the same thing, but over time, winners definitely spring up. A lot of software that on the surface does the "exact same thing" often has different nuances, either to the business or the product that makes them appeal to different niches in the market. Understanding the nuances and exploiting the market niche is your only goal when starting a business. It's not something you ever do or think about when working on software, but people who strike it out on their own quickly realize that simply building is not enough, you MUST give people a good reason to use your software. Just because you don't see or understand the nuances, does not mean they are not there.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoLiving the dream, man! \o/
- alberth 2y agoI wouldn't be surprised if he 2x his price and wouldn’t have much churn. Increasing your pricing is the #1 way to grow revenue and weed out customers who abuse customer support. https://healthchecks.io/pricing/ https://healthchecks.io/pricing/ With that being said, he clearly knows what he’s doing - don’t take advice from strangers :)
- guywithahat 2y agoAlthough I don’t disagree, the conception of the company was he found an industry and decided to undercut it. Raising prices might be a risk here, since his customers are (presumably) more price conscious
- bityard 2y agoAh, the Broadcom/VMWare strategy... Small businesses that actually find a market and turn a profit live or die on reputation. I have a feeling that 2x the price (even incrementally over time) would burn a lot of goodwill. But there is a middle ground. As long as your operating costs don't rise precipitously for whatever reason, you can keep your existing customers on their current pricing and give new customers your new higher price. It works in web hosting, anyway. (Usually.)
- Aurornis 2y ago> Increasing your pricing is the #1 way to grow revenue and weed out customers who abuse customer support. Unlikely with businesses like this. This business model is to offer a budget alternative to the big name services that doesn’t have the same level of support and reliability (it admits not having failover, for example) to customers who are okay with that in exchange for the lower price. Once you start raising prices significantly, it no longer becomes the budget option. Customers may not churn right away, but growth would slow substantially as people started comparing to the full-featured mainstream services at similar price points. The common startup wisdom is that raising prices dramatically is a magic wand to improve your customer base and grow your revenue, but that doesn’t work in the budget domain.
- alberth 2y ago
- sakopov 2y ago> Web servers upgraded to Hetzner’s AX42 (AMD 8700GE, 8 cores). On the old machines, saw a few nonsensical Python exceptions. A kernel update and a reboot didn’t fix it. Rather than messing with hardware troubleshooting, I upgraded to newer, faster, and more efficient machines. > Database servers upgraded to Hetzner’s EX101 (Intel 13900, 8+16 cores). I was setting up new database replicas after an outage and failover event and took the opportunity to upgrade hardware. Does anybody know if this setup is containerized? I have to say, I love that this is running on dedicated servers. I don't know how many times I burned myself out trying to setup infrastructure in AWS for personal projects only to accumulate a significant monthly bill and nothing substantial to show for it.
- rvnx 2y agoFrom the blog posts: > Main values: Simple is good. Efficient is good. Less is more. > The core infrastructure runs on Hetzner bare metal machines. Hetzner offers amazing value for money and is a big part of the reason why Healthchecks.io can offer its current pricing. > No containers, no auto-scaling, no “serverless”. Plain old servers, each dedicated to a single role: “load balancer”, “application server” and “database server”. > The machines are closer to “pets” than “cattle”: I have provisioning scripts to set up new ones relatively quickly, but in practice the working set of machines changes rarely. For example, the primary database server currently has an uptime of 375 days.
- killingtime74 2y agoFurther here (https://blog.healthchecks.io/2022/02/healthchecks-io-hosting-setup-2022-edition/ https://blog.healthchecks.io/2022/02/healthchecks-io-hosting...) it says no auto fail over.
- rco8786 2y agoSo much nostalgia reading that. I wish we could go back
- sgarland 2y agoNothing is stopping you. Reject modernity, embrace stability.
- Brystephor 2y agoDo you do marketing as well? I'd assume not based on the no JS-analytics so I'm curious what your customer acquisition methods are, as in how they find out about your business?
- globalise83 2y agoWe're all here on the front page of Hacker News :)
- cuu508 2y agoAuthor here, I think most new signups are through traffic from search engines and through word of mouth, Healthchecks.io gets regular mentions in Reddit /r/selfhosted. I've dabbled with paid ads (Google search, Reddit, Twitter, EthicalAds) but without analytics it was shooting in the dark.
- _heimdall 2y agoVery cool to see, thanks for continuing to share updates! It's refreshing to see one person or small teams happily prioritizing work/life balance over the never ending treadmill of profit and growth. Finding what "enough" means to you is hard, holding that line over nearly a decade of success is even harder.
