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Comment by radicalbyte | Hacker News Reader

What is insane to me is seeing people turning things which are pretty simple to build - like feature flags - into products which can hit $1.5M in ARR. This is pretty trivial to build once you have given it some thought, it sits nicely next to the work you do building health-checks into the various tiers of your infrastructure, yet there are enough people out there willing to pay for it.

I guess that this is why I don't have a bootstrapped startup - I wouldn't even consider building something like this out as a SaaS.

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It goes both ways:

It's incredible to see something that would take 2-3 days make $1.5M ARR :(

It's incredible to see something that would take 2-3 days make $1.5M ARR :)

Transcend ego and come drink your fill at the font of easy money. Don't let pride hold you back from what is probably the best ROI you can make as a SWE.

As someone who introduced our org to a SaaS feature flag tool, we did it cause the cost of building out and maintaining the system in house would have been too costly. In addition we needed both FE and BE flags (multi language support).

In addition, I needed to transform the culture fast, and not wait around for people to implement a custom library for internal use.

Having said that, I have built in house flag implementations or used OSS projects and would much prefer those to using a third party.

There are a lot of things that are trivial to build. That's often not the question at a startup. At a startup, it's "what is the most valuable to build". Implicit in this is often, "what's unique to my product that I must build".

If I can take X to drop in a 3rd party feature flag system, that is almost always going to be more valuable than building it in house. It gets me back to mainline work.

I agree mostly but I would say it's a bit more nuanced. Instead of what's unique to my product, maybe also consider what's unique to my market. Business is about selling stuff. If you are selling to a unique subset, all you need is the same feature set but which feels different.

Haha we (Author here!) thought feature flags would be a pretty simple product to build 6 years ago. 6 years later we are still hard at it!

Building a feature custom to one company is usually simpler than building an entire product that meets the diverse needs of many companies.

It may very well be that the polished product is a better fit for many businesses than the quickly put together custom feature that does the bare minimum, though.

This. You don’t need to create the first thing in a category or choose something complex to be successful.

You may be able to hack together a basic feature flagging product in 2-3 days, but like many domains, it goes incredibly deep and there’s a lot of hidden nuance if you focus on it. If the value doesn’t drop off for those long-tail “deep” features and people will pay extra for you to handle the nuance - voila, you have an amazing SaaS, potentially.

Oh as a platform it's certainly a different level compared to building something for a set of products (versioning etc for a start). The thing is, if you build something yourself then it's an order of magnitude or two less complex. Unless you have little / no skills in backend.

That's the market; it's shocking (to me) how little knowledge even the largest and most highly rated "Mobile Agencies" actually have with systems which have a lifetime measures in decades vs months. Silly as I've worked with these "wordpress agencies" a lot and they've always been thin/wide skill wise (devs skills which are teachable in a few months but with designers + marketing added to the mix).

Your story is inspiring, thanks for sharing. I hope that I can eventually get over my blind spot as it is a career goal to build a small/medium sized company (with annual revenue around the $1M+ mark).

> This is pretty trivial to build once you have given it some thought, it sits nicely next to the work you do building health-checks into the various tiers of your infrastructure, yet there are enough people out there willing to pay for it.

I think the reason you don't have a bootstrapped startup is because you don't see the difference between trivial and valuable.

Would it be easy for you to build out a feature flag app? Yes, most devs probably can without a huge problem. But it will take them time to do it, and it will require maintenance over time. If it takes a senior dev two weeks of dev time in sum total over 4 years, it would be "cheaper" to pay $100/mo for this service. This type of product product has value as it allows us to spend our limited dev time more on forward feature development that drives future revenue and less on infrastructure.

This is the math that companies buying SaaS products will make. I don't want my eng team to spend hours on trivial stuff, I want them to work on the things that move the needle for the company. I'll gladly pay $$$ for certain features and functionalities that are not part of our core competencies so that the team can focus on the things that are. And once we're a Big Company paying Enterprise tier prices to a feature flag company or whatever, we can have the chat about in-housing it or building Feature #137,221

Well, some of the main players are companies like launch darkly. Which don’t have the most stellar track record. It’s easier to stand out when the competition is mediocre.

What's wrong with Launch Darkly's track record? I don't have much experience with their product, but was considering it for something upcoming.

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