
Ask HN: Is the concept of a one-person software shop still viable? - jetti
I&#x27;ve started a software company and want to keep it just me and no employees. In this day and age with the popularity of SaaS and uptime needed is it still a realistic goal of starting and keep running a micro ISV?
======
jasonswett
I'll add something I wish I had realized several years ago: build a SaaS is
not the only path to a product business, and for a solo founder, it's (in my
opinion) probably not a very good path.

I spent 5 years trying to get a micro ISV off the ground which made scheduling
software for hair salons. It was a terrible idea for a large number of reasons
(described in detail here: [https://www.jasonswett.net/im-shutting-down-snip-
heres-why/](https://www.jasonswett.net/im-shutting-down-snip-heres-why/)) and
I never made more than about $430/mo.

My opinion now is that info products are a better way for a solo founder to
get started with a product business. The reason is that a SaaS product can
take a huge amount of effort (perhaps pre-traction effort, which is risky) to
get off the ground whereas an info product business can be started with a tiny
"guide" and then expanded outwardly from there, keeping effort in proportion
with traction the whole time.

My current business is AngularOnRails.com, an info product business. In its
third month of making money, it made $1580, over 3 times what the SaaS made at
its peak. Here's a detailed income report:
[https://www.jasonswett.net/november-2016-angular-on-rails-
in...](https://www.jasonswett.net/november-2016-angular-on-rails-income-
report/)

~~~
joshontheweb
Word. I started my current SaaS with the goal of working 10hrs a week and
making 15k a month. I'm getting close to my monthly revenue goal but if I'm
not sleeping, I'm working. I don't regret it. I'm enjoying the challenge now
but it wasn't what I had thought I was getting myself into. I truly
underestimated the gravity of emails and support requests. As a one man shop,
it can grind entire days to a halt.

Passive info products do seem to be the easier path to a more leisurely
success.

Edit: missed a word

~~~
Cyph0n
That's pretty impressive actually! Have you considering hiring one or two
people (e.g., freelancers) to remotely help with support? Also, a virtual
secretary would be immensely helpful I'd imagine.

I have a couple of ideas I've been wanting to work on, but time is quite
scarce as a grad student. I guess it's partly because I tend to overthink (and
over-design) my ideas, and end up getting overwhelmed before even touching a
line of code! What's even worse is that the majority of my ideas are intended
for my home country (EST+6 timezone), since I think it's much harder to be
successful in an over-saturated market like the US.

For example, one of my ideas is designing an Uber-like service for my home
country. The current roadmap (which I haven't started on) is as follows:

1\. Design a basic placeholder site with some info on the app/service

2\. Run a limited ad campaign to gauge interest and ideally collect emails
(Google, FB, local radio, local newspapers)

3\. Try to get interested users to fill out a survey

4\. If the results from 2) and 3) are promising, start developing a barebones
MVP

5\. The MVP will target one city, require manual signup for drivers, and only
have a simple web client

6\. If successful, start hiring local developers, optimizing server-side, and
designing an Android app (iOS is a very small market)

Any advice for someone in my position? I'm open to all types of feedback from
any HNer - it's always good to get an opinion before working on something like
this!

~~~
shubhamjain
I am not exactly qualified to gauge the viability of your idea but I believe
an Uber-like service is pretty ambitious of a venture, especially given the
fact that you'd go for it solo. Consider the fact that you need to fill both
the demand-side and supply-side, and match them _almost in real time_ for it
to be useful. I feel that it's often underestimated how challenging this task
is.

I am not sure if a web-client would do the job. From my knowledge, interacting
with maps on a mobile browser can be an aggravating experience. If an app
doesn't do the job, isn't immediately useful, people discard it without
further consideration which makes B2C things tenfold hard.

The surest way I see for it to work is to start as boring-taxi company that
has a phone number and a person at the end. Then, slowly move into automated
app-like way. I am guessing that's how OlaCabs, India's Uber, got started.
Automation is awesome but there are so many points of failure in Uber-like
venture that it's better to be safe by doing manual tasks.

~~~
Cyph0n
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that it is in fact non-trivial to get
automated ride sharing working end to end.

