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I built and run a saas product solo (> $500k/year). Honestly, I have never found any advice useful. I've been to saas founder meetups (like microconf), I've rea

I built and run a saas product solo (> $500k/year). Honestly, I have never found any advice useful. I've been to saas founder meetups (like microconf), I've read the books, etc. Any advice I give may not apply to you and your business. My business is b2b and it's a platform for certain kinds of professionals as well as an API that powers many well known businesses. I've only had success through two general strategies: 1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc). Leverage your network to find more customers. 2. The "Long Game" (SEO, word of mouth, etc). This is where I get most of my customers. I'd say focus on the long game from day one (blog posts, good marketing pages, etc). Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it.

braden-lk 2y ago
Similar experience. I’ve never received much good advice, or found anything that feels like it “works”, just small, accumulating long-game actions that drive up traffic/conversions a hundredth of a percent at a time. Blog posts, paid ads, sponsorships, emails, affiliates, product improvements, etc. I’m B2C so most advice given to me by “thought leaders” is “stop doing B2c” which isn’t super helpful when I have a functioning, profitable B2C business.
- noufalibrahim 2y ago
  Same. I think much of the stuff that you need to do is common sense (put word out, write about it, encourage word of mouth). And it's usually obvious what will definitely kill your project (don't talk about it to anyone, don't listen to customer feedback etc.) so do the opposite of those. My general experience has been that word of mouth is slow but very reliable and the customers you get from there are usually high value.
iamflimflam1 2y ago
> Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it. This is a key thing. A lot of developers operate in the belief that “if you build it they will come”. A small amount of market validation would prevent a lot of wasted time. - Do people have the problem you are solving? - Are they willing to pay a sufficient amount to solve it? - Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile? The real danger is that we often don’t want to hear the answers to these questions. So we either don’t ask or we dismiss the answers that we get. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing.
- hermitcrab 2y ago
  This is all true. But it isn't as easy as it sounds. When you start out, you probably only have a vague idea of what the product will be. The sort of people you want to talk to might not want to talk to you. They are busy people and you don't even have a product! People saying they will give you money is worthless, in my experience. Only people actually giving you money counts for anything. Estimating the market size is hard and not all that relevant. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fall...
  - iamflimflam1 2y ago
    I think that is part of the problem. Starting out with only a vague idea of what the product will be sounds very unwise. Successful businesses I have worked at have started out solving a real problem for someone (in a business) - with that person telling us that they know other businesses have the same problem. If someone in an industry comes to you with a problem - and they have worked in the industry sufficiently long enough to have been in multiple companies - they can give you a pretty good idea of what size the prize might be. The difficulty a lot of us have working in software is that we don’t really get enough exposure to these people.
    - Appsmith 2y ago
      This is right on the money (speaking from experience)! Simple and superb root cause analysis!
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    This is whats perfect about web3 that most pundits miss It takes the looooong web 2.0 funnels and flips it to a single step: Your customers pay to interact with your app at all and there is insatiable demand at the beginning, unless you do some boomer-level system design that is based on pretending that a 3 trillion dollar crypto native audience doesnt exist already and you need to onboard a bunch of technophobes. In comparison, the entire web 2.0 ethos basically sums up to getting a customer to put their credit card into your website for a small charge, as a funnel for a bigger recurring charge later in web3 all of your users are at the last step at the very beginning. they are even paying for all your hosting costs. they are paying to update your database! and your actual business model of being some form of plumbing with a transaction fee, if you didnt just sell a token collection, is fine and has low overhead costs this will continue attracting developers and their entire audience in perpetuity because the entire web 2.0 ecosystem cannot compete with that
scarface_74 2y ago
