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Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how much time customer support takes for products around this price and how much impacts the viability of a business this size.

At $8600 MRR * 12 ~= $103k. Obviously some level of expenses here but let's assume very high margins.

$8600 / $40 plan = 215 customers.

Given all that, how much time does it take to service 215 customers' support needs? Assuming profit would be in the $80-90k range, that's multiples lower than what a developer could make in a job, so is this a full-time work load or is it pretty minimal and could operate as a side-gig? It sounds like the plan here is to continue to grow well beyond the current state but just curious about this particular moment in the business and how sustainable it is if it doesn't grow.

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Support is roughly 10 hours per week and we're now up to 270 customers. The rest of the time is spent on product, reviewing marketing content and occasionaly sales. I've been full-time since $5k MRR as trying to juggle all this with a full time job was miserably + slowed down growth.

$80-90k isn't actually that much less than a developer salary (in U.K., not U.S.), but it's an interesting question what I'd do if it didn't grow any more.

I'd probably put it into maintenance-mode, and start another micro-saas, as I love the freedom of working where/when/how I want. I'm hopeful of hitting $150k ARR by end of year though, and $250k next year.

What customer support needs generally take up the most of your time? By rest of your time, are you talking 40 hour weeks? 60 hr weeks? Just trying to understand the time commitment for this amount of MRR

People finding bugs - it's a super flexible tool so lots of edge case bugs. Helping people set up their requests (e.g. no-coders who don't totally understand APIs or DF). Then boring stuff like billing queries/refunds etc.

I probably work 30-40 hours a week total.

Out of interest, do you see that work increasing linearly with your number of customers?

Probably but I’ll be able to hire someone to help with it soon!

super cool to see the maturity in knowing what you want. i realize now that i was wayyyyy more profitable (cash money in my pocket) when my startup was literally 10x smaller. for those aspiring to be the next big blow up, as you grow/scale, overhead and the need to manage your own people start taking over from building product and supporting/making your customers happy.

for context, i'm at ~$400k MRR/just shy of ~$5M ARR and i make way less (in cash) now than i did at $40k MRR. don't get me wrong, the enterprise value has supposedly gone up but that's a lottery ticket versus the consistent cash in your pocket.

Thanks! Super interesting example. Do you prefer the day to day challenges now or when you were at $40k MRR?

I basically look at entrepreneurship as trying to create my perfect job: make $200-500k/ year, work on what I want with smart people, don't have a boss etc. So a lifestyle business. But maybe I'll get bored and want to take a bigger swing, who knows.

How do you find Saas ideas?

> Assuming profit would be in the $80-90k range, that's multiples lower than what a developer could make in a job

HN really lives in a bubble. $90k USD per year is more than double the median income in the highest earning countries in the world [0]. There are very few places in the world you could not live extremely comfortably on that income.

Even for software engineering specifically, there are only two countries where the median is > $90k USD. [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income 1. https://codesubmit.io/blog/software-engineer-salary-by-count...

And don’t forget: building your own business adds value to an asset that YOU own. A regular dev job adds value to something someone else owns.

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