
SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months - csallen
https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/submithub
======
theunixbeard
1.) Build an audience (~6 years)

2.) Build your business (a few months...)

That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover
& Product Hunt:

[https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-
rise-d49249a...](https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-
rise-d49249a1a2c0)

The title was "Product Hunt's Rise: An overnight success 1,834 days in the
making"... Same exact story here except growing Indie shuffle took closer to
2,190 days!

~~~
erikb
It's funny how this blog post probably explains quite well how the
indiehackers (the site this article about indie shuffle is hosted on) guy
builds his community.

~~~
theunixbeard
Quite meta! Would be nice to hear csallen's thoughts on it.

Once big difference I think is that csallen is focused on writing specifically
for the Hacker News audience as a way to bootstrap traffic from an existing
large audience. Product Hunt didn't really use that strategy from what I can
tell.

Similarly to Indie Hackers, I wrote my Product Hunt article with the aim to
bootstrap off of Ryan Hoover's large existing audience (40K twitter followers
at the time, compared to my paltry 100). He was the first to tweet about it
after I brought it to his attention and it spread organically from there (26K
views currently).

My next Internet Archaeology article is already in the works and I plan to use
the exact same strategy as before (bootstrap off of my subject's existing
audience).

~~~
erikb
Sounds good. I love your archeology work. Saves me a lot of time.It was a
little too long for a coffee break read and now I'm behind my work schedule,
though. Maybe you can split one article into smaller chunks, which may also
increase your overall traffic. ;-)

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jason-grishkoff
SubmitHub founder weighing in here -- thanks for sharing, Courtland! If anyone
has any questions about SubmitHub or Indie Shuffle (technical or business),
feel free to ask :)

Edit: in case you're curious, here's what the dashboard looks like for
bloggers - [http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png](http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png)

~~~
napoleoncomplex
Just wanted to chime in and say Indie Shuffle is one of the best resources
I've found for new music out there (for my taste).

While I have no need for SubmitHub's main purpose, the Popular tab looks like
it can serve as another source of fresh stuff.

All in all, massive respect for your work promoting new music. As a sidenote,
I'd happily donate some money through Patreon/whatever to support an ad-free
version of the site (I know, I know, one in a million :).

~~~
raywu
Ditto, this popular chart is very cool: ranked by approval,
[http://www.submithub.com/popular](http://www.submithub.com/popular)

To me it seems like expanding on the playable features could make SubmitHub
itself a very meta/cool place to submit through. A place to engage other
artists. It's like HackerNews for music.

------
mherrmann
As seems to be common on Indie Hackers, the title is extremely disingenuous:

1) It took him 6 years to build an audience before turning it into a business.
The title makes it sound like the entire process only took 10 months.

2) $46k/mo of what? Revenue or profit? If the latter, at least half
immediately goes to the music blogs.

3) Where exactly does the $46k/mo number come from? It's only mentioned in the
title and explained nowhere. Is it a projection, an average, the best month,
...?

Courtland, you have a great site and I really enjoy your articles. Please
don't spoil your awesome content with vagueness and clickbait.

~~~
gregormck
Well said.

------
wyc
Kudos! I get really excited when I learn about people working hard at creative
and useful things like this. I also think it's important to note that, while
this is surely no small feat, it sounds like this is the fruition of the
author's accumulated experiences, network, and reputation "[over] the course
of my ~7 years running a blog", and probably even longer with a strong passion
for music and the people in music.

This comment is not to downplay the author's accomplishments--I think keeping
to something for even 5 years is ridiculously hard, and that should be
commended, especially if it resulted in something that people find valuable.
Rather, I hope that people reading this won't lose hope when, 10 months into
their own businesses, they don't see the same levels of popularity or
financial success. This project seems to be the tip of an iceberg. I think
luck is also a strong component, but it definitely favors the prepared.

~~~
petercooper
_while this is surely no small feat, it sounds like this is the fruition of
the author 's accumulated experiences, network, and reputation_

True for most success stories. Overnight success is so rare (and often
fleeting - all of the rapid online successes I can think of are underwater now
- all the best things were slow burns, including this very site). It's about
accumulating bricks here and there and building the wall over years. People
who never lose hope and who keep building those bricks will reap the rewards
in the end.

------
sp527
I think another important lesson to draw from this is that you should build
things for domains and problems in which you have a legitimate
interest/curiosity. That was something I took away from this that's difficult
to accept, because it means you're probably going to be limited if you want to
work solo.

