How long can you continue to live like that? How do you live on that amount of money? Have you thought about raising the price?
There are a few extra factors at play here,
- Our price is somewhat anchored by the accounting packages we integrate with, but we do intend to try and push that price up eventually (I should add: by adding more powerful features, rather than just hiking it).
- We offer founder plans for people keen to support us (think kickstarter) which works out about 2-3 worth of lifetime value up front, and has really helped us month-to-month.
- I was still working a full-time, then part-time, job for the first 10 months or so. - We were partly incubated for a year or so by my co-founder's web design company, which allowed him to keep drawing a salary from that and gave us an effectively free office. Although we are now both full-time on Float.
- We've spent a number of our weekends this year helping start an incubation space (by literally knocking down walls) which has got us free office space while it's being finished off (http://techcube-ed.tumblr.com/).
- We have raised a tiny amount of money, which obviously helps.
- We live in Scotland which I am sure has a much lower cost of living than London/the Valley.
- I have a _very_ supportive wife who works full-time.
I find myself letting the fear factor of not having money completely control my life and actions. I am very impressed by anyone who's able to overcome this fear.
Your story is truly inspiring, and I wish you the very best of luck!
It took me a long time to get up the courage to leave my job, and fear of running out of money still paralyses me from time to time.
Fortunately my wife is amazingly supportive, and my cofounder is less paralysed by little details like running out of money than I am and helps me forge-ahead.
100 customers = yes, people want this. Now it's onwards and upwards :)
- Expand to more platforms, to increase the total market we can hit.
- Improve the product to make it easier for the general market to understand. We are hitting early adopter types pretty well, but the majority struggle because it's a complex problem/product.
- Figure out how to scale the marketing (the really hard bit ;) )
Plus, that's ~14k in revenue, not profit. SaaS apps have great margins, but there's still some cost to servers and marketing.
Still, going from 0 to 100 paying customers in a year is pretty great. The next year will surely be even better.
Best of luck!
What I'm try to say is that from my vantage point, the price seems right. A data point.