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Comment by bitbasher | Hacker News Reader

I built and run a saas product solo (> $500k/year). Honestly, I have never found any advice useful. I've been to saas founder meetups (like microconf), I've read the books, etc.

Any advice I give may not apply to you and your business. My business is b2b and it's a platform for certain kinds of professionals as well as an API that powers many well known businesses.

I've only had success through two general strategies:

1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc). Leverage your network to find more customers.

2. The "Long Game" (SEO, word of mouth, etc). This is where I get most of my customers.

I'd say focus on the long game from day one (blog posts, good marketing pages, etc). Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it.

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> Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it.

This is a key thing. A lot of developers operate in the belief that “if you build it they will come”.

A small amount of market validation would prevent a lot of wasted time.

- Do people have the problem you are solving?

- Are they willing to pay a sufficient amount to solve it?

- Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile?

The real danger is that we often don’t want to hear the answers to these questions. So we either don’t ask or we dismiss the answers that we get. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing.

This is all true. But it isn't as easy as it sounds.

When you start out, you probably only have a vague idea of what the product will be.

The sort of people you want to talk to might not want to talk to you. They are busy people and you don't even have a product!

People saying they will give you money is worthless, in my experience. Only people actually giving you money counts for anything.

Estimating the market size is hard and not all that relevant. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fall...

I think that is part of the problem. Starting out with only a vague idea of what the product will be sounds very unwise.

Successful businesses I have worked at have started out solving a real problem for someone (in a business) - with that person telling us that they know other businesses have the same problem.

If someone in an industry comes to you with a problem - and they have worked in the industry sufficiently long enough to have been in multiple companies - they can give you a pretty good idea of what size the prize might be.

The difficulty a lot of us have working in software is that we don’t really get enough exposure to these people.

This is right on the money (speaking from experience)!

Simple and superb root cause analysis!

This is whats perfect about web3 that most pundits miss

It takes the looooong web 2.0 funnels and flips it to a single step:

Your customers pay to interact with your app at all and there is insatiable demand at the beginning, unless you do some boomer-level system design that is based on pretending that a 3 trillion dollar crypto native audience doesnt exist already and you need to onboard a bunch of technophobes.

In comparison, the entire web 2.0 ethos basically sums up to getting a customer to put their credit card into your website for a small charge, as a funnel for a bigger recurring charge later

in web3 all of your users are at the last step at the very beginning. they are even paying for all your hosting costs. they are paying to update your database! and your actual business model of being some form of plumbing with a transaction fee, if you didnt just sell a token collection, is fine and has low overhead costs

this will continue attracting developers and their entire audience in perpetuity because the entire web 2.0 ecosystem cannot compete with that

This must be how it sounds when I preach nuclear power as the be-all, end-all solution to our climate and energy crises.

Thank you for the insights.

As it happens, the people you disparagingly refer to as boomers are often the ones holding the purse strings.

Your elders designed and built the system of boxes, chips, wires, cables and tubes this thing runs on.

that doesn’t matter here and it wasn’t really disparaging

the only people that have an issue with web3 have a characteristic and typically describe an irrelevant system design that doesn’t factor in the simple reality that users are paying in web3 and wouldn’t in web2.0, the only people having an issue creating web3 apps have a characteristic, for example I just got off a call with someone trying to jump on the web3 bandwagon for hotel reservations - a technophobic audience that should be ignored for web3 ux fictions - and the only people funding broken web2 apps that are supposed to use web3 rails have a characteristic

reclaim the term like every marginalized group does

Have you personally launched and made money with any web2 or web3 apps?

How much did you make?

> reclaim the term like every marginalized group does

I'm 34.

8 figures from web3 apps, 6 figures from web2.0 saas apps

aiming to do more of both this cycle

That's impressive. Care to share any more?

I'm assuming this is USD?

It's curious, because some of your other posts[0] would suggest someone who is a little more price sensitive than someone who has made more than 10 million dollars from their own website. But I'm probably reading this incorrectly or something.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33415595

yes, USD

also out of curiosity, in your world why does me saying a third party charge other people money, over two years ago or at any point in time, suggest what you said it would suggest. it would be a matter if other people are price sensitive, for reference

if one were looking for something to invalidate or grasping for an ad hominem, doesnt it require interpreting the posting accurately as well at a bare minimum?

Not sure why you're being defensive.

In my experience, people who are less price sensitive tend to not think about inconsequential sums. So it was surprising to me to read that someone who has made over $10,000,000 would care about whether or not Calendly would charge for no-shows.

Just curious about the thought process. That's all.