My question is how do you get businesses to trust the continuity of a business operating by one person? As a rule, I wouldn’t trust building anything depending on a small company - “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”. (I also wouldn’t trust building a project on top of a Google product. But that’s a different story) Not as a solo entrepreneur, but I have been on both sides of a similar situation. I was working for a struggling startup where our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on the code being put in escrow that they would get access to under certain conditions. The condition happened - company was sold for scraps - and then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to them. Yes everything was above board, they worked with the acquiring company to allow me to keep my work laptop and in my severance agreement the acquirer released me from non competes, etc. Two companies later I was on the opposite side where I was one of the decision makers where we were going to extend the contract with a solo entrepreneur for a SaaS. We were going to be 70% of his revenue. I suggested we also get his code put in escrow and I was responsible for actually watching his build process once per quarter where he pulled his escrowed code out and built and ran from scratch.
- tobyjsullivan 2y ago
  To be fair, they said "many well known businesses," not necessarily large or mature organizations. They could easily be selling to startups, some of which are notable.
- justmarc 2y ago
  You literally answered your own question. Trust no one, and it doesn't matter if it's a Fortune whatever, a small enterprise, a small company or an individual. A company or business of any size can axe a product they own at any time, unless they contractually promised you support.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Yes. The difference is that if one employee at a large company gets hit by the “lottery bus” or loses interest, the business doesn’t go under. Also some companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS etc are more trusted by “the enterprise” than Google. Is there an easy process for your customers to move their data over to a similar service if they don’t want to renew the contract?
r_singh 2y ago
> 1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc). Leverage your network to find more customers. For those located in India (I would argue anywhere outside US really), in my opinion, trying to find customers in your network is a waste of time, even if you're wealthy. Most societies outside US aren't as abundant in their mind nor value driven the same way people in the US are Instead focus on the long game, keep filling in the blanks on your ICP and what their pushes and pulls are by trying to figure out who is the right segment to serve so you can save time and energy
- staunton 2y ago
  > abundant in their mind Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?
  - halamadrid 2y ago
    I think he meant any or all of - generous, helpful, willing to do something for nothing in return
  - r_singh 2y ago
    See prosperity not as a zero-sum game
TypingOutBugs 2y ago
How did you iterate through product ideas go find one that worked? And what tech stack did you use?
- bitbasher 2y ago
  I kept things stupidly simple. I didn't invent a new product or idea. I seen a number of companies doing it and I thought, "I can do that..." The initial product was built with Ruby on Rails. It stayed in Rails for three years. At that point I had enough API traffic the memory on the server was getting out of control and Ruby just couldn't handle the concurrent traffic (with a reasonable budget). I re-wrote the entire product in Go on the third year mark (converted ERB to Go templates, re-wrote all backend logic with Go, etc). The Go version worked wonderfully and reduced my server costs substantially (from $600/month to $88/month). I had the Go version running for four years and I re-wrote it again in Rust (actixweb, askama, htmx). For funsies, I re-wrote a portion in Rust and noticed the amount of code used was substantially lower (about 50% less code in Rust). I was surprised by that (I figured it would use more being lower level). At that same time I was growing frustrated with maintaining the Go monolith (it had a lot of legacy cruft from the Rails port and spaghetti code). I decided to re-write the whole thing in Rust and cull the cruft in the process.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - luxpir 2y ago
    That's really interesting. Any further cost savings going from Go to Rust?
    - bitbasher 2y ago
      There were no financial savings from the transition, but there were certainly overall resource savings (cpu, memory). I think I could cut the financial cost in half, but I am currently stuck where I am due to the (postgres) database size and memory requirements. It's on my list of things to improve some day, but I'm not I'm not too worried about it right now :)
benjaminwootton 2y ago
I quite like this framing. You can think of network as a medium term thing which has to be developed and worked as opposed to just getting bootstrapped. Did you purposely leave out outbound sales? Cold emails, trade shows, working the phones?
- bitbasher 2y ago
  I've tried cold emails, LinkedIn outreach and so on. It works, but I found the success rate to be horrible (< 1% ???). Believe me, I've tried. I read all of the sales and outreach books (predictable revenue, predictable prospecting, founding sales, etc). I've implemented the ideas, I've done it manually, automated, etc.
aristofun 2y ago
Can you share a link?
wayoverthecloud 2y ago
Very valuable advices. Do you mind sharing how you got the starting customers? Did you find customers and then build the product?
rexreed 2y ago
Can you provide more details on how you leverage your network to grow your business? It's hard to just push friends and customers to get you more business. What in your experience works here?

