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Comment by PaywallBuster | Hacker News Reader

The SaaS was only doing $218 MRR https://twitter.com/joemasilotti/status/1460706255874318338?...

$218 MRR and damn proud of it, too!

You deserve to be proud, well done Joe. Most side projects fail, yours didn't. Enjoy being a dad!

Agreed. Having bootstrapped a $10m+ ARR business, I always think it’s a HUGE accomplishment when somebody makes their first dollar from SaaS.

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.

you bootstrapped one hell of a business. SaaS is hard, but y'all made it look easy

Thanks! It's def really hard. Nothing easy about it.

How much did you sell it for?

Maybe a 1000 or 2000. Not worth spending 14 months in my opinion.

the lessons learned are definitely worth if you apply it going forward. making successful products and wealth is a skill. that value snowballs into making one rich

I doubt it. I think it's actually opposite. You create something which the market pulls away from you.

Definitely more than that. I sold something doing $5MRR for $2000 on MicroAcquire.

Any idea how the buyer did after that?

I'm a big microacquire lurker.

Hard to say really. They revamped the webpage but left the product mostly the same (was a Google Sheet add-on). The only insight I have is the "# Users" that gets listed in the Google Workplace Marketplace. I think it's up to a few hundred, so likely they haven't made their money back yet.

$218 MRR = $2616 ARR

With a pretty standard 4x multiple, it's a $10k business. Though I imagine the slower growth etc resulted in an actual valuation ~$8k.

I just meant it was not printing millions after 14 months hah

well done Joe, I should start following your footsteps!

I would be really interested to see a rough $/hr estimate from OP. Like, if he really did get $200/mo for 1-2 hours of work a month - that's ~$100/hr! It's a good rate! But any increase in time demands is going to sink this as a productive side gig and obviously it's unfit to use as a main gig.

I wish I had that data... sadly I didn't time track for this in the beginning when I was working on it the most. But in the end I was definitely making less than $100/hour before the sale.

That makes sense - and congrats on getting any revenue out of a side project! It seems like a good experience even if it's hard to judge it on economic grounds alone.

But also nothing per hour for the busy setup time - surely a more realistic assessment would be the total number of hours on the project divided by the total income?

Personally, given the number of people who never even launch, I congratulate every dollar of MRR. Everyone has to start somewhere, and lessons are learned with every incremental win or loss.

lol my brain was automatically adding K each time MRR was mentioned. Completely missed that.

Nevertheless, nice work.

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