How We Bootstrapped Our SaaS Startup to Ramen Profitability
blog.canny.io
blog.canny.io
The Customer Support teams of your customers are going to be one of the main channels for capturing feature requests. We use Zendesk and have custom fields for categorizing and sub-categorizing requests along with a brief description. We do this so that the PMs don't have to read the entire Support ticket if one sentence is about the feature request out of 10 pages of text. If you could build an integration with Zendesk and other major ticketing tools that tie support tickets directly into your product it'd be an easy way to get your customers to have a huge influx of important data.
Sales will also provide lots of feature requests as they are also talking to many customers. You have to make this as seamless and as easy as possible otherwise they won't use it. Setting up a Salesforce integration is probably your only way to do that.
Tracking feature requests for strategic customers need to be treated differently than for other customers. There needs to be a system to categorize tickets by customer cohorts. If you can tie ARR, deal-breakers or other metrics to feature requests, that will help PMs prioritize them.
For your customers, publicly exposing feature requests is a double-edged sword. You're going to capture a lot of feedback. Some of it is good, some is bad. Not taking action on customer feature requests can build negative sentiment in the community.
Feedback that internal teams track (opposed to users voting) is kept internal, so users can't see stuff that sales/support adds. A few companies are using us entirely internally.
The internal use case is definitely interesting but then we lose the nice organic channel.
Thanks again for your insight! Really appreciate it. Say hi on our intercom chat sometime.
Nice story - $100 in December, then we do this, then $100 in March, then we dont cry and despair but do that, then $3,500, "but how do you possibly live on $3,500/mo?" - answered right away.
So I thought it was a nice read. Also, good luck :)
- Consider a Zapier integration, might save you some time and make delivery/adoption faster
- In step 3 of onboarding you ask me to share a url with team members. Can I make this url private/sso? If yes, make the discovery of that immediate. If no, that's going to be a blocker for any internal adoption.
- PMs tend to organize their internal priorities and roadmaps in specific ways. I like that I can sort by "coming soon" "done", etc, in your list BUT, what I really want is a consistent visual delivery, this seems to usually be a kanban style board.
- Internal teams and stakeholders need to understand why what you're working on right now is the single most important thing that the teams need to be working on. It's important that this assessment criteria is clearly communicated, visually, and understand.
We have a Zapier integration! It's currently in beta, try it out: https://zapier.com/developer/invite/59728/b66bec80febabe914b...
Kanban coming soon. https://feedback.canny.io/feature-requests/p/roadmap-view
> Can I make this url private/sso?
What exactly do you mean? Would love to chat more. Would you mind hopping on our live chat sometime?
> It's important that this assessment criteria is clearly communicated, visually, and understand.
CRM integrations (Salesforce, Intercom) coming soon so you can tie monthly spend to those votes.
Multiple times.
The logo at the top should take me to your product’s homepage, not your blog.
The article should link to it, every time you mention it.
In the end, recommend that I go see the product you mentioned.
I loved this article but realized I never bothered to see your site. It didn’t occur to me.
The blog post wasn't about us getting customers, it was about helping people startup.
We still got 25% of blog traffic to our homepage anyway. Would you still make the change?
When I click Start I'd logo I expect to be taken to their product website, not to the root of their blog.
I have nothing to support my opinion, and maybe most people use the web differently to me.
One of the primary goals of any new startup should be to get Andrew Warner to notice you.
I agree with the comment re logo... it just drives me crazy that people don't understand the mechanism of blog post lures people to the product site via the logo link.
So I started the trial setup, but I bounced at step 1/3. Didn't want to write 5 feature ideas. And I still don't know what it'll look like on my site.
(Small side thing: I wanted to use the sample "board" name that you gave, but I couldn't just hit enter--I had to re-type it into the text field.)
Good luck! Looks interesting, from what I can understand so far.
We've heard that "small side thing" a few times before so we'll fix that soon.
Happy to answer any other questions on our intercom chat!
https://www.chromium.org/for-testers/bug-reporting-guideline...
Solo founder. Saas product. 70k users all word of mouth.
Congrats to the folks at Canny.
The other person linked to it already.
Repl.it has been one of the earliest users of the product and we couldn't be happier. It's embedded here: https://repl.it/feedback
But seriously, that MRR graph is very impressive!