braden-lk 2y ago

Similar experience. I’ve never received much good advice, or found anything that feels like it “works”, just small, accumulating long-game actions that drive up traffic/conversions a hundredth of a percent at a time. Blog posts, paid ads, sponsorships, emails, affiliates, product improvements, etc. I’m B2C so most advice given to me by “thought leaders” is “stop doing B2c” which isn’t super helpful when I have a functioning, profitable B2C business.

noufalibrahim 2y ago
Same. I think much of the stuff that you need to do is common sense (put word out, write about it, encourage word of mouth). And it's usually obvious what will definitely kill your project (don't talk about it to anyone, don't listen to customer feedback etc.) so do the opposite of those. My general experience has been that word of mouth is slow but very reliable and the customers you get from there are usually high value.

iamflimflam1 2y ago

> Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it. This is a key thing. A lot of developers operate in the belief that “if you build it they will come”. A small amount of market validation would prevent a lot of wasted time. - Do people have the problem you are solving? - Are they willing to pay a sufficient amount to solve it? - Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile? The real danger is that we often don’t want to hear the answers to these questions. So we either don’t ask or we dismiss the answers that we get. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing.

hermitcrab 2y ago
This is all true. But it isn't as easy as it sounds. When you start out, you probably only have a vague idea of what the product will be. The sort of people you want to talk to might not want to talk to you. They are busy people and you don't even have a product! People saying they will give you money is worthless, in my experience. Only people actually giving you money counts for anything. Estimating the market size is hard and not all that relevant. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fall...
- iamflimflam1 2y ago
  I think that is part of the problem. Starting out with only a vague idea of what the product will be sounds very unwise. Successful businesses I have worked at have started out solving a real problem for someone (in a business) - with that person telling us that they know other businesses have the same problem. If someone in an industry comes to you with a problem - and they have worked in the industry sufficiently long enough to have been in multiple companies - they can give you a pretty good idea of what size the prize might be. The difficulty a lot of us have working in software is that we don’t really get enough exposure to these people.
  - Appsmith 2y ago
    This is right on the money (speaking from experience)! Simple and superb root cause analysis!
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  This is whats perfect about web3 that most pundits miss It takes the looooong web 2.0 funnels and flips it to a single step: Your customers pay to interact with your app at all and there is insatiable demand at the beginning, unless you do some boomer-level system design that is based on pretending that a 3 trillion dollar crypto native audience doesnt exist already and you need to onboard a bunch of technophobes. In comparison, the entire web 2.0 ethos basically sums up to getting a customer to put their credit card into your website for a small charge, as a funnel for a bigger recurring charge later in web3 all of your users are at the last step at the very beginning. they are even paying for all your hosting costs. they are paying to update your database! and your actual business model of being some form of plumbing with a transaction fee, if you didnt just sell a token collection, is fine and has low overhead costs this will continue attracting developers and their entire audience in perpetuity because the entire web 2.0 ecosystem cannot compete with that

scarface_74 2y ago

My question is how do you get businesses to trust the continuity of a business operating by one person? As a rule, I wouldn’t trust building anything depending on a small company - “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”. (I also wouldn’t trust building a project on top of a Google product. But that’s a different story) Not as a solo entrepreneur, but I have been on both sides of a similar situation. I was working for a struggling startup where our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on the code being put in escrow that they would get access to under certain conditions. The condition happened - company was sold for scraps - and then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to them. Yes everything was above board, they worked with the acquiring company to allow me to keep my work laptop and in my severance agreement the acquirer released me from non competes, etc. Two companies later I was on the opposite side where I was one of the decision makers where we were going to extend the contract with a solo entrepreneur for a SaaS. We were going to be 70% of his revenue. I suggested we also get his code put in escrow and I was responsible for actually watching his build process once per quarter where he pulled his escrowed code out and built and ran from scratch.

