[HN Gopher] What I learned running a SaaS for a year
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What I learned running a SaaS for a year
Author : rozenmd
Score : 214 points
Date : 2022-02-22 10:30 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (onlineornot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onlineornot.com)
| mjwhansen wrote:
| Thanks for sharing!
|
| This is such a great example of having your pre-existing belief
| questioned, noticing user behavior, and adapting accordingly:
|
| > Contrary to popular belief (for B2B SaaS), people actually work
| from their phones.
|
| > Something like 50% of traffic to OnlineOrNot.com comes from
| folks on mobile. They tend to quickly create an account, add a
| few pages to monitor, then eventually get on their laptop/desktop
| to review their checks from time to time.
|
| > For about 6 months I didn't support mobile well, and folks that
| signed up on their phone churned rapidly. I eventually took the
| time to build responsive views for mobile, and now new mobile
| users are sticking around.
|
| Just curious -- in addition observing their behavior, have you
| talked to those customers (either via support/email or
| interviews) to understand this workflow?
| rozenmd wrote:
| I've mainly been emailing customers to try understand their
| processes better.
|
| I read your book though, and I've been working up the courage
| to do customer interviews over Zoom/calls!
| mjwhansen wrote:
| oooh, you should share the email copy you're using on
| Twitter! would happily RT, so helpful to have real-life
| examples
|
| let me know how it goes when you work up to interviews! :)
| ushakov wrote:
| not the OP, but i have actually observed a similar thing in the
| past - people land on marketing page on the phone, sign up, go
| to dashboard, etc.
|
| then then go to desktop and pick up where they left off
| vincvinc wrote:
| > half of my time went to actually solving the problem I wanted
| to solve (knowing if a site is down, and alerting folks when that
| happens). The other half went to building a SaaS platform around
| that problem.
|
| You'd think in today's software landscape there would be tools to
| simplify or automate the part or building a SaaS business that
| everyone needs to do.
|
| He mentions Stripe for payments of course, but isn't there
| anything broader to get set up more quickly? Like a shopify for
| SaaS businesses?
| zild3d wrote:
| > the part or building a SaaS business that everyone needs to
| do.
|
| A few critical ones off the top of my head
|
| - payments (subscriptions, cancellations, invoices, etc)
|
| - authentication (signup, login, invite, forgot password)
|
| - transactional emails (confirmations, etc)
|
| for enterprise:
|
| - permissions, access controls
|
| - audit logs
|
| - gdpr
|
| - reporting, monitoring
|
| - single sign on
|
| other common saas-y needs
|
| - notifications
|
| - error monitoring
|
| - performance monitoring
|
| - admin tools (impersonate, deletions)
|
| - feature flagging
|
| I'm surprised a "SaaS in a box" hasn't really gotten traction.
| I think part of it is the tech stack dependencies - frontend
| frameworks, backend languages & frameworks, infra, databases,
| 3rd party tools
| ozim wrote:
| Frameworks like RoR, Laravel, .NET framework provide most of
| it which are mostly SaaS in a box from technical perspective.
|
| Then you have headless CMS-es on top of which you also can
| build stuff.
|
| So you can plugin your email provider, payment provider,
| single sign on. It does not take much code but you still have
| to understand how to integrate stuff.
|
| Then you have wordpress where people basically install all
| kind of plugins and you can have all what was listed in CMS,
| but then you get "wordpress developers" to hire so I don't
| see much difference.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| Stripe pretty much _is_ that. There 's only so much abstraction
| you can do on payment processing.
| dbbk wrote:
| > Like a shopify for SaaS businesses?
|
| This is Paddle. As a one-person startup, there's no way I could
| go with Stripe. The tax implications alone are too much.
| zild3d wrote:
| that's still just payments provider vs "Shopify for SaaS"
| which handles a lot more
| PhilipA wrote:
| Depending on the technology stack there are frameworks like
| SaaS Starter Kit for Phoenix:
| https://fullstackphoenix.com/saas-starter-kit
| rozenmd wrote:
| There probably is, but I like to avoid sharing around customer
| data unnecessarily.
| bytebln wrote:
| Paddle.com is pretty simple. I implemented Paddle in my App in
| less than 2 hours. Stripe API became too complex for my needs.
| tnolet wrote:
| Welcome to the club! Reminds me a lot of the first ~1,5 years
| hacking on my then bootstrapped monitoring product.
| lbriner wrote:
| Pricing is hard but we also make it harder than it needs to be,
| especially if we have doubts about our product and the imposter
| syndrome (our product isn't perfect so can I charge premium?)