------
desktopapp
Running solo doing around $750k/year on a desktop app. The market is so huge
and so many niches to filll. Make something you can sell for $50-300 with
upgrades once in a while and set up a simple shop. It has never been easier to
develop desktop software. If I was going to start this route today I'd 100%
make an electron app and try to address and already large market that has
stagnated or has shitty entrenched players making a ton of margin.

~~~
dispose13432
How do you sell?

That's one of the annoying (and liberating) things about desktops, they don't
have an app-store, so you have to run your own store (without reviews) and
people have to trust that you're not going to sell them a virus.

~~~
desktopapp
Good SEO, reputation, big market, staying alive long enough that word of mouth
starts to mean something.

------
ovidiup
I built Jollyturns ([https://jollyturns.com](https://jollyturns.com)), a ski
and snowboarding oriented business. I currently have a fairly extensive web
site, and two mobile apps, on iOS and Android. I started with the iOS mobile
app, I wanted something to show me on a ski resort's map where my friends are,
and keep track of my skiing statistics.

I tried finding a partner to work with, but that's pretty much impossible in
Silicon Valley where I live. Most good engineers want to work for one of the
glamorous companies in the Valley. Oh well...

I've been working on Jollyturns for the past 5 years. It's been a lot of work,
but I do it at my own pace since I still want to enjoy myself. The experience
is unique. I write all the software myself, and hired few people to help map
the ski resorts. I built a bunch of custom tools for the mapping work, so
people can map the location of lifts, ski runs, restaurants inside a ski
resort. I ended up having mapped all the ski resorts in the world, about 2700
of them.

Being by yourself, you need to be prepared to be a full-stack engineer. I
built my own Supermicro servers, and host them in a colocation facility. I
found that if you're in it for a long time it's cheaper this way. I run
Kubernetes for cluster management, Postgres with PostGIS for database, Redis
for caching, nginx for web proxy. Server side is written in a mixture of
Python and C++. Web frontend is AngularJS (JavaScript). For iOS I write C, C++
and Objective-C. On Android I use Java.

Writing the code is the easy part. I found marketing to be the hardest. You
need to find a way to make the world know what you built, and that's hard!

~~~
nthState
"Writing the code is the easy part. I found marketing to be the hardest" \-
This part is the hardest, absolute hardest :-/

~~~
ivm
It also eats time like crazy and I find switching between development and
marketing mindsets frustrating.

------
seibelj
I haven't done this, but if I was going to, I would target an existing
platform that big companies depend on (salesforce, slack, more niche CRM's,
etc.) and create a super focused niche plugin that 1) Is not core value prop
of the platform, 2) Has little chance of being duplicated by the platform, 3)
Has no competition, 4) Solves a real problem companies have.

For example, do research that shows that 7% of companies in industry XYZ use
certain CRM. Analyze that industry and see what common use cases and pain
points are. Somehow figure out what the CRM is missing for that industry.
Validate the idea before building it by reaching out to said companies.

There would be a lot more to it, but basically a plugin for established
software a company already uses is much easier and less risk to sell when you
are a small shop.

~~~
caseysoftware
I did exactly that ~10 years ago and made pretty good money with it at
$50/install.

My plugin allowed you to put in your hotel when you traveled. Then it showed a
list of your current & past customers' offices that were within X miles. Now
you can fire off those "btw, I'll be in town in 2 weeks, we should talk about
X" emails well in advance.

If I had to do it now, I'd tie into Tripit or Google Calendar to get the most
accurate info, pull the data from your CRM, and send you an email with some
"last contact" info & links to email them.

Oh.. and I'd make it a monthly charge instead of a one-time purchase.

~~~
seibelj
Absolutely about the recurring revenue. Make it monthly or annual with a steep
discount, but auto-renew. When I make mobile apps with advertisements,
removing the ads is a yearly fee, not a one-time payment. Otherwise, they get
lifetime benefits which does not accurately compensate me for my time, and I
need to keep making new sales in perpetuity.

~~~
kkoomi
This sounds great, but it doesn't seem easy to pull off. Does it sit well with
them and are they willing to pay for something like this? EDIT: wording

~~~
seibelj
I would rather get die-hard users who would pay yearly, than constantly have
to game the rankings to be high enough to get more sales. Even if the rankings
change, you can get longterm value out of those who do pay, even if annual
payments make less total customers.