~~~
jason-grishkoff
If you're going to spend 8+ hours a day on something, you'd best enjoy the
subject matter :)

------
steve-benjamins
I used SubmitHub to share my music and it's a great experience. It fixes an
_exhausting_ cold-outreach process. (I used it to get some pretty major
coverage— for me, at least— when a well-known blog sent 25,000 listens after
covering my song).

------
fiatjaf
The guy had a very successful music blog and used that to kick off the network
effect needed to make SubmitHub work. There is zero chance SubmitHub would
work without the music blog, so unless you have a very successful blog
yourself this article will not help you in any practical manner.

~~~
paulsutter
Or maybe the lesson is to develop a following first before developing a
product. The music blog didn't happen by random chance, and his overall
approach seems better than developing a product and hoping for a following.

~~~
fourstar
I did this with the intention of promoting the product.

The issue was that I built it on someone else's platform. Something I've known
to be a cardinal sin and a disaster waiting to happen.

Alas, I built /r/lifeprotips and it quickly became a default on reddit. I
started building the site (lifeprotips.com which is no longer up) around the
same time.

Some moronic moderator named reddit.com/user/krispykrackers banned me because
I was promoting the site on the subreddit. They still use artwork I paid an
illustrator to design for my site that I re-used there.

tl;dr: don't build a following on someone else's platform. You will be
penalized because in 2016 there is no loyalty to the game anymore (I've been
building sites since the late 90s so I know how corporate this environment has
gotten).

Also, big middle finger to reddit for trying to be a big boy corporation but
failing to address issues like mine -- I spent so much time and energy getting
that subreddit to where it is today and I get rewarded with a punch in the
face.

~~~
fiatjaf
Thank you for sharing.

Do you think you would be as successful in developing an audience outside
Reddit as you were inside it? Where? In a blog?

~~~
fourstar
Of course.

Honestly, probably not. Reddit was the perfect audience for that particular
type of content, so it made perfect sense. There's only one other player in
that space that I know who is really killing it and it's lifehack.org.

Life Pro Tips focused on digestible pieces of content, but in order to
monetize, it seems like you need more long-form types of content (that of
which lifehack.org provides).

I've moved on to other areas (like I've always done). I've had wins and I've
had losses. The losses are necessary in order to keep the wins going.

------
reagan83
I ran my first startup with Jason 15 years ago. Since then, he's gone on to do
some amazing things and seeing him on HN today makes me realize:

1) how lucky I was to work with him for those 2 years. 2) how small our
industry is.

Congrats Jason on the well deserved success.

~~~
jason-grishkoff
Nice to from you Reagan! :)

------
textread
Congratulations Jason

Why did you pick Digital Ocean over Meteor Galaxy hosting ? Would you point me
to some resources that you looked into while setting up Digital Ocean for
Meteor hosting ?

~~~
jason-grishkoff
1) price; 2) they had a really good tutorial for setting up Meteor on Digital
Ocean: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
depl...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-deploy-a-
meteor-js-application-on-ubuntu-14-04-with-nginx)

~~~
textread
Thanks man

------
goodJobWalrus
I have a question for the guy running indie hackers. Do you periodically
update those revenue figures?

------
sgdesign
Something that I think is worth pointing out: that site doesn't have a
recurring revenue model and also charges very low fees, two things that go
against the common wisdom of "just get people to pay you every month, and add
an enterprise plan in there for good measure".

The truth is that the classic three-tiered SaaS business model is just one of
many possible business models, yet many developers-turned-entrepreneur adopt
it without stopping to think whether it's a good fit or not for their product.

------
pjwal
So, why not democratize this a bit more given the application and the current
audience. Why not charge (and deliver) 1000 user reviews of music for $1 as
well?

Obviously, established music sites are a distribution channel that works right
now. But it seems apparent to me the natural extension right now is direct to
music lovers?

------
z3t4
This could be used for other branches too, not just music blogs. For example
Indie Games.

