23 karma · joined November 21, 2024
Most years I have a booth at an industry trade show. For a couple of weeks preparing for it, the week during the show, and a couple of weeks after that, following up with potential customers I met at there, I find it virtually impossible to get an development done.
Also, onboarding new customers with my software is usually labor-intensive. So that also takes time from development.
My product started off 25 years ago as a simple intranet web app I wrote in Classic ASP running on a PC in the office of my father's mobile home dealership. I had taken a break from corporate software development to run the dealership for him. I did that for seven years, then got back into software, first working for Symantec for two years (Ugh), and then as a freelancer/contractor.
Then in 2019 I noticed that the handful of small software businesses that used to service the mobile home dealership industry had all gone under. So I revisited my old dealership program and revamped/rewrote it to turn it into a SaaS product. My first two customers were in the summer of 2019, and it's grown steadily since then to about 80 dealerships using it in 13 states.
In my case, I knew a lot about the industry (mobile home retail) I was creating a product for, and was also lucky in that there were not (at the time) any competitors. (Unfortunately, since then there are at least three companies competing with me in the space.)
Creating a real, money-making business like this as solo developer is not easy. The programming is the fun part for me, but, as much as I don't like to admit it, that's the less important part in many ways. Selling is the hard part. And providing good support is crucial. I actually like doing support, but I suspect that a lot of developers would hate it.
The whole thing has been kind of a slow grind in many ways, but there's something very satisfying about making real money (and adding real values to customers) from something you created yourself from scratch.
A lot of people don't want to give guys like him money, especially when most of the website's value was created by the thousands of bike tourists who put their journals there, not the creator of the website itself.
If he can't make a living from his website, he should get a job like the rest of us.
One comment: I hope you don't start emphasizing the "social media" aspects, like Strava has done, to their detriment, in my opinion. That's what prompted me to finally delete my Strava account (after uploading my thousands of activities to ridewithgps.)