
Making your first dollar from a SaaS project - czue
https://www.indiehackers.com/@czue/what-actually-goes-into-making-your-first-dollar-from-a-saas-project-49d98f7d45
======
hoodoof
In 1998, before people had much of clue about what represents success and how
big things can get given time, I built a software product and posted it to the
net. Within a week or so there had been a handful of sales at $100 each.

That looked like failure to me at the time - "that's a trickle of money -
extrapolating maybe $25,000 per year? Not enough to pay my bills. I need to
get a job".

Today that sort of start looks like a whopping success.

I've been trying to replicate that start ever since.

The upside is that I did go and get a job, and through that job met the woman
who I had kids with..... if that's that path to getting my fabulous kids then
I don't regret it.

~~~
TwelveNights
The internet is becoming a bigger and bigger playground. Even getting that
first bit of attention is extremely meaningful now. There are so many
different services and other attention-suckers out there at this point that
everything really does matter.

What type of software product did you make back then that warranted $100
sales?

~~~
roel_v
Back then, _every_ software product cost that much. Well OK maybe I'm
exaggerating a bit, but certainly anything that was B2B focused. 'Personal'
sales would be $25 for something really simple, $50 for something established
that people would use a lot.

Car expense tracker for Palm - $19.95. Today if you even want to charge $1.99,
you'll be competing with several free (ad-supported) ones.

------
lefstathiou
To share our experience (we sell SAAS in financial services): our first
solution took us 6+ months of development (one person) to get our MVP launched
and another year to get people to use it actively without active outbound
selling (that is to say it was sold but we had to hold your hand the whole way
through).

Some thoughts: internally we consider the "V" in MVP to encompass not just
what is the minimum you need to do to solve a problem but the minimum to solve
a problem (worth solving) at a level someone is willing to pay you for the
solution. That often is more extensive than a traditional MVP which is why
SAAS solutions require so much up front development. Consumers are not fond of
subscribing to services and businesses don't like beta products.

A couple additional thoughts as we now actively sell 4 SAAS services:

\- to be successful in SAAS you need to build something people need. They say
there are two types of businesses: painkillers and vitamins. If you're a
vitamin you are 20x more likely to fail than a pain killer. The value prop is
just too hard to communicate and people's attention spans are too limited \-
the more you understand the user / workflow / domain the better. I realize
this may sound obvious but I do my best to pay forward the mentorship I
received and I am shocked at how often I come across people trying to solve
other people's problems as an outsider.

\- with the exception of notable billion dollar startups we all love and read
about daily, I believe the dream of "build it and they will come (register,
put in their credit card and bam you're done) is just that, a dream. Yes
organic growth is real but all my buddies who have successful SAAS companies
spent a ton of time and effort selling them before that organic growth kicked
off. This could be an east coast vs west coast thing as my network is hitting
niche workflows but worth sharing regardless.

~~~
blizkreeg
On vitamins vs painkillers: conversely, do you think if you are able to build
a vitamin product that does make your worklife better/easier, wouldn't it be a
harder barrier to entry for newcomers? i.e., greater entrenchment?

I'm currently doing customer development on such a product. I've burned my
fingers previously building nice-to-have products and don't intend to repeat
my mistake. With this one, I'm validating the market before I build anything.

There are ways people do this thing (inefficiently and poorly IMO) today.
Their business isn't likely to suffer if they don't adopt my product but I'm
hoping to prove a factor of efficiency improvement if they adopt it.

What would your advice to me be (aside from don't do it)?

~~~
lefstathiou
First let's level set: the benefit of taking vitamins is that if you take them
regularly, at some point in the future you will be better off than you are now
(in other words there is no immediate perceived benefit - it requires an
investment). Alternatively, a painkiller has immediate physiological benefits.

Assessing a service as a painkiller vs a vitamin is not totally black and
white - generally I would say a service qualifies as a vitamin if there is no
immediate perceived benefit to its use (ie it doesn't meaningfully save me
time in aggregate, does not enable me to do something else that I can directly
ascribe value to, doesn't reduce a painpoint I feel at this moment). A mental
test I use is if someone goes from using my service for two months to
immediately not using my service, how will their workflow change? If it
doesn't change meaningfully, you are likely a vitamin. Note that I recognize
that by this definition Facebook is a vitamin. Vitamins can make money.

