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I 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 peo

I 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 ago
Stealing ideas is a lot of work.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  Right. 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 ago
    Also, I totally agree with what sharmi says here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41106276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41106276
timcambrant 2y ago
healthchecks.io seems like a service which gets recommended on the web enough so that larger or even better competitors would have a hard time stealing his customers. It could lead to a slowdown in growth, but I suspect the growth so far is largely a result of success story posts like this.
stevoski 2y ago
The idea of hiding your business makes no sense. You need people to hear about it if you want customers. Getting mentioned on forums like HN is exactly how a business like this gets more customers.
kondro 2y ago
90% of the difficulty in booting a competitor is unrelated to copying the product. It's in finding and then convincing customers to spend money with you.
_xnmw 2y ago
It only took 9 years for him to get to where he is now.
ozim 2y ago
The idea is not super special or novel - I can type out 5 services like this from top of my head.

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 ago

Stealing ideas is a lot of work.

fuzztester 2y ago
Right. 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 ago
  Also, I totally agree with what sharmi says here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41106276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41106276

timcambrant 2y ago

healthchecks.io seems like a service which gets recommended on the web enough so that larger or even better competitors would have a hard time stealing his customers. It could lead to a slowdown in growth, but I suspect the growth so far is largely a result of success story posts like this.

stevoski 2y ago

The idea of hiding your business makes no sense. You need people to hear about it if you want customers. Getting mentioned on forums like HN is exactly how a business like this gets more customers.

kondro 2y ago

90% of the difficulty in booting a competitor is unrelated to copying the product. It's in finding and then convincing customers to spend money with you.

_xnmw 2y ago

It only took 9 years for him to get to where he is now.

ozim 2y ago

The idea is not super special or novel - I can type out 5 services like this from top of my head.