Keep in mind that Joel was talking about a business with zero value added by the founders. For a SaaS business, 100% of the value is added by the software writ

Keep in mind that Joel was talking about a business with zero value added by the founders. For a SaaS business, 100% of the value is added by the software written by the founders. If it's worth $50/month to the customer when manned by a guy doing a thousand tasks by hand and answering every email that comes in within 10 minutes, it's still worth $50/month to that customer once that guy gets organized. But you're right, you probably won't earn much more than $25,000 per month for that half day's effort. Really puts a crimp in my yacht buying budget, that does.