02thoeva

We did write an article here: https://medium.com/emailoctopus/the-road-to-one-billion-emai...

Although in short, we built a product to serve our own need, launched it totally free for everyone and ended up gaining around 2000 users very quickly. Within a year we had grown MRR to the £3k mark, so we contracted alongside running this 2 days a week. Now, another further year on we're full-time with a few employees.

So we work the hours which work for us now and are free to work from anywhere in the world. For example, I'm not an early riser, so start work at 10am and if I want to leave early, I do. We're very relaxed on exact hours as long as we hit our commitments for the week, which we outline on a Monday.

We launched https://emailoctopus.com around 3 years ago as a side project. The most difficult thing with launching a SaaS is the early days, where you've spent hours upon hours building the app and are only bringing in £400 a month.

We stuck with it though and today have a full-time team of 5 working on the app, are paying ourselves a similar wage to what we were earning in our full-time jobs and most importantly have almost complete ownership of our work-life balance.

I'd really recommend a SaaS business if you are after recurring, side revenue and as mentioned before https://www.oppslist.com/ is a great place to get some initial ideas. Your marketing skills will improve too - just stick with it for a year or so if you do go that route!

In the UK, Eve, a rival maker also just (around a month ago) IPO'd here in the UK. Their figures are scary at the moment, with a CPA hovering around £250-£300 and returns of 15% on the mattresses with the 100-night trial. All that with an average order value was only £450, on a product people buy every 10 years! They lost £11.3m last year on earnings of £12m, so no wonder their shares have been on the decline since IPO.

The mattress market may be big, but there are so many clones - surely only one or two can win out.

I put this article together after reading and commenting in this earlier HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14279870

I think there's a real attitude when starting as a side project to go with rock bottom pricing, feeling like it's the only way to compete with the more established players. Unfortunately, I think this hinders the progress of many exciting projects and slows down their early growth. In short, you almost definitely can and probably should charge more.

Just checked out the Smart Passive Income post. It's amazing that almost 10% of ConvertKit's revenue has come from this guy. Thanks so much for sharing.

Think this also shows how important your product pricing is, particularly if growing by these traditional methods. The affiliate model of giving away a 30-40% recurring cut (as Aweber and CK do) is unsustainable unless your prices factor this in and affiliates will also only work with you if your prices are high enough in the first place to make it worthwhile.

So we launched https://emailoctopus.com around 3 years ago, it was pitched as 10x cheaper than Mailchimp and that's remained our core proposition.

That said, it's very difficult to grow a bootstrapped business when you're not charging much. At the lower end of the market you usually have less committed customers and depending on the SaaS, you may attract less favourable customers. As such we're slowly moving away from pricing being our only unique selling point and beginning to look at differentiating features.

Copying features at a lower price is a fine way to start out as a one-man band and gives you sufficient focus to get it out ther door, however, to grow the business I think you'll need to look bigger.

I run EmailOctopus - happy to discuss anything we can do to help you out, as we're a relatively small SaaS business ourself and know the struggles.

Fair question. As it stands, there are 2 of us collecting and curating the pieces from what we consider some of the better liberal and conservative opinion sources.

We're trying to maintain the quality and integrity of the articles by limiting the number of newsletters we send out to one a fortnight.

It's possible in the future we'll open it up to readers to submit insightful articles for others to read. The curated newsletter is step one to gauge interest in such a product.