What I learned running a SaaS for a year
onlineornot.com
onlineornot.com
If he worked 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 1 year (52 weeks), thats 520 hours.
He made $6.73 per hour before self employment and income taxes (if applicable). Or $13.46 per day.
I’m not sure how you get a good lunch and tuition from that unfortunately.
Still, everyone values their time and talents differently, they also have different goals in terms of education and what they consider to be a financial success.
I guess, given the money he’s made, what he’s actually learned is a long list of things he still needs to learn. Because what he’s saying he’s “learned” hasn’t been validated yet. Maybe if he’s making ~$70k by the end of this year we can assume these things he’s learned have value, otherwise, they are mostly observations about the current state of his business and how making adjustments in these areas have mildly impacted his bottom line.
I wish him the best of luck.
On the education side, my first 3 years as a maker, I didn't grow beyond 1 paid user on any product I sold. I still learned with every failed launch, and every product I shut down.
See "Year in review" at https://maxrozen.com/
The learning has been cumulative.
I went from "Hey if I just copy Pieter Levels, I'll be rich immediately" to "If I build it, they will come" to "Maybe if I write about the problem, people will come?" to "If I talk to people about their problems, maybe I'll understand them well enough to solve a problem for them".
I'm not trying to convince you to take up the life of a bootstrapped founder, I just wrote an article about what I learned from a couple spare hours before my job each day over the last 12 months.
That being said, I think I'm at a point where I could spin off an API from OnlineOrNot and make it similarly successful within a month or so.
Do you plan on going the API route?
I would cancel a project if it couldn't pay its own infrastructure bill after 6 months.
If I had to name a goal for the second year, it's to reach $1k MRR across everything I sell online. I still have plenty of ideas for OnlineOrNot, but there are a few APIs I built internally that I could see others paying for (that I'll be testing if people would, actually, before building).
Oh well…
So they haven’t been working for $6.73/hour. They’ve been building a money printing machine that currently prints $13.46 a day.
Even taking it as working for $6.73/hour though, I’d make that trade plenty often even though I’d never consider regular employment anywhere near it. The flexibility of doing it whenever, whenever. No bosses or coworkers to be accountable to. These things count for a lot.
I mainly started building it because I wanted to learn more about running a business, marketing, and SEO (all the technical parts of the business were relatively easy in comparison).
i don’t regret launching a failing SaaS for me or for client because it gave me the opportunity to learn ins and outs for almost no cost
by the way, how does you product compare to instatus.com?
You can then use that data to write accurate status updates on your system's status page, but we do not host public status pages.
This is such a great example of having your pre-existing belief questioned, noticing user behavior, and adapting accordingly:
> Contrary to popular belief (for B2B SaaS), people actually work from their phones.
> Something like 50% of traffic to OnlineOrNot.com comes from folks on mobile. They tend to quickly create an account, add a few pages to monitor, then eventually get on their laptop/desktop to review their checks from time to time.
> For about 6 months I didn't support mobile well, and folks that signed up on their phone churned rapidly. I eventually took the time to build responsive views for mobile, and now new mobile users are sticking around.
Just curious -- in addition observing their behavior, have you talked to those customers (either via support/email or interviews) to understand this workflow?
I read your book though, and I've been working up the courage to do customer interviews over Zoom/calls!
let me know how it goes when you work up to interviews! :)
then then go to desktop and pick up where they left off
Once (as the OP pointed out) we see that we are solving a problem rather than selling a service/product, it becomes easier to price, at least in the right ballpark.
If you are saving perhaps 10 hours of time per week for a customer, you can price roughly how much you save them (probably a lot) and then you can charge accordingly. If you are saving whole employees from needing to be employed, then the sky is the limit.
In the same way, if you were renting a Bouncer to a nightclub, you wouldn't be bothered that they aren't quite tall enough or don't speak French. Those things would be nice to haves but they still perform a job!
You're omitting one critical piece of pricing. Saving someone 10 hours per week doesn't mean much unless you can convince them they will save 10 hours per week before they've used the product and you actually deliver so that they stick with you in the future. Oh, and if there's a competitor that saves 9 hours per week at half the cost, you're not going to have many customers.
Any thoughts on which analytics services, regarding privacy and "acceptable to users" kind of metrics?
(Former Google employee, who don't quite get the hatred Google receives online, but feeling that Google Analytics has a really complex UI for my needs.)
I'd recommend only sending server side events so you get really accurate stats and no privacy invasion.
I tried to limit the number of events tracked as well, and made sure I knew why I was tracking something, and not just "because I can", I found that it made it easier to focus on what matters.
(if not, what difference does the region make privacy-wise, if the parent US company can ultimately still access the data?)
You’d think in today’s software landscape there would be tools to simplify or automate the part or building a SaaS business that everyone needs to do.
He mentions Stripe for payments of course, but isn’t there anything broader to get set up more quickly? Like a shopify for SaaS businesses?
A few critical ones off the top of my head
- payments (subscriptions, cancellations, invoices, etc)
- authentication (signup, login, invite, forgot password)
- transactional emails (confirmations, etc)
for enterprise:
- permissions, access controls
- audit logs
- gdpr
- reporting, monitoring
- single sign on
other common saas-y needs
- notifications
- error monitoring
- performance monitoring
- admin tools (impersonate, deletions)
- feature flagging
I'm surprised a "SaaS in a box" hasn't really gotten traction. I think part of it is the tech stack dependencies - frontend frameworks, backend languages & frameworks, infra, databases, 3rd party tools
Then you have headless CMS-es on top of which you also can build stuff.
So you can plugin your email provider, payment provider, single sign on. It does not take much code but you still have to understand how to integrate stuff.
Then you have wordpress where people basically install all kind of plugins and you can have all what was listed in CMS, but then you get "wordpress developers" to hire so I don't see much difference.
This is Paddle. As a one-person startup, there's no way I could go with Stripe. The tax implications alone are too much.