Lessons from my third year running a SaaS | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from my third year running a SaaS

maxrozen.com

89 pointsrozenmd11 comments

Why would the hetzner vm fail the uptime tests randomly ? Did you investigate it ? Could it be some kind of DDOS prevention on Hetzner ?

Nah, to be honest at that point I just wanted to go back to AWS so I could get back to shipping features my customers asked for

As someone also building a SaaS, it's always nice to read this type of information. Subscribed to your newsletter :)

I'm on a similar path. Out of curiosity, business-wise, where are you aiming long-term? When feasible, will you expand team, or would you rather stay solo? Would you potentially take investment, or rather stay bootstrapped? Why/why not?

I'm planning on keeping it as a "two hours before work" thing. I try to document everything, and I started a YouTube channel with support videos to keep the support load low.

I'm happy with where things are, I have a full-time job I love, and the challenge of shipping something valuable in the two hours I have before work is extra fun. I still see myself doing this, bootstrapped and solo in 10 years time.

I tried taking one day off per week to focus on my projects full-time a couple years back, I didn't manage to accomplish much more. Maybe I'm more principled now, but I doubt it.

Great post. I love the idea of the product and have wondered why AWS doesn’t offer this level of convenience out of the box.

Half-joking name suggestion: I recognize the domain probably isn’t available but wouldn’t “upordown.com” be slightly more slick? ;)

Hah I actually love the name more and more as time goes on - I based it on the Australian-ism "Does it work or nah?"

How do you converse with your users?

Email mostly, Discord increasingly, sometimes Twitter.

Sorry to be 'that guy' but is this an 'ultimately reliable service' for 'critical monitoring' or a lifestyle business that you run on the side? Because your marketing is saying both.

Also, when did companies become so okay with their full-time employees having their own businesses? I worked for both a hosting provider and a large mainframe manufacturer and if I'd have had any sort of side business taking up my time that would always have been a contract violation due to conflict of interest. Let alone a business that relies on the services provided by a direct competitor...

The awesome thing about software is that you don't actually need a human there to supervise software checking a website five million times per week.

I have built a self-healing system with observability in place to catch and page me when there are issues that can't fix themselves - it works quite well.

I can't speak to your personal experience, but I've never had a problem with an employer and running my own business. The idea that a single employee even shows up on the radar as a competitor to a multi-billion dollar corporation makes me laugh though.

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