How I took my SaaS from idea to sold in 14 months
masilotti.com
masilotti.com
I know there's things like SaaS pegasus, but that forces Django. SaaS Pegasus and Bullet Train are also very expensive with no real options for trial. I wish tools like that - automating the basics of an ecommerce business - were more developed and available, preferably open source in the long run. I feel like it's the future we're slowly moving towards but we aren't there yet. We have widely-used open source frameworks for technical foundations - rails, django, etc - but no higher-abstraction equivalent that handles "features" like subscriptions and accounts.
It is infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010, and I'm hoping the time between now and 2030 represents a similar jump.
edit: found this list though https://github.com/smirnov-am/awesome-saas-boilerplates
There's also an open source version that handles a good chunk of the stuff needed to get a Rails saas up and running.
the open source one handles a basic devise, admin backend and some other things. the pay one adds stripe and payments and stuff like that. but the open source one is really nice for hitting the ground running
The problem for trials of stuff like this, is that you have no real way of enforcing it. You just have to hope that trialers feel like doing the right thing and paying if they continue to use it, because trying to recover a few hundred dollars through legal means is just not worth the time and money you'd have to spend.
In the end, I settled on a 60-day money-back guarantee, and I've already issued a few already, to folks who thought it had a feature it didn't yet, or ended up not pursuing their idea, etc, so it seems to work pretty well.
I started it because I recognized that it took entirely too long to implement some of the most basic core functionality for cross-platform apps in a way that is up to my standards (i.e., minimal with no real vendor lock-in). It actually boggles my mind that nothing of the same quality as Molecule.dev exists yet. It's obviously a problem that developers everywhere run into when building custom apps. I've seen a few solutions, but (again) they're all either not up to my standards or they try to lock you in.
I think most developers prefer to implement things themselves, as they have their own preferences and may (like me) not trust that the code quality is up to their standards, so the difficult part here may actually be to convince developers that the code is high quality and something they themselves would write.
That's a lot! Most are coming from things like the deployment OS (720 options since you aren't limited to only one choice).
My goal with this is to help developers and teams of any level, from beginners to experts, quickly get started building the highest quality product(s) they possibly can. I want to raise the bar and eventually set a new standard of DX and UX for both developers and end users.
Cool product though!
Until you get to the end and it says "$400" -- then I remember it's still 2022 and we're not there yet. You deserve to be compensated for this work, absolutely. I just look forward to a future where tools like this are no longer privately held.
I recently lowered the price in hopes that more people would be willing to follow through on buying. There have been many submissions but no one seems willing to pay. I may increase the prices again later on, but it really depends on how things go.
Ultimately, I want this to be accessible to the average developer so more people have the opportunity to quickly build awesome things and bring their ideas to life. It may prove difficult to find the optimal price point.
There's still a lot of work to done, especially on the marketing/convincing side of things. Maybe I'll look for funding, but I would prefer to bootstrap it. I'll probably need to find contract work soon if no buyers follow through, however. Ideally, clients would submit via assemble.molecule.dev and we move forward from there.
Tailwind is a masterclass with regard to how to market this kind of thing.
1. Release the core of your product for free (basicially give 95% away for nothing)
2. Sell premium features/components (the last 5% of your product for serious people with a budget)
Tailwind is selling their CSS framework UI component kit for $400!!!
It's a freaking simple little design system which is nothing in comparison to what you've built here and they are *rolling* in money.
Good luck.
Then people might get 1 month trial, and then $19/month/app.
This way you start building up a lot of MRR, and can maybe add price points for # of average monthly users or something like Auth0 has.
I do appreciate your work, don't get me wrong, but maybe iteration couldn't be bad to happen. Talk to few people, see what they say.
I'll soon be adding presets and templates, which should reduce the complexity of selection. People often have requirements which I have not considered though, so the ability to customize everything will likely remain for them.
Could you elaborate on the "No vendor lock-in" part? When we select cloud services like Heroku or AWS, aren't we technically locked-in? For example, AWS Amplify will create DNS entries and its own SSL certificate for the domain. If we wanted to switch, we'll have to set these up again in the new provider.
How does Molecule not make you locked-in to the providers you select?
As for other types of services, like cross-platform payment processing, push notifications, certain libraries/frameworks, etc., some of these try to lock you in, which are all avoided. Your Molecule's code covers all of this on its own so you don't have to rely on a third party. But at the same time, sometimes it can be cost effective to use a third party service, and in which case, the code is written so that adding and removing features and integrations of your own is super easy. I try to make no assumptions about what you will eventually need to add (or remove), while providing the most solid foundation possible for you.