------
patio11
Uptime isn't the hardest part about running a solo SaaS shop -- you can solve
it by a) bringing an appropriate amount of professionalism to engineering
choices and b) choosing to found a business which has appropriate uptime
constraints relative to your resources. Don't do analytics or infrastructure
software where a 15s blip in your availability causes hundreds of pagers to go
off. There exist many things businesses use which have markedly lower uptime
than every SaaS a HNer will ship -- remember, businesses are built around most
of their vendors having five twos. (That's a joke, but it isn't a joke.)

The harder part about running a solo SaaS company is building revenue takes _a
very long time_, particularly if you're new at this. Most of my peers take ~18
months to hit the ~$10k revenue number that lets them durably transition to
running the business as the full-time gig.

If you want to run a one-person shop which creates value substantially related
to software, but you don't want to bite off the complexity of writing and
selling a SaaS app for your first rodeo, I'd recommend a business model like
productized consulting (the glide path to shipping a SaaS app!), selling
infoproducts, or selling some sort of addon to an existing software ecosystem
(WordPress, Shopify, etc).

------
gizmo
Totally viable. As a micro ISV you have practically no expenses so the only
things you need are a mediocre product and handful of customers and you're
already sustainable. Once you get to that point tons of options will present
themselves.

Just build something that you know people need (meaning: there are other
products in that space) that has a small enough scope so a single person can
build it in a month or two. Then charge money for it.

The software market is ludicrously large, and because you don't have marginal
costs in a software business you can afford to make a lot of mistakes on the
business side of things and still make a profit.

You don't need a great product (plenty of lousy products sell well) and you
don't need great business sense (many CEOs don't know what they're doing) and
you don't need great marketing (same). For your business to work you have to
clear the minimum bar in all three areas, but luckily the bar is set pretty
low!

------
speps
For us peasants not trying to sell anything :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_ISV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_ISV)

~~~
dvdhnt
Yep, had to Google this, as well.

------
tyingq
Not the same thing exactly, but I'm able to run 2 ecommerce sites with non-
trivial sales volumes, by myself.

The two biggest things that make this possible:

a) Email support only, no telephone support (sales or post sales). Not
everyone likes it, of course, but if you're determined to be a one man band,
it's essential.

b) Automation of every single thing you can. For you, it would be a different
list, but I had to automate things like refunds, tracking numbers, inventory
levels, fraud detection, etc.

Also consider having someone you trust have access to documentation,
passwords, accounts, etc...in case of some kind of emergency, etc. If it's
making money, it would be a shame not to be able to pass it on to a
beneficiary if you were to die unexpectedly.

~~~
ryanmaynard
>Also consider having someone you trust have access to documentation,
passwords, accounts, etc...in case of some kind of emergency, etc. If it's
making money, it would be a shame not to be able to pass it on to a
beneficiary if you were to die unexpectedly.

This is important. Redundancy and automation are your allies, but it is
prudent to implement some sort of keyman insurance.

------
msbroadf
Yes its definitely viable. I started my micro ISV 6 years ago, its been quite
successful about $200k/yr. Its very niche. I do no marketing but get regular
sales through mainly word of mouth and internet searches. Now some bigger
companies have picked up my software and use it in house and OEM it. Took a
lot of work to get started and a lot of learning Its difficult for competitors
to make something similar in a reasonable amount of time so its got a nice
moat around it at the moment. I have no employees and almost no overheads so
all revenue is profit. The most useful thing is when other companies build
around your product, they provide valuable test / customer feedback which
greatly reduces the work load.

~~~
jetti
Do you mind sharing what space your product is in?

------
malux85
I am currently running as a single founder, no employee, μISV.

It's possible, but here's what I have found:

\- Partner with resellers who take a commission on sales -- then they can deal
with all of the customer management.

\- Set realistic goals for uptime, machines go down (it's not if but when),
distributed setups are possible and encouraged for larger customers, but they
cost more.

p.s. Wanna get a slack channel for solo founders going?

EDIT: I've created a slack group - Email me if you would like an invite!

