Show HN: Simple Ops – My new microstartup after three years of indie hacking

In the SaaS world, that's like Intercom or HubSpot giving their entire services or $50/m if you're a startup which is <$1M in rev, founded <2y ago etc.

The other shortcut is venture subsidized growth where you sell for cheap to show growth with the hope you'll have net negative churn and the expanded revenue will make up for it. This is highly segment dependant.

But as the founder of Intercom said: startups make a poor market, there's no recovery from death. So choose wisely.

Somehow there's something psychological that makes you appreciate a product less when you paid 10$ vs 1000$.

Besides, with more customers you can have the luxury of deciding which segment you actually want to serve and start refining the product for them (thus increasing the value proposition and allowing for a higher price point).

I think more apps need to do this.

Thanks for the feedback.

One thing they promote is privacy. Which is important indeed. But another aspect could be the simplicity of them. Google Analytics is just too huge. We often need only a couple of key metrics.

For example, Simple Analytics is really nice I think (doing $6.2k/mo): https://makehub.io/startups/simple-analytics

But it starts from $19/mo. I feel it's too expensive.

Another one I recently discovered is Plausible (doing $1.8k/mo): https://makehub.io/startups/plausible

Starts from $6/mo, which is a lot better.

I love that your product is self-hosted by the client. Are you providing updates for them?

I hope you like it. Let me know if you'd like to change anything!

This part of Steve definition is for me the most fundamental: "The goal of your early business model can be revenue, OR profits, or users, OR click-throughs – whatever you and your investors have agreed upon".

When bootstrapping you cannot afford to have a business model that can generate anything else than revenue. Except if you optimize for time while having another full-time job for example.

I was not at all implying that you can't do anything meaningful if you don't raise money. But again it depends what you mean by meaningful.

If by meaningful you mean developing a product / idea that will completely disrupt an industry or the way people live (think Tesla, AirBnB, Apple & co), I'd argue that 99% of the time, people with that ambition will use the VC way.

If by meaningful you mean building a strong business, generating millions of $ and creating hundreds of jobs (think BaseCamp, MailChimp, ConvertKit), I agree that raising money is not mandatory.

But I stand by my point, if you want to change the world, you should probably aim for the VC road.

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Growing quickly doesn't mean growing quickly sketchily... it means companies like Facebook who go from nothing to 3 billion people in a decade... something that was much more difficult before software.