"Assemble a simple but powerful, fully functional codebase consisting of only what you need."
Maybe add a small list of features you supply out of the box? Auth, Subscription management, billing, etc...?
You're also right that it's infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010!
For example I put together https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/. It's a video course and SAAS example app that ties together a bunch of features. I've easily put in over 1,000 hours to create and update it over time. It's also been extracted from building multiple SAAS apps for clients (I do contract work).
The way I look at it, it's paying $59 once to get a well tested code base that's going to save you 100+ hours of research and development. I also give lifetime updates and support along with refunds for up to 1 year. For context since I created it in 2015 I've re-recorded the course twice and continuously add a bunch of incremental updates. Every few months I go in and update things to their latest versions. Answered a countless number of questions too.
I think nowadays you can use whatever frontend you want with it, where prior versions you had to use Vue (I think)
I'm really not doing it much justice, but the docs are pretty short and easy to read through: https://spark.laravel.com/docs/1.x/spark-stripe/plans.html
All of those things are built into Jumpstart Rails, which the author now uses. To be 100% honest, just using a highly productive framework like Rails, Laravel or, my personal favorite, Phoenix, goes a long ways towards making it quick to build all of those features. If you're experienced with a Rails-inspired fullstack framework, I'd say the work involved is closer to a week or two at most.
Jumpstart gives you a sane default for that week or two of work.
I'm not convinced that is true. At least if you compare 2012 with 2022, it was very easy to get a Rails app working, with user authentication/signup/password reset/etc (Devise), integrate Stripe for payments, deploy the whole thing on Heroku. It wasn't an overnight project, but one person could get that done in a few weeks of full time work. There was a lot of energy and excitement around this stack and the community often created "one good way" of doing things.
In 2022, all those technologies are still available, but they are uncool and most of the internet will dissuade you from using them. Instead, unopinionated micro-frameworks are in vogue, and you you're down a rabbit hole creating the same product by gluing together dozens of libraries, writing a jamstack SPA, deploying the whole thing on kubernetes. You could easily spend several weeks just building out user signup flows, password reset, email templates, etc.
I'm not saying it's all bad today: you can do much more with a SPA than you ever could with server side HTML + jquery, and back in the day when you hit a wall with Rails it was often extremely difficult to work around, whereas today's libraries are much more flexible. But for the happy path of "scaffold a functioning SaaS app", I definitely feel like it's harder to get started today than 10 years ago.
If you use Phoenix in 2022, you can generate authentication/signup/pasword reset/etc with a single command and the generator was written by the same person who created Devise back in 2010. You also get LiveView (and generators for it) that let you make apps with all the interactivity of a SPA.
Oh, and there's a single line mix command to deploy a release of your app to fly.io!
In short, things have become far easier for small teams and solo devs as long as they chose appropriate tools. Obviously it's going to be painful if you try to go it alone with the exact same tools a team of 30 or more would use. The same was just as true a decade ago.
That's why Hey is impossible to use from places like NZ.
I can blitz through building a basic SaaS product, but will it be worthwhile to:
1. Make enough money to replace $dayjob.
2. Make enough money to even cover the headache of supporting customers.
3. Make enough money to even cover the hosting cost.
I'm a big microacquire lurker.
With a pretty standard 4x multiple, it's a $10k business. Though I imagine the slower growth etc resulted in an actual valuation ~$8k.
If you haven’t yet, follow Joe on Twitter (https://twitter.com/joemasilotti). He’s one of the most positive dudes building SaaS on the internet and it’s just so enjoyable to watch.
well done Joe, I should start following your footsteps!
Nevertheless, nice work.
Multiple times asked in this thread, maybe you can give a range instead of an exact number, instead of ignoring the questions.
I find this comment very interesting.
The vast majority of SaaS businesses that are shown/sold/started here on HN are complete mysteries to me in terms of their domain and customer base. It's rare that I see a business about which I can say "OK, I can see a need for that product." This one is yet another example: I simply can't fathom ever finding a use for this feature.
Please understand, I don't mean this in a negative sense. OP has definitely accomplished something to be proud of. It's just that my section of the industry (embedded systems) is so far removed from general web apps that I have no context for the use cases of a lot of what is introduced here.