~~~
jetti
I'd love to get a slack channel for solo founders. Just forewarning I have
never used Slack before but I'd be down to learn.

What kind of software do you sell? Is it desktop, mobile, web?

Also, is your price point rather high? I would imagine something like a $120
product may not benefit from a reseller as it is small deal for them

~~~
Bladtman
If you can use this forum, you can use slack.

------
bigmanwalter
I'm working on it, and a friend of mine does it successfully.

He builds plugins for the Shopify platform and ended up hiring one developer
to do full time onboarding of new clients, support and documentation, but does
all product development himself.

I think it's definitely realistic. You gotta just have a mindset where you try
and eliminate all bottlenecks and automate as much as possible.

The trick he found for coming up with product ideas was to first do custom
development. When enough clients are willing to spend a few thousand for a
personal implementation of something, that's when you know you have an
opportunity to charge 40$ per month for a SaaS version :)

~~~
cookiecaper
Taking advantage of the momentum of another platform by building a plugin,
skin, or extension is a great way to slingshot a project. There's also some
risk involved, because that platform usually has the power to cut you off,
legally if not technically.

------
vram22
Balsamiq Mockups is a good example that microISVs are still viable. At least,
Peldi (the founder and sole dev initially) started off solo some years ago,
was solo for a while, and became successful while still solo. Then got some
employees over time due to more growth.

[http://balsamiq.com](http://balsamiq.com)

Source: I read about Balsamiq Mockups soon after it was created, used it in
some commercial projects as a consultant/freelancer, corresponded some with
Peldi, and also got a free copy of Mockups early on, for having released an
open source product. He had a scheme of giving a free copy to such people. May
still have it.

Edit/update:

IIRC, he initially had the idea of doing Mockups as a web app plugin (for
JIRA, maybe), and did it, but a lot of people asked for a desktop app, so he
did that too, and I remember reading that at least in the early years (maybe
now too), the desktop app sold much more. I used the desktop app in my work I
mentioned.

~~~
vram22
Another good example of a successful microISV (I just remembered) is Andy
Brice (in the UK), the creator of Perfect Table Plan, a wedding seating
planning software. He has been an ISV with that as his desktop app product for
over 10 years, IIRC.

First got to know of him via his blog:

[http://successfulsoftware.net](http://successfulsoftware.net)

and have corresponded with him too on a few occasions.

He has many interesting / useful posts about the ISV business on his blog - on
many aspects - from technical (he uses C++ and Qt) to commercial, though more
of the latter, IIRC. I've read many, and found them interesting. Just got one
today in my email, in fact. It's about how one-day sales helped him boost his
sales some. (He tries various marketing / sales experiments now and then.)
Another interesting thing is that he reviews or interviews other microISVs and
their products sometimes - those posts are interesting too. There was one
about a file compare tool which was doing quite well - Beyond Compare.

He also started another desktop product, HyperPlan, much after the first, and
I read that it too is doing okay.

------
20years
Yes, it is absolutely possible. I have been doing this for years focusing on
niche SaaS products that are too small for VC funded or big companies to go
after. I am currently bringing in $20k/mo from my SaaS stuff (3 different
niche products) and additional revenue on top of that with adsense/affiliate
stuff.

I ran an advertising agency with employees at one point and grew it to $50k/mo
but hated it so stopped and went back to single founder SaaS stuff.

Before the recession hit, I also ran a SaaS product in the Real Estate sector
that brought in over $70k/mo at its height. I had a few employees during that
time too.

I personally enjoy being a single founder running niche products but it has
its downsides. Also, once you reach a certain growth point, it becomes much
more difficult to go it alone. At that point, you can either hire employees to
help or decide maybe it is best to sell.

~~~
xsegfault
Have you sold any of your businesses before? If so, how did you seek out
businesses to buy yours?

~~~
20years
I haven't but am considering selling one of the products next year. I plan to
go through a Broker.

I had a soft offer in the $3 mil range from a big company for that real estate
product I mentioned. They reached out to me. I pretty much blew it off because
it was in a growth phase and I felt I could grow it more. 6 months later, the
real estate market crashed and that product lost 50% of its revenue within a
year. In hindsight, I wish I took that offer a little more serious.

