Building a One-Person SaaS App Offers a Profound Sense of Personal Achievement

I don't think you realize just how much of a naive statement that is.

That is honestly, genuinely, terrible advice that does not take in to account that building a business means building a BUSINESS not building software.

They are two very different things.

The idea that you can "build it and they will come" has been proven to be a fallacy many many times over.

With regard to your other comments - Yes - I wrote that post with the express purpose of drawing attention to my product. That is called marketing and that is how you build a business.

The trick is to always try to give value while you do that, and from reading the general tone of the comments here I believe that aim was achieved.

You're understating the effort of building an online business by a factor of thousand. Author's premise might not be widely applicable — that's debatable but don't make the mistake of assuming that you can just decide to build a product and rake $$$ in a jiffy. It takes a tremendous learning and an arduous effort to even hit few thousand dollars of stable monthly revenue.

By the way, i am selling shovels over here :) http://graphqlapi.com

Somehow, people want to share their experience and genuinely help others. And often, slapping a price tag on their advice makes it more valuable than if it was given for free.

On the other hand, the whole "I teach you how to make money" smells like a big scam. I wonder how many people really became successful because of doing a course and not despite of doing one. My gut feeling is, the majority of successful solo founders simply did what you said: build a product, somehow get the word out, profit.

You don't start with 1,000 clients thankfully. You start with 0. And then 1. And so on and so forth.

People get dreams of making money from the internet, until a year or so later when they realise they are not getting anywhere. At this point they step up to the next level, of trying to build mailing lists of their former self, to try and sell them the secrets to making money online.

I'm sooo sorry that you had to stop listening to TechZing because of "the other guy" talking for hours and hours ;)

Our track record is terrible if you mean revenue generating saas apps. In fact in six months we currently have zero members of more than 250 that have achieved any revenue.

But, that is because all of our members are starting from pre-idea.

To get some revenue you need to build an audience that are willing to pay you for what you have made, or are about to make.

The best path to get to that place is to pick an audience to serve and then to run customer development interviews.

Then, based off of those interviews you can discover a pain point that the audience really wants to pay to get solve and then you can launch.

So, if your measure of success is, are we helping founders on a day to day basis with that process?

Then yes! We are doing tremendously well! We have quite a few founders who are running customer interviews and making some amazing headway on building a real business.

All the focus at this point is on teaching and supporting cold outreach and audience building and getting founders to a place where they have a validated low risk business to get started on.

I wasn't even going to really partake in the community, I was just going to take an idea that I really wanted to work on, tell people I was working on it and then put my head down and do it. I don't even know how it happened, but I got sucked into the community, and I've gotten further with the idea I've been working on than any other (which were, to be fair, half-hearted attempts).

Justin and Brandon have really guided me through the process; I also feel like having the community to keep me accountable during the cold outreach stage (which I wasn't a fan of) has kept me going. I've tried a cold outreach approach before, but had very little response. Just the help that Brandon gave me that got me over that hump alone is probably worth what I paid. I can now do that myself in future any time I want if I have to start all over again. To me, that's invaluable.

Justin, the guy who runs it, says they haven't had any successful businesses come out of it yet (though a handful have gone past the build, even launch, stage), but it is itself a fairly new business to be fair. So I can't really vouch for their track record, other than to say that the business he built before this took 3 years to reach ~$3k revenue and this one took 3 months to reach the same.

Now, it's $19/month (what, ~£15?) and it's got so much more. Justin's planning to build a third business completely from scratch and vlog and document the process as he goes, which I'm really looking forward to (should be starting very soon).

I've been looking for exactly that kind of material before (these new improvements came from customer feedback, so he's very clued up on what his customers want too); before I was worried about users and I was still learning to program, I was following Carl Herold's Livestream Startup (until he ended up getting arrested). There's practically nothing that gives you that level of openness (although Matt Bearman's Bugmuncher blog is really great as well).

Anyway, this ended up a lot longer than expected, but that's my… review? All in all, I think it's definitely worth it, especially with the price drop and all the new 'features', so I'm staying on for the foreseeable future. Take that as you will.

I guess the clearest way to say it is that I've been recommending it to a bunch of friends (including my best friend, who's now signed up) with enthusiasm. Honestly, at ~£15/month, there's no reason not to sign up for a month just to try it out, especially with the 30-day money back guarantee (ha, had to check that one).

This 100K exit is actually quite an achievement I think.

That said, it's still not easy, and requires a fair amount of annoying work that stretches one outside of their comfort zone.

I think it would actually help everyone if you were to comment.

As a guess: you wanted to be negative because it sounds like a sales pitch ("get rich quick")? In that case, I kind of agree with you, but people seem to like the article, regardless :)