- mathgladiator 2y agoThis has been my dream for the last few years. I'm making progress as I am also acting as a fractional CTO for a few start ups where I only took equity and only used my platform. All the companies are going to migrate off at some point, but they found market fit and are staffing up full engineering teams. Over the next few years, I'm going to continue just having fun building. However, I have a few verticals that I plan to launch in and start figuring out marketing for that is... reasonable.
- martin82 2y agoIt all sounds very... healthy :)
- sakesun 2y agoHacker News is filled with thousands of inspiring stories. This one is simply the best for me.
- iamcreasy 2y agoIf the author is reading - what was the nonsensical Python exceptions that went away after hardware upgrade?
- cuu508 2y agoIt was "../Python/getargs.c:2316: bad argument to internal function". In one case, it was thrown from some_string.split(), in another case from some_string.encode().
- gepardi 2y agoThis is the DREAM.
- abrookewood 2y agoHe has a twitter thread where he describes Hobbit Software: "Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them. Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub" https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/112766460393943288 https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/112766460393943288
- MrDresden 2y agoI'm confused. The article's author name is Pēteris Caune while the account you link is of one Dave Anderson. What is the connection between the two?
- arrowsmith 2y agoThe blog post by Peteris Caune includes a link to the Mastodon thread by Dave Anderson. The post you're replying to reposts the same Mastodon link, although it kind of implies that it was written by the same person who wrote the blog post, which isn't true.
- abrookewood 2y agoAhh sorry - I didn't realise I had mixed them up.
- m_a_g 2y agoI don’t think that is possible. Almost all software depends on other software. At the very least, it depends on the clients software. Which means you can’t ignore what Chrome or Safari changes for example.
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoIt most certainly is. You can be pedantic and argue that you’re depending on an HTML rendering engine but so is everyone else. The key is minimizing unnecessary dependencies. This is seen as untenable in communities that love to crow about “social coding,” but there are other groups of people who are happily living that. They just aren’t chattering away about it.
- FlyingSnake 2y agoI wish the best for OP but I really wonder if advertising your one-man-SaaS to the wider world is a good idea. Especially on a forum like HN where competent people are few clicks away from stealing your idea.
- sharmi 2y ago* Unlike how technical people often understand these stories, development is a smaller part of the story. From my own experience, it is a huge journey to understand marketing and sales. We generally undervalue marketing and sales in programming forums. Every founder has to pay their dues to cross this chasm and see success. * Very few startups, probably a infinitesimal number, are overnight successes. Startups are actually a long grind. There are a lot more lows than highs and the lows tend to be really low. The effect is even worse when you go solo. It took the author 5 years to breach the 5K MRR ceiling. That's a long timeframe and it takes a great amount of fortitude, patience and persistence to stay focused, keep learning and handle uncertainty in the face of lack of visible progress (you are actually learning even in failures but it often doesn't feel good).
- duggan 2y agoStealing ideas is a lot of work.
- fuzztester 2y agoRight. And it is even more work to, you know, actually (as in real life deploy) implement the copied business idea, and then to keep it running on an ongoing basis, showing up daily, even if not for a mad number of hours. This is the point where most of the glib talkers would fail, early.
- fuzztester 2y agoAlso, I totally agree with what sharmi says here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41106276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41106276
- 2y ago
- chubs 2y agoI've tried creating a few one-man SaaS's in the past and have always struggled to get customers to visit (let alone try it out and pay), any tips from people here who have had success? Thanks :)
- tuyenhx 2y agoThe key is putting your SaaS in front of people who need it. Here are something I did: - Find a group that your potential customers there (on Reddit, Facebook,) ... post your work there. - Create content on IG/Tiktok/Facebook/... - Final is using paid ads FB ads/Google Ads/... They call these works are "marketing".
- creesch 2y agoThere is no magic bullet I think. It also depends on the market you are after. If you are not after the big bucks from huge corporations, there are a few things I believe do help, things I also see on the healthchecks.io website: - Have a no bullshit, clear description of what your product does right on the front page. No marketing lingo, no big overpromising. *Relevant* screenshots help. - A free plan without huge caveats. This depends on your service, but it helps if people can actually trial the full service before committing. It also helps with word of mouth advertising, as someone who is using it personally might also recommend it for their company. - Have clear and reasonable pricing. - Don't hide documentation for your service behind a login. I have advised against using SaaS's services in the past because I couldn't easily find documentation. - Actual have clear documentation for your product. It shows a level of maturity. - Be clear about you as a company. You don't need to have an about page with mugshots of all team members smiling and their role description. But I do want to know what sort of company I am dealing with. So, I am looking for an about page with a reasonable description. Ideally, you have more than just a contact form. In fact, if you don't have a real address listed, I will not consider your service. Disclaimer: Purely my personal experience being involved in selecting SaaS services. It also more or less aims at smaller to mid-sized companies, as with bigger companies you sadly do need some marketing bullshit. But with larger companies you also get to deal with more bullshit in regard to their requirements, something the healthchecks.io owner also specifically seems to avoid. The above also assumes that you get people to land on your website. Which is really difficult, which is why I guess a lot of these services have a blog. Blog posts allow them to be posted on websites like hackernews and other media more often.