~~~
thepredestrian
Unrelated point, but I would do anything (even put school on hold) just to be
able to work with a mentor like you. Being a solo founder for niche Saas
products is exactly what I aspire to be, and learning from someone who's been
there and done that would be a terrific experience

~~~
20years
I will reach out to you at the beginning of the new year. Honestly though if
you are interested, I would put you mostly on advertising related stuff.
Coding is the easy part, advertising and acquiring users is the hard part.
Learning how to advertise a product and acquire users for less than what you
are spend is one of the most important pieces of running a SaaS.

~~~
thepredestrian
Oh wow, that'd be super amazing, and I look forward to that.

I wholeheartedly agree that advertising and acquiring users are the most
important pieces, and also one of the hardest. Finding a niche and the market
to go after (who do I approach? what do I say? what sort of problems can I
solve that hasnt already been done? etc) has been a stumbling block, not to
mention the fact that I'm far from technically fluent to spin up a basic
prototype to demo.

As such I kinda put that aspiration on hold and decided to hone my craft in CS
/ programming in general, so that at least I have a solid, technical base to
built off on.

Anyhow, I really appreciate your response and am excited to hearing back from
you.

------
cschmidt
You might be interested in
[http://www.microconf.com/](http://www.microconf.com/)

I went to the conferences when I was a one man startup, and it was helpful.

~~~
jetti
I've heard many things on Microconf from Mike and Rob on Startups for the Rest
of Us. The problem is paying for a ticket as well as airfare to get there. Due
to family financial responsibilities my company operates its own accounts and
can only spend what it takes in. I'm currently down to a couple hundred
dollars and I have monthly expenses that take cuts out of that. Any sort of
conference is out of the question.

I am curious, though, what was it about the conference that made it helpful
for you?

~~~
cschmidt
It was a lot of little things. One big takeaway is that they're big on going
vertical not horizontal. Find a niche.

There was some useful stuff on landing page optimization.

patio11 gave a talk that year that was great.

I also found it helpful to talk to other people doing the same thing I was. A
solo startup can be kind of isolating.

So it isn't anything you _need_ to do. As I mentioned below this, the book
"Start Small, Stay Small" has a lot of the practical stuff, if $25 is more in
your budget.

------
antfie
I recently tried to become my own ISV. I produced the first draft of
[https://conciergeapp.uk/](https://conciergeapp.uk/) within 2 weeks after a
chat with someone who is in the Facilities Management (FM) section. Initial
interest in the market looked good and I had plans to make a modular platform.
After some refinement etc, I totally failed to sell it. I tried so hard but it
was exhausting. Then I got a regular job, but still.. this does appeal. Wish
you luck! The hard part is not the coding.

~~~
sogen
saw the website and got one question: who is your market target?

~~~
antfie
The target market is companies providing facilities management services to
residential apartment blocks.

------
inconshreveable
Yes it's possible. I've been doing it for nearly four years now running
networking infrastructure software which has even stricter requirements than a
typical SaaS business.

It's not easy though. Assuming you have product/market fit (i.e. something
that sells):

Reliability is paramount. It is everything to you. If your system breaks, it
will stop new development, marketing, support responses, sales calls. Because
there is only one of you, you can't afford to spend time fighting fires and
answering pages. It does not matter if your software is slow or fast or if it
is pretty or ugly or if your userbase is growing or not if you are down.

Reliability is paramount. Invest your time into building systems that do not
fail when one component or one machine breaks. Where you can, you should
leverage primitives and services from cloud providers that provide the kind of
failure guarantees you need. Then assume that your cloud providers will
eventually fail on you, so design with that in mind. Take as few dependencies
on them as you can handle or make sure you can failover between them.

Reliability is paramount. Every change you deploy could break your systems and
cause downtime. You need good testing and monitoring. Run continuous end-to-
end testing of all customer-facing functionality that pages you when it fails.

Reliability is a feature if your software is critical to your customer's
business. Some will notice when your competitors are down and you aren't. For
those that don't notice, educate them. Explain to your customers the
investments you've made to keep your service up and running. You can sell it
as a differentiator.