|
| Once (as the OP pointed out) we see that we are solving a problem
| rather than selling a service/product, it becomes easier to
| price, at least in the right ballpark.
|
| If you are saving perhaps 10 hours of time per week for a
| customer, you can price roughly how much you save them (probably
| a lot) and then you can charge accordingly. If you are saving
| whole employees from needing to be employed, then the sky is the
| limit.
|
| In the same way, if you were renting a Bouncer to a nightclub,
| you wouldn't be bothered that they aren't quite tall enough or
| don't speak French. Those things would be nice to haves but they
| still perform a job!
| bachmeier wrote:
| > If you are saving perhaps 10 hours of time per week for a
| customer, you can price roughly how much you save them
| (probably a lot) and then you can charge accordingly.
|
| You're omitting one critical piece of pricing. Saving someone
| 10 hours per week doesn't mean much unless you can convince
| them they will save 10 hours per week before they've used the
| product _and_ you actually deliver so that they stick with you
| in the future. Oh, and if there 's a competitor that saves 9
| hours per week at half the cost, you're not going to have many
| customers.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| > Use analytics, set-up funnel tracking
|
| Any thoughts on which analytics services, regarding privacy and
| "acceptable to users" kind of metrics?
|
| (Former Google employee, who don't quite get the hatred Google
| receives online, but feeling that Google Analytics has a really
| complex UI for my needs.)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| How far does webserver access log analysis take you? If you log
| IP address or some other kind of user fingerprinting and
| referer headers I think you'd get pretty far already in doing
| rudimentary funnel analytics without needing permission or
| installing 3rd party tooling on the website. Mind you, my
| understanding of analytics is minimal at best; I don't know
| what use cases are usually applied to this data.
| antoinec wrote:
| Mixpanel, their UI is amazing and they make it really easy to
| setup graphs that are actually useful.
|
| I'd recommend only sending server side events so you get really
| accurate stats and no privacy invasion.
|
| I tried to limit the number of events tracked as well, and made
| sure I knew why I was tracking something, and not just "because
| I can", I found that it made it easier to focus on what
| matters.
| dbbk wrote:
| Plausible for marketing site, Mixpanel for the app, has been a
| great combo for me.
| flurly wrote:
| I built https://graphjson.com for builders like yourself! Feel
| free to email me (in bio) if you have any questions. I wrote
| about how and why I built it here
| https://www.graphjson.com/guides/about
| rozenmd wrote:
| I use Plausible analytics for site analytics - you can do quite
| a bit just by firing events when users land on a page (don't
| need to know who they are, just need a count of people that see
| page A, B, and C).
| withinboredom wrote:
| I've found Azure's Application Insights to be quite privacy
| focused. You can host the instance in whatever region you
| prefer. The UI isn't all that great, but it seems pretty
| decent.
| cuu508 wrote:
| Are any Azure regions currently operated by independent
| companies that license Azure code from Microsoft?
|
| (if not, what difference does the region make privacy-wise,
| if the parent US company can ultimately still access the
| data?)
| withinboredom wrote:
| Does it matter if you've turned off all PII collection? If
| that's your threat model to your own app though (ie, doing
| stuff that's illegal in the US but not where you serve
| traffic), self hosting is probably the way to go.
| cuu508 wrote:
| No, if they process no PII then it does not matter.
| rozenmd wrote:
| Hey, I'm the creator of OnlineOrNot.
|
| I mainly started building it because I wanted to learn more about
| running a business, marketing, and SEO (all the technical parts
| of the business were relatively easy in comparison).
| eatonphil wrote:
| I'm having the same experience, 8 months in. The software is by
| far the easy part.
| ushakov wrote:
| i have same feeling for technical vs marketing side
|
| i don't regret launching a failing SaaS for me or for client
| because it gave me the opportunity to learn ins and outs for
| almost no cost
|
| by the way, how does you product compare to instatus.com?
| rozenmd wrote:
| At the moment, I just handle the monitoring (static websites,
| APIs, and now JavaScript apps) and alerts.
|
| You can then use that data to write accurate status updates
| on your system's status page, but we do not host public
| status pages.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| How is your Monetisation going? I guess its hard to make a living
| from building your own product (I'm trying todo the same). But
| not impossible... I often sees these "twitter i'm successful
| founders" who keep mentioning "I'm almost doing 10k MRR" but not
| talking about costs... Its easy todo 10k per month, if you spend
| 15k on google ;-) I'm doing close to 2k per month on MRR but
| costs are also quite high.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| Ah found it in your blog! https://onlineornot.com/eight-months-
| of-onlineornot
| rozenmd wrote:
| $3.5k USD total over the year, roughly.