NYC and the Bay Area aren't exactly representative of the rest of the country.
I also noticed in a linked article that you are using Notion. (I am the co-founder). Happy to give you guys a free account to help you bootstrap. You should receive a message from us shortly ;-)
Thanks for the great product!
We'll check this thread periodically till this Friday EOD.
I read the post linked[1] in this blog post which talks about day to day life, even if work-life balance can be tough, it must be awesome for you guys! But what about administrative paperwork or hurdles (IRS, legal mail, and whatnot)? Was there anything different due to the fact that you guys are digital nomads?
We talk to our customers using Intercom and email. Most of them are in the US, so being in Europe works well.
I don't think we could go to Asia because we'd be sleeping while the US is working. Or we'd have to pull off a crazy sleep schedule.
We use a family's place for our business address. Filing taxes isn't any different really.
Marketing is hard. I think we had a good day!
Would love to chat more, want to message us on Intercom whenever you've got a few minutes?
In all seriousness, ChartMogul wrote a great post about how freemium can work for SaaS https://blog.chartmogul.com/saas-pricing-two-sides-freemium/
We spent €500 per month on a tiny rooftop apartment on the main city square with beautiful views over the city.
OP: Contact me if I can help you out there.
This cafe, Cafe ArtySana, is one of my favorite spots to work in the whole world! Great coffee + food, great wifi, plenty of outlets, and they don't mind if you work all day.
We're probably not ready for this just yet. We're currently in a good place with a) solving a problem we have and b) a couple dozen paying customers who are helping us see the cracks in our MVP. Some of whom we can work with face-to-face. That's huge considering our target market isn't the best at articulating the challenges they are facing, so watching them use the app is a great insight vector. It's also really motivating to hang out with people who are excited about using our product.
Looks like we didn't have enough confidence in our marketing capabilities! Wasn't expecting #1 on HN for one of our first posts.
It's also a great product for us but as a fellow bootstrapper, the price range is out of our reach at the moment. We will be looking into when get more scale.
We're building a simple CRM tool that tracks calls, meetings and all kinds of details for companies. It would be interesting if you already have an API available that we can integrate with.
If you're ever in Edinburgh/Glasgow, be happy to take you and your significant other out for a coffee/beer.
Reach out on our Intercom and we may be able to make something work.
Would love to visit Scotland! Probably next year when it's warmer again. :)
I don't blame you - it can get a little bit chilly in Scotland.
That said, hat's off to those of you who make this work.
If it's raw corporate revenue, then their take home should be much less than that after taxes.
Is the corporation listed as a C-Corp? Doesn't the business have to pay taxes on profits, then pay employment taxes on what it pays to employees as well, on top of what the employee must pay?
You're most welcome to come & visit us in Barcelona, Casablanca or London.
NB: your FB and linkedin links at the end of your post do not work.
Will keep you in mind if we visit one of those cities. :)
and how they cleverly highjacked the brand’s main users.
re: recycling ideas i guess if u are just starting on your first startup and just want to feel things out for the first time — its worth the toil.
but life is short. better to focus on real innovate
Sidenote: have you climbed at the castle in London? That was such a cool gym!
Also good call on the name change!
Also, if you don't leave your email, how will you know once the feature is built?
> Canny spends hundreds a month, mostly on hosting and other SaaS
What other SaaS do you use? Forgive me if this was mentioned and I've missed it.
Or as they called it in the 80s:
"How we Started a business"
I'm all for calling out buzzwords, but each word here seems to do a decent job of communicating a lot more than "How we started a business."
https://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/About-JPMC/historica...
The 1980s may have been a time when some borrowers had easier time getting credit at all, but it wasn't a time of “cheap cash”.
The idea of bootstrapping is only valid in recent 1-2 decades because it is now possible to start businesses without a chunk of cash, thus "bootstrapping".
I'm not convinced bootstrapping existing under another name in the 80s.
For the pedants, I'm not saying it was impossible to start a business in the 80s and 90s without cash, just saying that such a path was rare enough to not have a common name such as "bootstrapping".
In fact, prior to Amazon ec2, even Internet businesses required typically the cash to buy/house a server in a data centre which was often thousands of dollars, and even that was considered incredibly cheap for access to a global market compared to what it used to cost prior to the web.