After that, support is the next time-sink you need to eliminate. Treat every
support request as a bug that can be fixed so it doesn't happen again. Make it
extraordinarily easy to contact you and then try to optimize so no one ever
contacts you. Invest in your UX. Your UX should try to illuminate the inner
workings of your software. Many support requests are simply failures of a
customer to understand what your software is doing and why. Customers can't
debug black boxes, but they are smart and motivated and if you invest in their
understanding, many will solve their own problems before contacting you.

Design your error messages. Your error messages are a more important piece of
design than any other messaging from your product. Finally, if you can't solve
the support bug with UX, invest in your documentation. Documentation is your
last resort because most users will not read it or they will only read
portions of it. By the time they get to the docs they're already frustrated,
so it needs to be fantastic.

good luck!

~~~
jeremyw
> Make it extraordinarily easy to contact you and then try to optimize so no
> one ever contacts you.

> By the time they get to the docs they're already frustrated, so it needs to
> be fantastic.

Well said.

------
palidanx
I made Menutail ([https://www.menutail.com](https://www.menutail.com)) which
creates nutrition facts labels for food vendors. Up time is definitely
important, but if things go wrong, customers are understanding if you
communicate honestly with them on what is going on.

The other thing to be careful of is feature creep to ensure it is valuable for
your customer base. If one customer complains that they want something which
would be super difficult and applicable to only one edge case, I'd take some
pause to evaluate the feedback.

The other thing as ovidiup mentioned, marketing is the absolutely hardest. I
would even consider it soul draining if you like coding, but it is super
necessary. I would recommend reading this book to help think about your sales
channel

[https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Inevitable-Hyper-Growth-
Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Inevitable-Hyper-Growth-Companies-
Predictable-ebook/dp/B01AXTFMSW)

------
ernestipark
[http://indiehackers.com](http://indiehackers.com) has been making the rounds
on HN lately and shows that it's definitely possible. But of course, keep in
mind these are the success stories.

------
nxtrafalgar
Yes. I am my boss's only employee, and I only work part-time while studying.
Before he hired me, it was just him. We develop software for the real estate
industry for property management and trust accounting. We have one major
client that we work with directly, and we have a specific version of our
software that we only supply to them. We also have a partnership with another
company overseas who we license our software to, while they handle client
relations and support.

It appears to working out quite well for him, as he is currently on holiday
overseas.

------
wonderwonder
sure, i do it. Develop a custom system for a company and then charge a monthly
use and/or maint. fee. If the original development was tested well you are
essentially getting free money every month.

I have a full time job but one client on the side. I built a system for them
that I net $1,250 per month on and do 2 hours of work a month at most.
Rackspace takes care of almost all host related items for me.

I have a partner who also makes $1,250 from the same contract. In hind sight I
could have easily done the whole project without him and be making $2,500 per
month.

Been going for almost 3 years now, probably has a shelf life of another 7
years.

If you can get a few customers like this, you are set. The challenge is of
course to get more customers, let me know when you solve that issue, I'm still
working on it :)

edit: changed gross to net

~~~
bdavisx
What's your Rackspace hosting cost / month? I realize it would vary for
different situations, but just curious if you don't mind sharing.

~~~
wonderwonder
Sure, it's approx $500 per month. We gross $3,500 per month and pay hosting
and business insurance as expenses. net is $2,500.

Edit: hosting includes daily backups

------
Spooky23
Do you have a sales channel?

I know a guy who continues to run a one-man software shop for some municipal
government functions that are important, but too small for a more general
software company.

Key factor for him is that his uncle had been a well-known person, which got
him in the door early on.

------
jason_slack
I think it is doable. I write a few desktop apps (text editor) for OS X,
Windows, Linux, iPad and I have a few games in the app store with more coming.
Some days I pull my hair out from the stress but overall I am happy writing
the products.