So back to you. If your service does improve work/life or actually provide a
"factor of efficiency improvement" over whatever their alternative is (e.g.
Doing nothing) you may have a painkiller on your hands instead of a vitamin.
The problem is you aren't the ultimate judge of what is a painkiller or a
vitamin (you are operating on a hunch) until you go out there and try to sell
it. The market will tell you.

So my advice is to spend as much time thinking about how you will package and
sell this service as you are designing the service. Create a few marketing
materials, hone the pitch and sit down face-to-face with as many people as
makes sense and pitch them. In fact, I am 100% happy to genuinely consider
purchasing this from you so you can try it on me. At the end of the day, the
customer decides if you are adding value by voting with their time and dollars
so developing a sales strategy early is important. You may discover you have a
great service for a specific type of buyer profile but finding that buyer
profile is too expensive. It happens.

I often remind myself of Ali-G's pitch to Donald Trump of a glove to prevent
ice cream from getting on your hands (if you haven't seen it please watch -
hilarious). Anyone who loves ice cream has this problem and the potential
market of people who eat ice cream is huge. You could probably find someone
willing to pay $1 for it but there is no way anyone can build a real business
off this. Of course, you never know.

~~~
adventured
> Note that I recognize that by this definition Facebook is a vitamin.

Facebook started its life as an immediate painkiller. They solved several
problems for the most hyper-active of social groups: college students. The
facebook-equivalent products at colleges at the time were either non-existent
at most schools or atrocious. Then to amplify the Facebook benefit, the
connectivity between the primitive school products was basically non-existent
(that is, to the extent they existed, there tended to be no wider connection
school to school). Circa ~2004-2007, Once students acquired the benefits of
having Facebook as a social booster, leaving it would have left them worse
off.

------
dangero
I've crashed and burned on SaaS enough that I'm very into the landing page
approach -- don't build the product, but convince people you have so that they
can click the "buy now" button. That way you feel more confident that the
market exists while you're actually building it. After all the projects I've
failed at, nothing is harder for me to do than spend 200+ hours on something
without having a clue whether it will reap benefits or not. Corey spent 100
hours trying to gather traction. He could have potentially skipped the 100
hours it took to build it and instead just tested the sales side.

There are people who can know where a market is and confidently blaze straight
into it without any validation. I think I'm just not that genius or lucky.

~~~
alexpetralia
Any recommendations for quick and effective landing page solutions? I assume
something like MailChimp for email sign-ups?

~~~
Untit1ed
I'm building something to do exactly this at
[https://nichetester.com](https://nichetester.com) \- I should note that I
used the method described in the OP to validate it and it worked really well
:).

~~~
Pavelcz
I absolutely love that the website that promises to build a testing decoy is a
testing decoy. Perfect. (img idontknowwhatiexpected.gif)

~~~
arethuza
Well, it worked - I just signed up!

------
jkarneges
Separate from finding someone who is willing to make a purchase, getting the
technical bits in place in order to properly accept a purchase can be
challenging, too. It's not just about being able to charge a credit card.

In our case we're an infrastructure service that charges customers based on
their usage level. This required collecting the right metrics, consolidating
them durably, making the metrics visual somewhere so customers understand how
they are being charged, implementing notions of billing cycles, syncing with
the payment provider (in our case Stripe), UI elements to indicate if the
account is paid or not, ability to cancel paid service, etc.

All in all it took us a good two months from when we wanted to charge people
to when we could actually charge people. Of course every service will have
different technical needs. Congrats on the first buck. :)

------
johnvonneumann
As you get through the article, he mentions
[https://toggl.com/](https://toggl.com/) as his time tracking tool. I'm not
usually a fan of videos, but that intro is awesome.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Hilarious, especially the board meeting.

------
nametube
Took a look at the site [https://www.placecard.me/](https://www.placecard.me/)
and went through the flow of making a card and couldn't see a single place to
pay for the template or order prints. Its possible I hit some kind of A/B test
but i think the call to action might be buried too deep in the process.