> Just curious about the thought process. That's all.

the answer is that calendly does not charge for no-shows and my time is valuable, which would match the worldview you’re looking for, and on the defensive perception, I’m not sure if you really understand the interaction proposed.

but if we were on the same page all along, then we also have a different definition of defensive since clarifying whether you are perceiving the same concept is not defensive to wonder about.

Like, isn’t there another comment somewhere else in my post history that would be better to question what you think an 8-figure HN user would be doing with their time? since you don’t know the value of the intended conversations on the calendly schedule, that requesting they charge wouldn’t be factor in supporting your validity or not of price sensitivity or inconsequential sums, and the other party would be charged either way, not me. I would define this whole line of reasoning to be a non-sequitur.

in any case, if you would like to talk more about web3 user acquisition funnels and how it compresses web2.0 ones, removing a magic based marketing industry and replacing them with paying customers, I'm available for that.

hey man, relax. i keep reading a comment from someone making an innocuous statement that isn't intended to imply anything about you, then reading a loooooong post from you explaining how you're DEFINITELY TOTALLY NOT AT ALL the thing you're imagining they're implying. take it from me, I'm really highstrung and defensive, you gotta make some time to breath over the next couple weeks.

its rational to be defensive in a skeptical forum where people will take a counterpoint at face value

no response has acknowledged the substance of what has been said in this entire subthread, only that I replied at all

if you would like to talk more about web3 user acquisition funnels and how it compresses web2.0 ones, I’m available for that

What did I even just read? Is this an AI response? I'm lost...

No. That's just how "web3" folks talk. I never managed to understand them yet. And I have to wonder if they understand themselves.

I think it means "if the whole point of your application is that customers pay to do anything, then you short circuit all the typical process of acquiring and monetizing customers". Of course you can still have zero customers nevertheless.

that web3 apps are just optimized web2.0 apps especially with regards to how marketing funnels work to get paid users, further goes on to explain why and how

you’d have to be crazy to think the onboarding funnel in web3 is easier than web2

if you reduce frictions that existing web3 users actually have then yeah its way easier, have to pay some influencers though and infiltrate a couple discords and get people's attention onchain as well

outside of stable coins and poly market i don’t see anything useful for those outside of crypto

plenty of cool shit for those who do things onchain tho

exactly. thats my entire point. there is $3tr+ sloshing around in the crypto economy from crypto natives. just scrap any idea that isnt catering directly to crypto natives.

philisters on HN are not our clientele. they’ll never get it and it doesnt matter anymore. but if you are a developer or “BUIDL” er there are unique system designs that are superior than anything web2.0 infrastructure has to offer.

If you only have a vague idea of what the product will be (or at least what the real problem to solve is) and you don't have any potential buyers to talk to then you really shouldn't be writing a single line of code at all. You should be building your network and experience so that you do understand those things, then you go and build an MVP. So many developers fall into this trap.

I always recommend the book The Mom Test to would-be entrepreneurs. It goes into more detail on why asking people if they will buy something is worthless (as you mentioned), and how you can ask much better questions to find and validate problems worth solving.

+1 on recommending the Mom Test, it's one of the most important books I've read.

I'd say in addition to entrepreneurs, it's an important book for product teams / product engineers to understand what the Mom Test teaches, and tune the filter on asking the right questions to get the highest signal, and ensure the solution closely matches the value prop for the customer. Then sales and marketing get a whole lot easier when you've asked the right questions and solved the right problems.

You could write MVP for yourself to get a clear view how much work it really is.

Just set correct expectations that your MVP won’t be something for the customers.

Or maybe it will. But I think biggest issue is having high hopes after completing v0.1.

2 and 3 apply to this case study.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30831688

One thing I've always stumbled on is finding the people to even ask the questions to. How do you contact people in the domain you're interested in and how do you convince them to give you the time of day?

I'm the polar opposite.

I don't waste anytime and never felt like I stumbled on a product idea that warrants me building something.

Therefore, I haven't built anything but the projects at work.

My question is how do you get businesses to trust the continuity of a business operating by one person?

As a rule, I wouldn’t trust building anything depending on a small company - “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”.

(I also wouldn’t trust building a project on top of a Google product. But that’s a different story)

Not as a solo entrepreneur, but I have been on both sides of a similar situation. I was working for a struggling startup where our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on the code being put in escrow that they would get access to under certain conditions.

The condition happened - company was sold for scraps - and then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to them. Yes everything was above board, they worked with the acquiring company to allow me to keep my work laptop and in my severance agreement the acquirer released me from non competes, etc.