- bmitc 2y agoThanks for the great writeup and inspiration. Nothing much more here to add, but I like the idea of hobbit software that you presented and the fact that you stick to what you want to do. It's a great thing to see someone not search for growth at all costs.
- nektro 2y agoCongrats!
- sanketskasar 2y agoThis is both inspirational and aspirational! Can the more knowledgeable members of the forum guide on how to find and validate such idea and start with the execution?
- bpiroman 2y agolove this!
- reassess_blind 2y agoIn a similar boat, a run a few SaaS’s as a one man band. Around 1,000 subscribers. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, being responsible for uptime while you’re sleeping can be stressful, thinking you may have overlooked a massive security vulnerability is constantly in the back of your mind. I wouldn’t trade it for anything though, it’s a very fortunate position to be in. I also don’t feel the pressure to grow the product features anymore similar to OP. In fact I struggle sometimes now from being overly comfortable and feeling stagnant.
- binwiederhier 2y agoPēteris' model with healthchecks.io was a large inspiration for me, and it is the reason why ntfy.sh is following the same model: open source, self-hostable, fun driven development. Thank you Pēteris for being an inspiration.
- sunnybeetroot 2y agoThank you for making ntfy.sh, excellent piece of software.
- dmje 2y agoMassive respect for the no growth approach. We’re different in that we’re a consultancy rather than a SaaS but 14 years into running our “micro agency” (my wife and I). We’ve had plenty of opportunities to take on staff but have always chosen not to in favour of working with trusted freelancers. Net result is an extremely contented life spent living by the sea in Cornwall and a gently profitable business. We'll never be rich but it’s been the right choice to see our beautiful kids grow up in a place that we all love :-)
- axelthegerman 2y agoKudos to you and your wife, definitely not the way most agencies are going and it's a shame.
- rozap 2y agoThis rules. Congrats.
- webprofusion 2y agoI have a similar style of business, ~10K customers, ~150k users, ~7yrs. The key points are: - offer email support, but don't offer phone, video calls or remote support. This works for most people and forces them to properly phrase questions instead of just "jumping on a call" (so you can then effectively train them over the phone, which doesn't scale). - offer as much self-service as possible - work at your own pace and it's ok to just not work some days. - finding a niche is hard, but they can be surprisingly basic. You're just saving someone time, effort, worry etc. - lean on global cloud services for reliability. Let them do that.
- webprofusion 2y agoOne trick I may or may not have invented for the enterprise PO problem (manual processes etc) was to offer an Azure Marketplace subscription for the product. That way they can just go to azure and subscribe to the license that way, without needing any azure resources etc, it's just a billing mechanism. They can then bundle that into their usual Azure spend and even do manual POs etc that I never have to deal with.
- 255kb 2y agoThis is really interesting. I discovered AWS marketplace which offers the same feature. I started integrating but it takes some time, especially with their webhooks. Is it bringing leads directly, from the marketplace listing, or is it just a plus that will help streamlining the purchase process? Edit: another question: do you advertise on your website the possibility to use Azure billing?
- webprofusion 2y agoIt does bring leads, but not many. The main advantage is giving them an easy procurement path.
- 255kb 2y agoThank you for the insights!
- _xnmw 2y agoIf anyone wants some one-man-SaaS ideas, here's a few which I desperately want. Somebody please build these and let me know! I already have my own startup so I don't have time to build these other ideas. - A cheaper and simpler version of visualping.io, they used to be really good but now they're too expensive and enterprise-y. Would be easier and better with AI. - AI-based email assistant which instantly brings up the entire history of contact I had with a person (even if they used a different email or sent to a different inbox) and can quickly be used to draft replies based on that history and a set of canned response templates. Note that I don't want a full email client, I want to use my own email client, I just want an assistant that is plugged in via API/whatever. Yes I've already tried all the alternatives in this space like Mailbutler/Spark/Superhuman but they're all crappy and force you to be locked in to their client. - An Apple TV/Android TV app for the Anki memorization app. Lots of people have made successful Anki plugins and little hardware devices and made good money, like AnkiRemote.com. TVs are extremely well suited to laid-back studying and memorization, so you could easily promote this within the Anki student community if you made one.