~~~
jetti
Are you making money on any of those products?

~~~
jason_slack
The text editor I pulled from being sold a long while back. Now I maintain it
and have a new version I am contemplating putting out for sale again.

The games are way better :-)

------
cookiecaper
I had such a project that was making about $15k/mo at its peak -- it was me
and my wife, barring a couple of spot contributions from contractors. It
depended on data from a sole data source, a Fortune 100 company, which
eventually cut us off by sending a C&D threatening to sue under the CFAA,
Copyright Act, and various other statutes. They claimed we breached the
contract entered automatically by using their site, as their Terms of Service
states that "no automated or manual method" (i.e., no method at all) can be
used to access their content and their footer states that use of the site
constitutes agreement (this is called "browsewrap"). The way we accessed data
was much lower-impact than the way our clients accessed the data previously
and I'm fully convinced that we saved them tens of thousands in maintenance
and bandwidth costs.

No other data source is capable of providing the content we needed. We were
forced to shut down.

We knew this was a possible eventuality and our ToS explicitly disclaimed
responsibility for it. Our site required users to check both a checkbox and
click OK on a dialog box that served only to inform that they used the product
at their own risk, nothing was guaranteed, and no refunds of any kind would be
furnished. When we shut down, many angry users demanded refunds and issued
chargebacks, often after months of successful use, despite the clear and
unambiguous language which confronted them several times and required their
affirmative assent before they were allowed to purchase anything.

Before we were forced to shut down, other people had caught on to the market
and started copying us. We had about a year where we were in it by ourselves.
Once serious competitors showed up, they ate our lunch by using a
sophisticated spam network to promote their offerings, which were sloppily
made by offshore contractors and far worse than our offering in every way,
technical and aesthetic.

I refused to engage in similar tactics and felt righteous about it, but it
sure cost us a lot of money. They somehow brokered deals with the niche forums
that had blacklisted us from day one (or just outspammed their moderation
capacity), afraid that we may eventually expand into something that would
threaten them directly (which I now plan to do, some day). Perhaps we could've
prevented the copycats by acquiring software patents.

These competitors pushed the envelope to the point where it became a visible
PR issue and the F100 was forced to respond by C&D'ing every site that
operated in the sector I launched and instructing their users to never use
anything not distributed directly by the company itself again.

Now, about 16 months post-shutdown, I still get emails from business owners
who depended on us begging me to turn the service back on, and saying that
their business has been seriously hurt by our absence.

Some of the people in this thread evidently picked much better niches than I
did.

~~~
mywittyname
I usually don't do this, but couldn't you have the customers set up some sort
of proxy to acquire the data from the F100? So give them a piece of software
that they run on their local network to grab the data and configure your SaaS
to point to the customer's site to get it.

Perhaps you've considered this and it wouldn't work for some reason or
another. But I thought I'd offer some unsolicited advice.

~~~
cookiecaper
I wanted to do this, and in fact thought of doing it before the takedown
occurred, but after the takedown, our lawyer advised me that doing so could be
construed as conspiracy to violate the CFAA. He thought it could give them
incentive to try to field criminal charges (the CFAA defines both criminal and
civil penalties, and as one may expect, the F100 is very well-connected and
surely could get a federal prosecutor interested), so I didn't pursue it.

As much as I wanted my business to be able to live on, I wanted to stay out of
prison more.

The only option would've been to abandon all US assets and essentially go into
exile in a state where the law was more friendly and the F100 would have a
harder time getting me shut down (and there are very few jurisdictions without
a law substantially derived from the CFAA; the wording of the
Telecommunications Act in many Commonwealth nations gives _marginally_ more
protection). I didn't think that was a very good option for a relatively small
business, I wouldn't have been able to afford it at the time anyway, and it
would've had meteoric impacts on my family, so I didn't do it.

On top of that, The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload have proven that the long arm of
American corporatism knows no borders.

To their credit, however, Sweden did seem to hold out a long time. They had to
be threatened with sanctions from the WTO in order to take down TPB. At that
point, Sweden ignored their own law and pushed through a sham trial against
TPB's proprietors, who went into exile in non-extradition countries, from
which they were eventually stopped at border crossings and extradited to serve
time in Sweden. Can't hide from Mickey Mouse.

The most ironic part of this is that the world's largest companies regularly
violate the same rules with impunity. Google, for example, routinely and
flagrantly violates the CFAA and the Copyright Act, going by the standards
that are applied to everyone non-Google. However, Google has been sued over
this and won, with their use specifically ruled fair, because they're Google
-- and that's essentially the reasoning the judges give if you read the
decisions, talking about how it's a "transformative use" that has changed the
world, etc. etc. Judges have declined to apply the same logic in later rulings
( _Ticketmaster v. RMG_ ), on the basis that the defendant was _not_ Google.

The moral of the story appears to be break rules and get too big to fail
_fast_ , and then you can do whatever you want. If you don't big enough fast
enough, you will be destroyed by a large company that's afraid of you.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Tarsnap is doing just fine, but he's also doing something unique.

------
ninjakeyboard
You CAN do it, but get a partner. You need someone to bat ideas around with.
Having at least one other person will allow you to go a lot farther with the
quality of your ideas.