The visits via those sources are competing with other tweets/posts in the feed. If there's a visually compelling social image, the likelihood of the URL being visited and/or shared increases.
Source: https://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-massively-boost-your-blog-t...
(Obviously this doesn't 'prove' that a more-visually-compelling image does better than a basic one, but it seems like it'd follow, given the inclusion of the image at all performs better than no image).
I started a company a couple of years ago and sunk weeks/months into the boilerplate, eventually to abandon the project, package the core product as an CLI and open source it. Hoping to avoid that again in the future :p
The scaffolds are already updated to utilize the latest Rails 7/Hotwire patterns .
I'm currently developing with it on a personal project.
Jumpstart takes care of a _lot_ of the boilerplate code in building a saas. I think it's worth the investment, but I'm involved in the project, so I'm pretty biased.
There have been a couple huge successes with it. One of them is processing millions in revenue a month. A lot of others are doing well and chugging along. Can't share the exact ones without permission, but I've been blown away it.
At the end of the day, it's nice to help people focus on their unique business features and not payments, teams, etc.
Do you think Supreme has anything valuable beyond its logo mark?
Edit: Still congratulations to you and thank you for sharing!
Natural language is not boolean algebra or legal text. Most people think of employees when they talk about a company. Hence the word company as in "having company". What most people think is what defines a word. That's how language works.
Of course you can call selling a software (everything OP listed as sold can be classified as software) selling a company. I do not want to demean what OP did. If he were to insist on having sold a company and not a software project, it would just sound a bit like the guy on LinkedIn calling himself CEO of his company, while being self-employed working out of his basement. (Not that OP does any of that, again OP did great!)
The sale of your company was an asset sale, which means the amount you made from the sale will be taxed as income. That’s fine for the size of the deal and low complexity of the product. As you said, you sold some code, IP, and design.
If the transaction was much larger, say $1m+, you’d be pushed to the top federal and state income brackets and be paying a lot in taxes. Top federal income tax rate is 37%.
Most larger companies are C-corps, which is a boring way of saying they issue stock, have shareholders, and a board of directors. It’s a more complicated structure, but it’s absolutely necessary if you want to bring in outside investors and/or know you’re going to build a high-growth company.
Under this arrangement, the thing that’s sold is stock. Just like you buy and sell MSFT or AAPL. Selling a C-corp means you sell over 50% of the company stock to a buyer and they control the company. No IP, design, code, or assets are sold—what’s sold is control to all of those things.
Back to taxes: the seller pays a capital gain tax rate, which depending on more factors worth enumerating here, come out to a little above 15%. There’s also this thing called qualified small business stock, which discounts that 15% rate on the first $10m of gains if you’ve held that stock for more than 5 years and sold it (it’s more complicated then that).
The shorter answer to your question, “what more is in a company?” — equity!
Sold is sold. Crossing that threshold is a huge step. Congrats to the author.
I wish them hearty congratulations on the sale and good luck with the next adventure.
Person put in 1-2 hours of work after the first two months.
True, but I would say close to 100% of people who build and business and try to sell it have a pretty singular definition of what success really means - and it isn't 'I learned something doing it'
Does everything need to be measured in millions here?
>Ask questions out of curiosity. Don't cross-examine.
>Instead of "you're doing it wrong", suggest alternatives. When someone is learning, help them learn more.
>When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is, but don't be gratuitously negative.
From the Show HN guidelines (yes this is not technically a Show HN but it serves the same purpose)
But here's a 2022 challenge for everyone: Start something new and get your first paying customer. You have exactly 1 month from now. I look forward to your Show HN.
Regardless of how much this made, the OP sold a business and crossed a chasm many find very uncomfortable to cross. Congrats on breaking past the inertia to ship, and then sell; it is truly commendable regardless of the naysayers.
This comment probably sounds a little like sour grapes. But let me clear: this was a remarkable and laudable accomplishment. The time and place were right for OP, and it's bad sportsmanship to take anything away from a pilot that tacks with the wind to win the race.
Aren't those a couple of useful lessons to draw from the story?
>>> My life goal quickly became: how can I spend as much time as possible with my family?
Wasn't Mugshot just like passive income at that point ?
I'm interested, since i'm running a product that does around 2k MRR, 10k MAU. However profit margin is only around 20% de to user acquisition costs/ operational costs.
One question - I know you mention in the article that your project was becoming a bit of a burden, but do you think you could've taken it further with a bit more time?