~~~
esfandia
My thought as well: I could see this for novels/short stories, or even could
revolutionize the academic publishing system.

------
rhizome
I'm finding that when some resources hang -- I got it with images.unsplash and
cloudfront on different pageloads -- it freezes Firefox completely such that
it must be killed. Is this a side effect of React/Meteor?

~~~
jason-grishkoff
Ruh roh. There are more than 100 people actively using the site right now, and
I haven't heard this issue before. The whole website does hinge on one single
.js file, which is hosted by Cloudfront. So if that doesn't load, it's going
to crash. The unsplash image would only be coming up if you were getting a
501/404/whatever via nginx.

Where are you based?

~~~
rhizome
SF

~~~
jason-grishkoff
Stumped. Not sure why that would be happening.

~~~
rhizome
Hold fire, it just happened on an unrelated site. I had updated Debian Testing
this morning and it turns out a couple other things are hinky, so it's likely
not to be your fault.

~~~
jason-grishkoff
Fire held :-D

------
gtirloni
Question to the moderators: Shouldn't IndieHackers posts be "Show HN"?

~~~
csallen
Curious why you think this. What makes it particularly different from any
other curated source of articles, e.g. Medium or TechCrunch?

------
lmenus
Good job!

------
scribu
Actual tl;dr: Founder built a webapp for streamlining music submissions made
by artists to music blogs. One important element of success was having a
popular music blog himself.

~~~
mathgeek
Which translates to "after years of work to establish a brand, this founder
turned that brand into a successful business opportunity."

A great story and excellent business sense, to be sure. The "10 months" part
is typical headline speak.

~~~
cantbecool
Right, and it doesn't hurt to say he worked for Google either.

~~~
dwightgunning
On the contrary, I thought this was a strange and irrelevant fact to include
in the article. There's no indication that his role at Google had any bearing
on the success of the business.

Perhaps if he'd worked on Google Music (or other music related area of the
business) or the referenced exposure to "top brass" opened some doors... but
it seems unlikely this is the case.

There's certainly correlation between Google employees and successful
initiatives... but not much beyond that.

~~~
edoceo
After working at BigCo and saving steady pay while nurturing your startup at
night for a few years. You have a visibility to traction. And a cushion
against failure. So you can take the "risk". It's easy to take a "risk" when
it's not really there.

It's not like this founder started with $100 and made an ongoing business
employing a few others.

Started on second, scored on as RBI and media talks about your Grand Slam.

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's actually a really good point _if it 's what he did_. The common
approach to employment is placing it safe using one job's revenue to get to
higher-paying one. Or even savings. Many startups or bootstrappers go all in
with different incentives and cost structure. Plus time available.

So, it's worth learning things like that in these stories in tracing the
bigger picture of how the success story played out with what ingredients that
might work next time.

------
hnsummarizer
Tldr: "I was born in South Africa and moved to California just before the
start of high school, graduating from the University of California, San Diego
in 2007 before working a corporate job in DC that ultimately landed me a sweet
gig at Google. My responsibility once there was to figure out how much to pay
the company's executives, which meant I was lucky to enjoy face time with many
of the top brass.,One of the biggest frustrations of running my music blog was
that by the time I took it full-time, I was receiving upwards of 300 email
pitches a day from artists, record labels, and publicists, all looking to have
their music featured on Indie Shuffle.,Then, toward the end of last year, I
decided that a good way to learn some new coding languages would be to try and
solve this problem by developing a website to streamline the process."

~~~
gist
Going forward I will upvote almost anything that you summarize that I see.
Reading it and the responding comments will be a great time saver.

~~~
bbcbasic
You could write a bot for that :-)