~~~
pryelluw
Nonsense. Ive been flying solo since my teens and dont really want a partner.
Some of us work better independently. Im not against a partner if the right
person shows uo, but Im not holding my plans until they appear.

------
AIMunchkin
I'm going to post a contrarian viewpoint that unless your product is self-
contained and it can continue on without you if you are hit by a truck or even
acqui-hired for top $, I will avoid you.

Too many pay apps and even games with DLC have gone poof in recent years
because of the latter situation or because the cost of maintaining the DLC no
longer justified itself.

~~~
jetti
What about with desktop software? Once you buy it you are able to use that
version and don't have to rely on the vendor sticking around. Also, how do you
go about finding such information about a company if a micro ISV doesn't
publicly say they are just a solo venture?

~~~
jimnotgym
When I purchase enterprise software I call them up and ask how many people
work for them. In UK (and sure it translates) I normally pull their accounts
from companies house. If not incorporated I'm suspicious. If they are it will
help me gauge size

------
DrNuke
It really depends on the service (if it solves a real problem) and on the
niche (if market is rich and people want to pay good money for your solution);
as for other ways related: public media content is done and dusted and
facilitator gigs are often not worth the hassle.

------
wtheme
Pretty much viable. I've experimented with
[https://worktheme.com](https://worktheme.com). What I realized is, small
increments of work over a long time adds up to really surprising results.

------
DoodleBuggy
Yes absolutely, at least initially. But expect weekends/nights/vacations to be
consumed.

Eventually, either due to growth or a desire to have free time again, you'll
probably want to bring aboard other persons.

------
idlewords
Yes.

------
jheriko
Yes. I know some. You got to pick your battles carefully and really produce
though...

------
LeicaLatte
More than ever

------
tajen
I do. As advised by others comments, I sell a plugin on a platform that takes
20-30%. It's great because they handle the invoicing to big companies, which
removes the hassle of being a referenced provider.

I'm ok on the sysadmin side (backups, Ansible, etc) and uptime. I'm subpaar on
the support side, because I can't develop features fast enough and I have a
problems prioritizing things that my various customers need and, at the same
time, I panic at the idea of telling them that "I don't know" whether I'll
deliver their tiny feature in 1 week or in 8 months. Anyway, it's all problems
you can solve by being more efficient or professional, just keep in mind that
support/bugfixing will creep up as you add features, up to 80% of your time,
at which point you'll either have enough money to hire, or notice that the
business model doesn't bring enough money.

There is definitely room for us, micro ISV: Do it as long as you like it /
enjoy the lifestyle.

Also, "don't talk to corp dev" (cf Paul Graham's essay) unless you want to
sell, in which case use an acquisition broker marketplace (cf patio11's
essays).

~~~
codazoda
You might want to try something like Pivotal Tracker if you aren't already.
Estimating each "task" and then prioritizing them seems to help me see how
long it will actually be before I will get to a specific feature. Pivotal is
pretty good at estimating your future tasks based on your past tasks.

~~~
tajen
It's not about estimates, it's that my output isn't enough to be ahead of my
customers' requests, so that they wouldn't have to ask for them, or I wouldn't
have to provide a workaround until I develop the specific feature.

~~~
jrumbut
I used to have the same problem and have since become an expert in saying "No
sorry we can't do that" or "we can but it costs this much".

Your clients will eventually thank you because you'll sustain the service
longer if it's worthwhile for you.

------
cheez
Yes

~~~
kkoomi
K

