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Comment by avinoth | Hacker News Reader

Running https://rosterbird.com on the side for 2 years now. It's oscillating between $800-$900 mrr for the past 3 months.

I originally wanted it to be a passive income project but it has grown in scope before I even realized.

Building and maintaining a B2B SaaS on the side is pretty draining. There's always more features, support requests, etc. Wouldn't recommend unless it takes off immediately or it is within a nice niche or you're planning to take it full time.

I've thought about either selling it (and start any other project) or properly growing it (launch in MS teams, shift capabilites, etc) for many months now.

Would appreciate if anyone has any thoughts.

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Well done on getting things to where you got them, it's tough to get anywhere around $1k/MRR!

Some feedback: Your homepage is focused on all the features of what the software does. I'm super technical and someone that signs up for SaaS all the time (plus angel invests in B2B SaaS companies), and I can't quite understand what you're software really does based on the site copy.

Speak more to the pain-points. I'm someone that is an early adopter and this sounds up my alley, but I'm left confused by what why I would even sign up for your service, and I'm giving it more time and attention to try and figure it out than most.

What is the ideal customer profile? What pain-points are your solution solving for your existing customers? I'm actually just genuinely curious. But also take those answers and make them more clear on the site versus just listing the features.

Thank you for the feedback, it is excellent. This homepage was done by me last month and you are correct. It speaks more of the offerings than exactly what it does or how it works. I'll get on it today.

As to what it does, It's basically a Rostering app for Slack teams to automate turn rotation and assign for who has to perform tasks when.

Users can setup their roster by selecting the interval (Daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly), notification time and select the squad members. RosterBird will automatically assign members per the configuration (factor in off days, absences, etc) and notify the assignee on their turn.

I'm working on additional features that allows the team members to book their convenient slots themselves instead of auto-assigning, that should give a different angle to the app and increase the potential usage, hopefully.

I am not an expert by a long shot.

My thoughts are the price is low. Maybe up the price and make $900 from fewer customers and therefore less support work.

I've just changed into the per-user pricing (From fixed rate) to give better flexibility for organizations of all sizes. Would look into the pricing again in 6 months based on how it performs for now.

Nice. If you don't mind me asking, how do you get customers? Do they find you via the Slack store? Or do you go out selling this? Or do you get people find you via search? Or ads?

I am always tempted to make a slack app. Not this particular idea, likely something else.

I don't mind. It's mostly via Slack app directory, sometimes I get through my links. I specifically wanted to build an idea in a marketplace to solve the discovery problem (as I suck at outbound marketing or any marketing in general).

If you're looking to build in any marketplace, shopify is more strealimed as majority of the shopify's users spends on the apps (and the billing and stuff is integrated) compared to any other marketplace.

I want to come up with such an idea and do the same but I always think "wow my idea is amazing" but then after a few days I realize that it's not really what the market needs. Do you have any tips on how to improve this ideation process?

Io be honest, i'm not much of an expert on this either. I've built several projects and have abandoned midway.

I put down all of my ideas with a title and 2 lines of description on evernote whenever it strikes (mostly when seeing a problem, there could be other solutions that exists for this problem at this point).

And whenever in an unrelated instance I encounter a variation of the problem again, which if I believe could've been solved by that idea that I had, I give it a serious thought into researching for solutions and if none exists, I get to build.

I wouldn't call this an ideal process, it just works for me. The bad side-effect I have come to realise from this process is, I build products for which there doesn't exist a solution, which means either the market isn't there or isn't big enough.

The previous project was the same situation (fileql.com, ended up selling it) and now RosterBird. They stay small for relatively long time as you also have to convince users that they have a problem in the first place.

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