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Comment by joshontheweb | Hacker News Reader

Word. I started my current SaaS with the goal of working 10hrs a week and making 15k a month. I'm getting close to my monthly revenue goal but if I'm not sleeping, I'm working. I don't regret it. I'm enjoying the challenge now but it wasn't what I had thought I was getting myself into. I truly underestimated the gravity of emails and support requests. As a one man shop, it can grind entire days to a halt.

Passive info products do seem to be the easier path to a more leisurely success.

Edit: missed a word

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That's pretty impressive actually! Have you considering hiring one or two people (e.g., freelancers) to remotely help with support? Also, a virtual secretary would be immensely helpful I'd imagine.

I have a couple of ideas I've been wanting to work on, but time is quite scarce as a grad student. I guess it's partly because I tend to overthink (and over-design) my ideas, and end up getting overwhelmed before even touching a line of code! What's even worse is that the majority of my ideas are intended for my home country (EST+6 timezone), since I think it's much harder to be successful in an over-saturated market like the US.

For example, one of my ideas is designing an Uber-like service for my home country. The current roadmap (which I haven't started on) is as follows:

1. Design a basic placeholder site with some info on the app/service

2. Run a limited ad campaign to gauge interest and ideally collect emails (Google, FB, local radio, local newspapers)

3. Try to get interested users to fill out a survey

4. If the results from 2) and 3) are promising, start developing a barebones MVP

5. The MVP will target one city, require manual signup for drivers, and only have a simple web client

6. If successful, start hiring local developers, optimizing server-side, and designing an Android app (iOS is a very small market)

Any advice for someone in my position? I'm open to all types of feedback from any HNer - it's always good to get an opinion before working on something like this!

Thanks! I'm trying to hire right now. (web audio and/or webrtc devs call me) :)

I've thought about a virtual secretary but I'm not so sure how helpful it would be. They would need pretty specialized knowledge to be able to help much with support requests. I don't have so many meetings that I can't schedule my own.

As far as Uber for your country. Does Uber not exist where you are yet? There was another one in Malaysia called GoTaxi or GrabTaxi that I thought was interesting. It connected you with 'real' taxi drivers for a pre-arranged flat fee for the ride. One guy told me he used it just so he had a record of what taxi he was in incase he got robbed by the driver.

Edit: latent thoughts

No, not yet! There is one service that is doing something similar to Uber, but it's not a good service imo.

That sounds interesting actually. One of my biggest concerns is push back from the local taxi union, so that may be a better way to approach it. I'll definitely look that service up.

I am not exactly qualified to gauge the viability of your idea but I believe an Uber-like service is pretty ambitious of a venture, especially given the fact that you'd go for it solo. Consider the fact that you need to fill both the demand-side and supply-side, and match them almost in real time for it to be useful. I feel that it's often underestimated how challenging this task is.

I am not sure if a web-client would do the job. From my knowledge, interacting with maps on a mobile browser can be an aggravating experience. If an app doesn't do the job, isn't immediately useful, people discard it without further consideration which makes B2C things tenfold hard.

The surest way I see for it to work is to start as boring-taxi company that has a phone number and a person at the end. Then, slowly move into automated app-like way. I am guessing that's how OlaCabs, India's Uber, got started. Automation is awesome but there are so many points of failure in Uber-like venture that it's better to be safe by doing manual tasks.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that it is in fact non-trivial to get automated ride sharing working end to end.

Didn't you mix up the goal and the result?

As a fellow (though happy) SaaS owner I'm trying to imagine being in your shoes. My goal is spending my time on something (~a problem) that interests me and hearing that customers benefit from what I offer. I think that is the awesome part of it.

This results in freedom and earning money, among other things. I don't earn as much as you but I care very little as long as I can do the above. Obviously you need to be able to cover your expenses, but that's another story.

I couldn't imagine starting this with the goal of working as little as possible while getting paid as much as possible. I don't know if that is what you are saying, but I hear this sometimes.

Am I getting too philosophical about it?

Perhaps I have. I started this business after learning I was going to be a dad. My broader goals were financial, location, and time independence for my family and I. I suppose I take it for granted that I enjoy the building part. As long as I can use tools that I like, I can get excited about building almost anything. So far the time independence has been elusive but I'm still just getting started. Moved to paid plans just a month ago. I think it will get more manageable as the product and I mature. Also bringing on some dev help is in order.

> I truly underestimated the gravity of emails and support requests. As a one man shop, it can grind entire days to a halt.

Same boat - You can make the most detailed image based walk through FAQ tutorial documentation what have you and you'll still have days filled with customer support.

You'll wake up one morning with multiple emails from billing to product support. The more you grow, the more they come.

PS: You're product hit the nail on the head. I've recommended it to a few podcast clients in the past.

Yeah, its a tough problem because it makes it hard to stay solo. I really like being in full control of everything as long as it stays manageable. Perhaps this is a weakness.

Thank You! I'm relying entirely on word of mouth marketing at the moment so that really helps!

BTW - What's your project?

Why don't you hire out support? Sounds like $15-20/h type of work which you shouldn't be doing if you can gain more value building features or marketing.

Have you considered the cause of the e-mails/support requests and tried to streamline your process or at least provide additional instruction in order to quell the high volume?

My experience has been that support requests can be near zero if you actively work on some kind of automated solution for the highest frequency problems.

I'm trying to work towards this. There are just a ton of problems that can occur since I'm dealing with recording/uploading audio in the browser. Network dropouts, OS audio settings, varied browser capabilities / versions, microphone selection issues, limited hard disk space, browser storage quotas, etc.

My new goal is to have every single error or notification have a built-in link that takes them to a solution article. This seems to be effective so far.

I know support, especially good support, is a hard problem to solve. However have you explored documenting processes in extreme detail in order to outsource that part of the business? The upfront investment would be great, but the returns in time alone would seem worth it.

Certainly worth the time investment when i can get to it. My biggest problem at the moment is that I have no admin interface. I have to dive into the db to make fixes/changes for people. Once I get an admin panel built out I'll be able to bring on help easier. The other issue is that I actually get so much great info about my users needs from the support requests that I cant detach entirely.

For sure. I definitely underestimate the advantages of an admin panel with proper permissions and reporting. Working primarily with an e-commerce platform day-to-day, I do feel the hit of subpar solutions when using rails or similar.

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