A little over a year ago a friend and I launched https://cronitor.io https://cronitor.io Our first paying customer came on July 9th, 2014. As of today we're at

A little over a year ago a friend and I launched https://cronitor.io https://cronitor.io Our first paying customer came on July 9th, 2014. As of today we're at about 80 paying customers. As of last month, we have started taking monthly revenue distributions of $1000 each. I would echo gargaplex's comment that, when building a small Saas product, your focus should be about building a business not necessarily just building passive income. However, it's easy to become completely engrossed in something you're working on (especially if it's showing a little traction). So, unless you can see a very clear path to your project becoming a replacement for your full-time revenue source, it's important to be conscious of your time investment, and whether you are at the point where additional work will yield diminishing returns. This is something I've been thinking about a lot with my project lately. I'm not sure if we're there, but, unlike a year ago, when spending 10 hours of time to improve a mediocre product was clearly adding value it's less cut and dry these days. When I look at what has made Cronitor successful (this is a relative term) this past year there are a couple of things that stand out. 1. We launched with a really basic version of our product. It had limited functionality, was far from robust, and didn't even include help docs. But, you could sign up and pay money for it. 2. We hounded our users for feedback. If you signed up you got at least one email from us asking for feedback. Most of the features that exist today on paid plans are because users asked for them. We'd say "sure, we can do that it will be part of plan X. would you be willing to sign up for that?" Not all of them said yes, but getting that validation before investing in features was key. 3. We took breaks from working on it. For myself especially this has been key. I'll have a feature I want to build, or some part of the infrastructure I want to improve. Tackling this feels just like a regular programming sprint, but when it's done I usually take at least a month before moving onto the next "big" thing. This has helped me avoid burnout, and gets me excited to come back and work on it every few weeks. Hope that helps, if you'd like to chat further about getting a Saas project off the ground you can email me august[at]cronitor.io.