| dpcan wrote:
| Am I reading this correctly that you worked 2 hours a day and
| only made $3.5k all year? Or about $300 a month?
| bachmeier wrote:
| He gets a valuable education, so basically he's getting
| free tuition plus enough money to buy a good lunch every
| day.
| dpcan wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| If he worked 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 1 year (52
| weeks), thats 520 hours.
|
| He made $6.73 per hour before self employment and income
| taxes (if applicable). Or $13.46 per day.
|
| I'm not sure how you get a good lunch and tuition from
| that unfortunately.
|
| Still, everyone values their time and talents
| differently, they also have different goals in terms of
| education and what they consider to be a financial
| success.
|
| I guess, given the money he's made, what he's actually
| learned is a long list of things he still needs to learn.
| Because what he's saying he's "learned" hasn't been
| validated yet. Maybe if he's making ~$70k by the end of
| this year we can assume these things he's learned have
| value, otherwise, they are mostly observations about the
| current state of his business and how making adjustments
| in these areas have mildly impacted his bottom line.
|
| I wish him the best of luck.
| rozenmd wrote:
| Thanks (I'm in France, so it's 218 working days, 436
| hours).
|
| On the education side, my first 3 years as a maker, I
| didn't grow beyond 1 paid user on any product I sold. I
| still learned with every failed launch, and every product
| I shut down.
|
| See "Year in review" at https://maxrozen.com/
|
| The learning has been cumulative.
|
| I went from "Hey if I just copy Pieter Levels, I'll be
| rich immediately" to "If I build it, they will come" to
| "Maybe if I write about the problem, people will come?"
| to "If I talk to people about their problems, maybe I'll
| understand them well enough to solve a problem for them".
|
| I'm not trying to convince you to take up the life of a
| bootstrapped founder, I just wrote an article about what
| I learned from a couple spare hours before my job each
| day over the last 12 months.
| cinntaile wrote:
| How much do you expect to grow this year? When do you
| decide it's time to throw in the towel? And I don't mean
| anything with my last question, I'm genuinely curious
| about your criteria.
| rozenmd wrote:
| That's the beauty of my setup IMO, I don't plan on
| quitting full time work, so the revenue is all a bonus on
| top of what I learn.
|
| That being said, I think I'm at a point where I could
| spin off an API from OnlineOrNot and make it similarly
| successful within a month or so.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I think you misunderstood. I was wondering when you
| cancel a SaaS project? What criteria do you use to decide
| that? Also how much would you like to grow this year or
| did you mean that you don't use that as a metric? Is it
| more about the learning aspect of it all?
|
| Do you plan on going the API route?
| rozenmd wrote:
| Ah right.
|
| I would cancel a project if it couldn't pay its own
| infrastructure bill after 6 months.
|
| If I had to name a goal for the second year, it's to
| reach $1k MRR across everything I sell online. I still
| have plenty of ideas for OnlineOrNot, but there are a few
| APIs I built internally that I could see others paying
| for (that I'll be testing if people would, actually,
| before building).
| austhrow743 wrote:
| Presumably if they stopped working on their products now
| it would be some time before revenue started to decrease
| and then even more before it became practically non
| existent. In fact it'd probably be some time before
| revenue stopped increasing.
|
| So they haven't been working for $6.73/hour. They've been
| building a money printing machine that currently prints
| $13.46 a day.
|
| Even taking it as working for $6.73/hour though, I'd make
| that trade plenty often even though I'd never consider
| regular employment anywhere near it. The flexibility of
| doing it whenever, whenever. No bosses or coworkers to be
| accountable to. These things count for a lot.
| freedomben wrote:
| You've got to remember the math of compound interest.
| He's investing up front now for a steady stream later.
| The day he decides it's feature complete and to stop
| working will not be the day people stop paying. In many
| SaaS I've been a part of , the first year or two looks
| bloody to most people, but it's the continued stream that
| matters.
| [deleted]
| darebak wrote:
| I think his monthly average over the year is 3.5k, atleast
| that's how I read it.
| rozenmd wrote:
| Nope, total over the year.
| altdataseller wrote:
| That's a win in my books. Lots of other ppl actually lose
| money their first year.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| He probably learned a lot more than he could have, say,
| attending a code bootcamp -- and he made money on top of
| that. So it's a huge win in my opinion.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| Not bad! What's invaluable is what you are currently learning
| about running a business. Something I learned was that I
| totally underestimated marketing :p
| sjapps wrote:
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(page generated 2022-02-22 23:02 UTC)