tobyjsullivan 2y ago
To be fair, they said "many well known businesses," not necessarily large or mature organizations. They could easily be selling to startups, some of which are notable.
justmarc 2y ago
You literally answered your own question. Trust no one, and it doesn't matter if it's a Fortune whatever, a small enterprise, a small company or an individual. A company or business of any size can axe a product they own at any time, unless they contractually promised you support.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Yes. The difference is that if one employee at a large company gets hit by the “lottery bus” or loses interest, the business doesn’t go under. Also some companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS etc are more trusted by “the enterprise” than Google. Is there an easy process for your customers to move their data over to a similar service if they don’t want to renew the contract?

r_singh 2y ago

> 1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc). Leverage your network to find more customers. For those located in India (I would argue anywhere outside US really), in my opinion, trying to find customers in your network is a waste of time, even if you're wealthy. Most societies outside US aren't as abundant in their mind nor value driven the same way people in the US are Instead focus on the long game, keep filling in the blanks on your ICP and what their pushes and pulls are by trying to figure out who is the right segment to serve so you can save time and energy

staunton 2y ago
> abundant in their mind Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?
- halamadrid 2y ago
  I think he meant any or all of - generous, helpful, willing to do something for nothing in return
- r_singh 2y ago
  See prosperity not as a zero-sum game

TypingOutBugs 2y ago

How did you iterate through product ideas go find one that worked? And what tech stack did you use?

bitbasher 2y ago
I kept things stupidly simple. I didn't invent a new product or idea. I seen a number of companies doing it and I thought, "I can do that..." The initial product was built with Ruby on Rails. It stayed in Rails for three years. At that point I had enough API traffic the memory on the server was getting out of control and Ruby just couldn't handle the concurrent traffic (with a reasonable budget). I re-wrote the entire product in Go on the third year mark (converted ERB to Go templates, re-wrote all backend logic with Go, etc). The Go version worked wonderfully and reduced my server costs substantially (from $600/month to $88/month). I had the Go version running for four years and I re-wrote it again in Rust (actixweb, askama, htmx). For funsies, I re-wrote a portion in Rust and noticed the amount of code used was substantially lower (about 50% less code in Rust). I was surprised by that (I figured it would use more being lower level). At that same time I was growing frustrated with maintaining the Go monolith (it had a lot of legacy cruft from the Rails port and spaghetti code). I decided to re-write the whole thing in Rust and cull the cruft in the process.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- luxpir 2y ago
  That's really interesting. Any further cost savings going from Go to Rust?
  - bitbasher 2y ago
    There were no financial savings from the transition, but there were certainly overall resource savings (cpu, memory). I think I could cut the financial cost in half, but I am currently stuck where I am due to the (postgres) database size and memory requirements. It's on my list of things to improve some day, but I'm not I'm not too worried about it right now :)

benjaminwootton 2y ago

I quite like this framing. You can think of network as a medium term thing which has to be developed and worked as opposed to just getting bootstrapped. Did you purposely leave out outbound sales? Cold emails, trade shows, working the phones?

bitbasher 2y ago
I've tried cold emails, LinkedIn outreach and so on. It works, but I found the success rate to be horrible (< 1% ???). Believe me, I've tried. I read all of the sales and outreach books (predictable revenue, predictable prospecting, founding sales, etc). I've implemented the ideas, I've done it manually, automated, etc.

aristofun 2y ago

Can you share a link?

wayoverthecloud 2y ago

Very valuable advices. Do you mind sharing how you got the starting customers? Did you find customers and then build the product?

rexreed 2y ago

Can you provide more details on how you leverage your network to grow your business? It's hard to just push friends and customers to get you more business. What in your experience works here?