Ask HN: SaaS Founders, What 3 advice would you give your younger selves?
To those currently operating or have built successful SaaS - what 3 lessons from experience have you learnt that you would tell your younger selves?
My co founder was able to close deals I wouldn’t even know how to approach.
Don’t discount sales and marketing. Unless your tech is really revolutionary (chatGPT tier) or leagues ahead of the competitors (Figma), your biggest problem will be distribution and discovery, not tech.
Famously, the GitHub co-founders and the Instagram co-founders met at co-working spaces / hacker meetups. Tom Preston-Werner gave an interesting talk on how to build successful co-founding teams and products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGTpU5XUAA8
Generally I think it’s all about the buildup after a certain amount of time of working in your industry. And not only 9-5 working but just doing interesting projects and attracting such likeminded people.
Do you have frequent social interactions with other professionals? Off the top of my head (and from personal experience) some ways to meet people:
- Network within your company, particularly with people in other disciplines
- Alumni events for your college
- Send your kids to private school and make friends with parents (or have gone to private school yourself)
- Play sports that professionals play like golf, tennis, pickleball?
- Attend networking events (though I haven't really tried doing this since covid)
- Get an (in-person) MBA
- Marry/date someone with a wide network
I know I want to be a founder one day and since I'm 27 years old I've thought that instead I can learn sales skills until I figure out the startup idea worth pursuing.
I'd say that with 6 months of dedicated effort and $20/month of Cursor.so prompts, you can create most basic product ideas you can imagine.
Seed stage. Focus on engineering and talking to customers. Ignore everything else. Do the sales and marketing work yourself till $1M in ARR at least. Many startups fail since they try to hire for these essential roles and its rare for non-founders to take it from 0 to 1.
A/B round stage. Build an in-house recruiting team early. I scaled to 150 people too fast over at Stream, next time i'd take more time with hiring. I'd also recommend doing final interviews with everyone yourself, don't let the company hire people without you interviewing them. Be on top of MQL definitions when you scale marketing, otherwise things will go wrong. Sales enablement is essential when you get beyond 3 AEs. Read Saastr :)
[0]: https://keygen.sh/blog/5-things-ive-learned-in-5-years/
2. Don't raise too much money for your seed. Plain and simple, you just do not need much money to build and validate your business plan. Whatever your number is, consider whether you'd really be much worse off if you raised half as much.
3. Start by providing professional services before you have a product. This will help you generate some early revenue, it will validate that someone is willing to pay for your services, it'll help you understand the requirements for your product before it's built, and most importantly, it'll help you build early relationships with crucial clients. Streamline these professional services by automating them with your early product. Over time, replace the professional services entirely with your product.
The tips I would give to myself:
1. Don't ever stop trying: sure, getting a job instead will give you a few hundreds k per year - but it won't help you getting any closer to your freedom dream. No more worthless standups or stupid retros.
2. Don't kill your social network: I know the temptation to get rid of social media is strong, but you need to cultivate your network and turn it into an audience of potential customers
3. Keep writing: building a trace of reliable writing and showing skills is an invaluable marketing tool
My view may be biased by having invested most of my life in up-skilling my skills (just because I enjoy it) and I find myself technically super strong but lacking in marketing.
The tips I would give to the general population are:
1. Be balanced in how much time you spend learning tech / doing marketing / managing staff
2. Do what's best for the product and for getting to the customer. CREATE VALUE FOR SOCIETY
3. Keep growing your network
Sucks, but you're probably right. And this is one of the biggest barriers to me working for myself - I have no network. Haven't had any social media in almost a decade, except linkedin which I avoid as much as humanly possible. Oh well.
Where do you think that is these days?
Politics aside, X/Twitter just isn’t what it was. Less people, less quality, and I’m reticent to trust a platform that changes on a whim. Which is a tragic shame because Twitter was it.
Mastodon’s … fine. Nowhere near the reach and never will be.
LinkedIn’s … ugh. I mean c’mon.
It’s not social as in “cool” and “trendy” social. For professional networking, it really is the best general networking tool.
If you have more focused communities for your areas of interest or expertise, those may be even better.
Love it or hate it, LinkedIn gets the job done.
Consider this. You don’t post on LI. Your side hustle ends up being a success. You leave your company. There is a non-zero chance that your company will notice then, and possibly have suspicions about whose time you used to develop this successful venture.
It’s one of those situations where it is a bit uncomfortable to disclose now, but could avert a much more uncomfortable situation in the future.
Once it is disclosed, post freely.
You're right that it might be a good idea to get some sort of paper trail in place. I'm already very good about what machine I do work on, what time commits happen in git (always outside of business hours, no giant commits at 5:01 PM, etc.), that sort of thing.
But, my community is almost entirely general business, SaaS, and developers - I've noticed no discernible drop in quality or quantity. If you follow a lot of journalists, politicians, etc. yeah your experience is going to be a lot worse.
1) I thought I could hire "head of sales" that would run the /department/ not need extensive hand holding, and worse, I did it more than once - went through several vp of sales. Of course they interview well, they are sales people. There has to be "verify" and really understand what is going on
2) The skills to get a product off the ground are very different than scaling a business; people have written about the "3 ceo's" but I think there is a similarity with technical founders; I had multiple co-founders but few stuck it out until the end, in retrospect they were needed at a given phase, not the whole time
3) know if you are trying be rich or king ( https://www.highalphainno.com/articles/rich-vs-king-the-corp... )
But also regarding code: If you think you will need it later, you probably won't. Build simple and don't overengineer. Chance is, you do it even though you think you don't. If it overgeneralizes something because you think it might be a requirement in two weeks, do it when the need arises, not now.
No one will sell your product better than you.
Jobs + Wozniak. Neither of then would be successful on their own no matter how big geniuses they were.
Both Jobs and Woz were founders and understood some level of technical detail of everything, at least in the early stages. GP is talking about the equivalent of Woz building all the engineering from 0 by himself, then going out and finding Jobs and saying "hey sell this for me please, thanks" which isn't what happened by any stretch.
Obviously, if your product doesn't sell, then your story isn't working. But what stories are out there where the founder didn't do the best job selling and someone came and crushed it as a chief member of the exec or early sales effort?
Forget big famous companies - what about the folks here?
MVP doesn't need to be perfect, but the core product should work.
Get it in users hands ASAP, get feedback ASAP, or see no traction and move on, ASAP
Start hiring PMs as soon as you see that you can have two product teams working together in parallel.
- $0 - $1M-ish, hire a part-time bookkeeper
- $1M - $5M-ish, get a director of finance / controller, who can manage AR/AP, audit, ASC 606, basic financial modeling, and your key rev benchmarks.
- $5M+ is when I'd consider hiring a CFO, but it really depends on your growth rate. You can probably get to $10M+ with a good dir of finance if you get them to hire a good FP&A person.
- Hire. Business will grow.
- You need to love your employees like a father does. That means, they’re gonna be shitty, they’re gonna be losers, they’ll waste your money, and some will be exceptionally good. But you need to love them all equally.
- You’re not gay. Girls just don’t like shy men under 25. Keep chasing girls, success will come.
Good luck.
During my development process, I realized that 80% of the features I implemented were also present in other SaaS products. This is why I created Nextless.js, a SaaS Boilerplate that includes all the necessary features for launching a successful SaaS.