And prior to EC2 a lot of people either just rented servers (in someone elses colo), or got a leased line and hosted servers in their office. Both were very, very common in the 90's.
Or by working a job on the side. I think the "definition" is rather to not take outside capital.
There was pretty cheap competitive web hosting available from 2000+, not just 2006 when ec2 was released.
In Germany it is quite common to start that way even today. Many startup folks consider this old fashioned. But it is the most engaging and valuable way to start a companies. Because then your about skills and providing real value and not for that fast money with a fast exit. You don't want an exit at all. 3 friends of mine started in the 90s a tools and services companies for the automotive world. They are now all 3 retired and moved to company to a trust fund so that no other company can ever own that, so that this company can exists for ever. Compared to the US. Remember DEC, HP, SUN, Silicon Graphics, and alike? All companies got sold at on time to another and basically disappeared with that.
Yes, "bootstrapping" is the old fashioned way in the old fashioned world to start companies.
You seem to imply that shared servers (shell or web) did not exist prior to AWS?
I do recall that there was typically shared PHP hosting.
ec-2 changed the game by making complete control over your own server simple, cheap, software controlled.
Shared hosting existing before but the ec2 formula was the one that worked.
As far as I know EC2 introduced auto scaling, load balancing and spinning up instances in such a lightweight way. Not a revolution but still nice and necessary steps.
If you built a website 20 years ago and it exploded in traffic, shared hosting without easy scaling would not be a solution. You would have to plan your growth and pre-order shared instances. Thus making your business cash dependent again without proven growth.
Google ran for many years on piles of commodity boards and they were expanding pretty fast...
The amount of marketing hype around cloud services is insane because all the big tech companies have a vested interest in your renting their platforms. It doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't 15 years ago, just makes it easy.
Plus, the level of resources for configuring EC2-like servers, and Heroku-esque preconfigured servers reduce the barrier to entry pretty significantly.
You could host a reasonably successful web site on a relatively low end server (say, a Sparc 10) off a T1 line (1.5 megabits) and serve a ton of users. They all had crappy connections and were used to waiting.
AWS was the first place where a joe-developer could dial up a machine to use without a heavy sales process and involving purchasing, legal etc.
This all played out slowly though : at first AWS was only used for things like running tests, replacing developer desktop hosted VMWare. It took a few years to get to the point where it was used in the way we are familiar with today.
fwiw when AWS (EC2 really) started, Internet/Web services weren't even typically run on x86 hardware or Linux. Solaris, AIX, HPUX et al ruled.
AWS didn't launch until 2006, which was actually pretty late in the internet game. x86 Linux hosting was ubiquitous then. If you're talking Solaris, AIX, and HPUX, you're remembering the late 90's...
From a bootstrap perspective, there was little cost difference at the beginning. The main difference was in the middle stage: scaling. After a bit off success it was still possible and practical to scale until you outgrew the ability of a single dedicated server to handle a specific task. Until then, you could grow and scale with little difficulty from a shared server, then dedicated, then shunting functionality to individual dedicated servers, e.g., web sever, database, etc. Yes these cost money, but ig you were bootstrapping then you only got to that point after you'd passed through the nearly free-per-month shared stage and, abd long after revenue flow began.
Scaling beyond that was absolutely way more difficult in terms of tech knowledge and cost. Modern AWS makes that scaling much easier, but the pre-ramen profitable stage was not much if any more expensive.
The key cost that was then and still is the biggest, in my opinion, is opportunity cost. A hundred bucks a month then or now, with or without adjustment for inflation, is nothing compared to the opportunity cost.
As a more general rebuttal of the sentimemt expressed, I'd offer up "started in my garage" businesses of all sorts, then and now. Those whose primary initial input is never cash but sweat equity and grinding out the details and execution of an idea.
If anything it's probably harder to get started today, your competition is worldwide, not just local and customer expect more than a text based terminal app.
The title is a bit buzzword-laden, and GP is calling that out.
Said differently..
For some, largely on the funded side, everyone's a statistic, and after generally "going hard", they inevitably "go home" because they're told there's no more money from investors, and not enough paying customers.
On the self-funded / lean / boot-strapped / ramen profitable side, you get to earn your keep to stay in business so no one can tell you to go home except your customers who stop paying you.
One of my friends is building a feedback system like this called qna.dog
The key thing is to use AI to come up with the right survey question to ask the user.