~~~
czue
It should be the case that if you pay for a template you get a preview link
where the PDF has a watermark on it, and the only way to remove that watermark
is to pay.

I agree it's way too many steps and am trying to figure out how to make it
easier and more seamless without delivering people something they don't
actually want.

~~~
nametube
Maybe having the cards on the front page might help. You've invested a lot of
screen realestate on explaining the product. You could probably make this
[https://www.placecard.me/try/](https://www.placecard.me/try/) your homepage,
have the instruction in the banner and have the product in front of the user
right away.

~~~
dereknewsom
I'll second this. I wasn't exactly sure what you were selling until I got to
the "try" page.

------
imhoguy
I like the product. But I wouldn't invest in automation of all the stuff
upfront. I would just process the upload/order manualy for a couple of first
users just to validate an idea financially.

From my experience people fear more of success than failure therefore overdo
the product to survive an imagined scale explosion. But there wouldn't be much
outrage from users that once flooded you have just raised the prices or
temporary suspended the service. I guess queue with bucks in front of the door
would boost your motivation to finish up the process implementation in half of
the time.

------
donkeyd
I feel like not adding affiliate links is a missed opportunity. The guides
section would be the perfect place to recommend a paper cutter, envelopes and
paper and link to Amazon. The income probably won't be very big, but people
who print their own place cards will probably need that stuff anyway, so it
might add some revenue.

It might have been a conscious not to do it though, which is of course fine.
But if it wasn't, I'd look into it.

------
chvid
Very inspiring and well executed; I can certainly learn something from chasing
problems that is so small that one can actually implement and promote a well-
functioning product within reasonable time.

------
mercwear
You don't have any hosting costs listed, are you hosting the site for free? If
so, where?

~~~
iakh
"You might be wondering where my server costs are, and I’ll admit that I’m
cheating a bit on that one. I host all of my projects on the same server—one
that I’ve been paying for for more than five years—so I’m not including that
in the budget for this project specifically. In reality I should probably
include a portion of those costs here."

------
guytpearson1
I don't want to hear about the first dollar you made. I want to hear about how
you went from $40,000 to $80,000 MRR. That's the key area. This post is just
an ego stroke for a guy who made $1.00 ($.96 after fees).

~~~
dangero
You think making a dollar after 200+ hours stroked his ego?

~~~
guytpearson1
Yes, I do think that. It was a promotional piece for his SaaS.

------
jameslk
I'm not sure why this is on the front page. I mean, $1 that you just made
yesterday doesn't really indicate product/market fit, nor seem very noteworthy
in general. If anything, it seems more like a midway point in the journey of
what you might expect to get there. You might have to pivot several times
after realizing traction is not stable or perhaps not scalable vis a vis
marketing efforts, as has been my experience. Kudos to building something
though.

Edit:

I get the point others are making about celebrating a milestone and your first
sale being the stepping stone to the next, but I don't think it addresses
mine:

Is $1 that you made _just yesterday_ really enough data to demonstrate to
others what to expect? Is there really any conclusion that can be drawn from
such a small experiment? Maybe it's just me, but I feel like there would be
much more interesting insights to discuss after waiting more time or when more
sales occurred.

Honestly this looks more like an SEO piece given the keyword rich external
links in the article from a high PR domain and boost from HN. The author has
mostly just submitted his own articles on HN to boot.

~~~
robodale
That "Zero to One" customer is a big deal. You can now ask that customer why
did they buy it in the first place? Why did they take their credit card out of
their purse/wallet, type their info in, and click buy? What would keep them as
a customer, etc.

The next step is to get to 10 customers, then 100...

~~~
jameslk
This is consumer product with a really low profit margin, which means he'll
need a lot more than 100 customers paying $1 each to have a sustainable
business. At $1, the product might as well be free. Imagine if this article
was retitled "What actually goes into getting your first user." Would anyone
care then?

Regardless, it would be much more interesting to hear why the customer took
out their credit card and entered their payment information. Unfortunately,
that's not what this article is about.

~~~
efdee
I think that alternative title would catch my attention a lot better,
actually.