- karolist 2y agoRegarding visualping, have you checked https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io, and if so, what's missing?
- imafikus 2y agoI have a startup called Notify Me (notify-me.rs) whose main idea is to be a simple service for tracking web page updates. Not sure what exactly you need, but feel free to try it out / reach out if you have any questions. We are trying to make it as hands-off for end user as possible, but just plugging AI into it is that easy as it seems, since you need to make sure that you are alerting for legit changes and that nothing is hallucinated by the AI
- fm2606 2y agoI'd love to just make $1000 / month profit. I don't "need" the money per se, but definitely "want" it. Maybe for no other reason than to just to do it. I just can't seem to come up with an idea. It has been said/written multiple times "scratch your own itch". It seems that I don't have an itch. If it takes me X-amount of steps or time to do some task, I don't ever look at how to reduce it, I just go with the flow. In the grand scheme of life I am very satisfied. I don't NEED anything and for that I am grateful. However, I am a worrier and I do worry about the future and retirement (I'm in my mid 50s), specifically healthcare. Anyway, better quite here and stop blathering on
- cedws 2y agoI have the same problem. When I see the kinds of simple products printing HNers money I think “people pay for THAT?” Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.
- PaulRobinson 2y agoSo in future, build a landing page, start shipping it around and see if you can get some early potential customers interested. Or, choose a small thing you can build in a few weekends, get it built and try shipping it. If you get no traction, you learned something. If you do, you can now invest more. This is the whole idea behind lean startups: don’t assume tou have a winner or a stinker, go find out and adapt based on feedback.
- htamas 2y ago> start shipping it around Can you elaborate on this?
- PaulRobinson 2y agoShare it on social media, talk to potential customers about it, give people something to sign up to, in order to learn more.
- 2y ago
- justusthane 2y agoJust wanted to say how much I appreciated self-hosted version of Healthchecks.io. It's so simple, it feels almost magic. Keep it up!
- dustedcodes 2y agoHow long did it take you to find your first paying customer and which channels did you find to be most successful in acquisition? I've just launched my own SaaS as a Solopreneur (https://msgdrop.io https://msgdrop.io) and and trying to figure out where to invest most of my limited free time to grow it now.
- TechDebtDevin 2y agoPaid advertising or organic marketing with reels/shorts and blog posts that are SEO optimized,lastly, a bit of luck.
- dustedcodes 2y agoThank you, I'll try the blog posts with SEO route first :)
- TechDebtDevin 2y agoA quick easy (but a bit dirty) trick is to post in a couple appropriate sub-reddits asking for a solution to a problem your app solves and let the comments organically populate. Make sure your question will be worded similarly to a search query on google. Come back a few days later after nobody is looking at your post any longer and edit your question to say you found a solution and link to your website. This is sometimes an effective way to get traffic via search since so many people append reddit to their search queries. Also, you could just reply to your question with a link to your app under a different account but I'm not sure this as effective as having the link in the post which guarantees the link will be seen if someone clicks on that Reddit thread via Google, otherwise, there is no guarantee that your comment will get up voted and be visible, unless of course you game this also.
- fm2606 2y agoNice looking page? Did you design it? If so, where did you get the graphics? My design work looks like a kindergartener drew it with a fat crayon on Big Chief paper! ;-)
- m3h 2y agoAre there any solutions for one-man SaaS to handle payments from enterprise customers? I'm assuming that the preferred mode of payment here is through wire transfers after some kind of PO process.
- yupsurprise 2y agoAll major billing providers should support this, from some cursory googling both Stripe and Stax Payment support it.
- gears_ 2y agoSomeone mentioned they use Azure for billing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107416
- r0b05 2y agoYou are such an inspiration. The explanation of why you became a solopreneur - because you didn't want to manage or be managed is simple, yet incredibly insightful. All the best!
- charles_f 2y agoThis is super inspiring, thanks for sharing. I hope I'll get inspired one day, as you were. Sorry if that was shared elsewhere, how did you market your product?
- matthewpick 2y agoI always wondered why Dead Man’s Snitch didn’t keep their app up-to-date. Seems like this area has a decent amount of competition!
- tnel77 2y agoHow did you come up with the idea for your SaaS? I would love to start my own business on the side, but I don’t feel like I really have any ideas that would generate revenue.
- wishpal 2y agoThis is inspiring. Whats the channel that works consistently well for your traffic?