Two companies later I was on the opposite side where I was one of the decision makers where we were going to extend the contract with a solo entrepreneur for a SaaS. We were going to be 70% of his revenue. I suggested we also get his code put in escrow and I was responsible for actually watching his build process once per quarter where he pulled his escrowed code out and built and ran from scratch.

You literally answered your own question.

Trust no one, and it doesn't matter if it's a Fortune whatever, a small enterprise, a small company or an individual.

A company or business of any size can axe a product they own at any time, unless they contractually promised you support.

Yes. The difference is that if one employee at a large company gets hit by the “lottery bus” or loses interest, the business doesn’t go under.

Also some companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS etc are more trusted by “the enterprise” than Google.

Is there an easy process for your customers to move their data over to a similar service if they don’t want to renew the contract?

The combo of data exports and open-sourcing your code is a great solution to this problem. If you vanished tomorrow customers could easily migrate to a different vendor or even self-host. That carries much less risk than betting on any early stage VC startup that might vanish overnight, even with more people involved.

As you've noted, there are solutions to this problem.

To be fair, they said "many well known businesses," not necessarily large or mature organizations. They could easily be selling to startups, some of which are notable.

> our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on the code being put in escrow

> then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to

Did you live in the same city? Or did you work remote?

Did they want to meet you in person first, before the escrow agreement?

Maybe that can be an addition to your answer: Start with big companies close to where you live?

Similar experience. I’ve never received much good advice, or found anything that feels like it “works”, just small, accumulating long-game actions that drive up traffic/conversions a hundredth of a percent at a time. Blog posts, paid ads, sponsorships, emails, affiliates, product improvements, etc. I’m B2C so most advice given to me by “thought leaders” is “stop doing B2c” which isn’t super helpful when I have a functioning, profitable B2C business.

Same.

I think much of the stuff that you need to do is common sense (put word out, write about it, encourage word of mouth). And it's usually obvious what will definitely kill your project (don't talk about it to anyone, don't listen to customer feedback etc.) so do the opposite of those.

My general experience has been that word of mouth is slow but very reliable and the customers you get from there are usually high value.

> 1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc). Leverage your network to find more customers.

For those located in India (I would argue anywhere outside US really), in my opinion, trying to find customers in your network is a waste of time, even if you're wealthy. Most societies outside US aren't as abundant in their mind nor value driven the same way people in the US are

Instead focus on the long game, keep filling in the blanks on your ICP and what their pushes and pulls are by trying to figure out who is the right segment to serve so you can save time and energy

> abundant in their mind

Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

I think he meant any or all of - generous, helpful, willing to do something for nothing in return

See prosperity not as a zero-sum game

Can you provide more details on how you leverage your network to grow your business? It's hard to just push friends and customers to get you more business. What in your experience works here?

I quite like this framing. You can think of network as a medium term thing which has to be developed and worked as opposed to just getting bootstrapped.

Did you purposely leave out outbound sales? Cold emails, trade shows, working the phones?

I've tried cold emails, LinkedIn outreach and so on. It works, but I found the success rate to be horrible (< 1% ???). Believe me, I've tried. I read all of the sales and outreach books (predictable revenue, predictable prospecting, founding sales, etc). I've implemented the ideas, I've done it manually, automated, etc.

Very valuable advices. Do you mind sharing how you got the starting customers? Did you find customers and then build the product?

How did you iterate through product ideas go find one that worked?

And what tech stack did you use?

I kept things stupidly simple. I didn't invent a new product or idea. I seen a number of companies doing it and I thought, "I can do that..."

The initial product was built with Ruby on Rails. It stayed in Rails for three years. At that point I had enough API traffic the memory on the server was getting out of control and Ruby just couldn't handle the concurrent traffic (with a reasonable budget).

I re-wrote the entire product in Go on the third year mark (converted ERB to Go templates, re-wrote all backend logic with Go, etc).

The Go version worked wonderfully and reduced my server costs substantially (from $600/month to $88/month). I had the Go version running for four years and I re-wrote it again in Rust (actixweb, askama, htmx).

For funsies, I re-wrote a portion in Rust and noticed the amount of code used was substantially lower (about 50% less code in Rust). I was surprised by that (I figured it would use more being lower level). At that same time I was growing frustrated with maintaining the Go monolith (it had a lot of legacy cruft from the Rails port and spaghetti code). I decided to re-write the whole thing in Rust and cull the cruft in the process.

That's really interesting. Any further cost savings going from Go to Rust?

There were no financial savings from the transition, but there were certainly overall resource savings (cpu, memory). I think I could cut the financial cost in half, but I am currently stuck where I am due to the (postgres) database size and memory requirements. It's on my list of things to improve some day, but I'm not I'm not too worried about it right now :)

Thanks!

Can you share a link?

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