[HN Gopher] Ask HN: One-person startups/SaaS that are profitable?
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Ask HN: One-person startups/SaaS that are profitable?
Hi, I was wondering as I am starting startup, are there here any
one person startup/SaaS? And how do you manage
marketing/sales/development, as I feel those are completely
different skill sets. Edit: If anyone is wondering my MVP is:
https://sentimentscanner.com/- google play
analytics/statistics/reports of comments by chatgpt Edit2: I was
inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072
Author : sentimentscan
Score : 13 points
Date : 2023-09-13 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
| mrieck wrote:
| Balancing marketing/sales with product development is one of my
| weaknesses, so I actually wrote a post about it on IndieHackers:
|
| https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-product-has-been-launch...
|
| That site also has a products page where you can search for solo
| founders making > $XXX revenue. There are tons of profitable solo
| SaaS.
| sentimentscan wrote:
| That's nice that you can succeed without social media, as I
| absolutely hate fb/x/whatever and that yo can do that without
| trying to pitch your every article in them.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| I'm doing roughly $20k/mo. with a physical monthly newsletter
| delivered to people's doorsteps. Here's the old-school
| salesletter for it: https://www.scottscheper.com/free-trial
|
| Here's a picture of my Stripe account from last month:
| https://cloud.scottscheper.com/3k3Yry2V
|
| Happy to share how this model works. There's a lot of subtleties
| to it.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I read the link, but couldn't quote figure out what the
| newsletter is about?
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| Knowledge Management, Writing, and Marketing.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Genuinely curious who your customers are and what the price
| point is. The market clearly isn't me because I hated your
| landing page and copy within 20 seconds. Not a criticism, I
| have products where I wrote copy in a way that hits an audience
| that is very much not aligned with me or people I know. But
| curious.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| They're People interested in Zettelkasten and already
| know/like me.
|
| They understand my use of old school font/letter. Otherwise
| to a cold audience (like yourself) it's definitely cringe.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Check out levelsio, a single guy pulling in ~200k MRR using
| pretty much outdated tech stacks https://twitter.com/levelsio
| sentimentscan wrote:
| >jquery
|
| Nice, I almost forgot about it, however for after a few months.
| Jquery always resulted in huge mess with one insanely long file
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thanks, I especially liked the pinned tweet at the top of his
| account:
|
| > Only 4 out of 70+ projects I ever did made money and grew
|
| > >95% of everything I ever did failed
|
| > My hit rate is only about ~5%
|
| > So...ship more
|
| Great, great advice IMO!
| jklein11 wrote:
| Not an answer to your question but why are you offering
| sentimentscanner for free?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| builtwith.com
| pouzy wrote:
| I run one too. International, customers in Europe, us, south
| America. It's been running for almost 8 years, so now it's
| practically 'finished' - basically does the job for the niche
| it's targeting.
|
| But I'm tired of being solo, so I'm merging with other people
| that are more on the sales part. One of them also has a
| profitable company (not saaa - involves people transportation)
| and needs a tech to make everything smoother (insurances contacts
| etc)
|
| We'll see how it goes because we come from VERY different
| perspectives and need to bend our habits to be able to work
| together
|
| Having a profitable SaaS is awesome (I can work on it something
| like 2 days a month if I want to, just managing specific
| invoices) but you just get nuts working from home alone after a
| while. It was fun during COVID-19, can't say it is anymore
| [deleted]
| clay_the_ripper wrote:
| I run a "one-person" saas that is profitable. I have an offshore
| contractor that helps me run the service, and one offshore
| support person to help with tickets.
|
| I do all of the marketing, product development, finances, sales &
| customer success.
|
| Do I recommend it? Probably not. I am very tired of doing
| everything myself and am excited to grow it to the point of
| hiring more team members. I recommend that when starting a
| startup to plan to build it big enough that you can afford not to
| do everything solo. It's stressful and lonely, but also strangely
| rewarding.
|
| A note on "offshore" team members: I hear a lot of people say
| offshore workers are low quality or don't care about the work
| yada yada. I have found the opposite to be true - offshore folks
| are the same as any other people you employ: pay your people
| well, treat them with respect and invest in their future and they
| will do great work. My support and ops team members have been
| with me for 3+ years.
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(page generated 2023-09-13 23:01 UTC)