
ExSaaSperated: A blog about the struggle to start a sustainable SaaS - con-cat
https://exsaasperated.com/2020/06/20/hello-world.html
======
michaelbuckbee
This is likely going to sound too harsh (and the folks behind this seem
lovely), but content creation efforts like this are a red flag to me in terms
of evaluating whether or not a bootstrapped SAAS is going to "make" it.

This isn't because they're inherently bad or that the people writing them have
bad intentions, but that they're a time/attention trap.

Meta articles like this, "How I made my first $10", "Breaking $1k MRR" and
similar tend to do really well in attracting clicks but fail to connect with
an actual target audience for whatever it is you're making. This makes them
really dangerous as when you're starting out you don't have any "signal" as to
what's working and these types seem positive.

Unfortunately, they're the equivalent of handing out free candy when your
intention is to open a restaurant.

These folks would be much further ahead if they instead:

1\. Started writing/learning about specific tactics and skills for starting
and marketing a SAAS.

2\. Randomly picked some industry or vertical and just started writing
articles about learning that industry and the problems they had.

I say all this as someone who has drunk too deeply of the bootstrapped startup
literature well, don't make my mistakes.

~~~
iends
One of the trends I’ve noticed is that people who have minor SaaS success can
5x their income by creating an ebook + course + masterclass about how they did
it. Selling shovels in a gold rush....

~~~
sudhirj
Every success story is really about people selling the secret of success,
which is to sell the secret of success. Twitter is full of this. Every success
guru is selling a course about selling courses.

~~~
mromanuk
Yes, there is some guy on Twitter, who recently grew his followers (like 100x)
now he sells courses on how to grow your Twitter audience

------
alixanderwang
I actually feel like I've been hearing a ton about failures, though they're
all preceded by "you never hear about failures", and proceeded by, "and then I
took what I learned and succeeded".

What I actually never hear about is stories of trying to build a SaaS,
failing, and then just giving up and going back to being a salaryman and
retiring after a few decades. It's either that these stories are rare -- which
signals that persistence works --, or the stories are just never shared.

~~~
utkarsh_apoorva
I was planning to write something along the same lines, _if_ I make it. I
guess the reason of this happening is this - after you fail, you are too busy
picking up the pieces, and trying to survive.

I have written so much about small wins at my previous startup. And when it
shut down, I was just trying to avoid falling.

In the current one, we built and failed with 5 products. And then got more
traction in 10 days than we'd ever had ! When I put it this way, it sound like
the story of success (in the making).

But it isn't. It is (if I write it), the story of how we got it wrong, and
what not to do. The __bonus __is that we make it.

\--

Check out LightCat.io to see what got traction eventually.

You guys are smart - yes, this is a shameless plug. I am poor and cheap, and
this is all I've got.

~~~
zomglings
> yes, this is a shameless plug. I am poor and cheap, and this is all I've
> got.

It will be difficult for you to know how much I empathize with this statement.
Beautifully put.

Good luck to you Utkarsh.

------
codingdave
Almost every SaaS I've worked on did not start as people sitting down saying,
"Lets make a SaaS". It started as people fell into a problem space as part of
their ongoing work. In those cases, your first customers are already right in
front of you, so you build what they need, then iterate to make it more useful
for a wider community.

There are certainly pain points to find your 10th-100th customer. But if you
don't even know who your 1st customer is, you are flying blind.

~~~
skrebbel
It's more general I think: it's hard to build a SaaS without a head start. In
your examples, having ~10 launching customers is such a head start.

But there's also plenty SaaSes that started building tech for something else,
that didn't pan out, but they realized they could sell the tech separately. Eg
close.io did this and so did my company talkjs.com. There's likely many more
examples.

But I agree that if you have to start without something to sell _and_ without
customers ready to pay, you're definitely in for a rough ride.

------
sky_rw
"Also, all these whiz-bang success stories suffer from enormous survivorship
bias."

Well that's because in 2 years when you finally pull the plug on a failing
business so you can pay your bills, you end up shutting down the blog you
stopped posting to regularly 14 months ago and nobody can find it anyway
because you put it on an 'indie' platform.

------
alextheparrot
The hosting of comments through Github is, interesting in a brilliant way.
Maybe I've spent too much time triaging issues at work and I'm confusing
Stockholm syndrome for affection.

Either way, this site has a certain tenderness, thanks for sharing.

~~~
toothbrush
_> this site has a certain tenderness, thanks for sharing_

Thank you so much for the kind words. It really means a lot to us.

 _> comments through Github is interesting in a brilliant way_

Thank you! Honestly we're just cheap/lazy – we really wanted a super low-
maintenance blogging platform, and static pages are amazing IMHO. This gave us
"all" of both worlds, sort of.

------
jcun4128
I'm trying to get into it but don't know what to make. I follow Indie
Hackers/Entrepreneur podcasts/wip.chat/etc... now I'm looking into Shopify
stuff, make some niche API connector or something... but it will be a time
sink to learn their docs/how stuff works on the Shopify aspect. Possible
oversaturated market, etc... but I figure if I cruise through the forums/see
recurring problems, maybe I can find something to build.

Recently I had a friend who runs a shipping business have me make him a PayPal
button generator built into an email template that was mailed out so they
could specify a price/tax/name/etc... That was cool, but I would not have come
up with that problem on my own as I don't run the particular shipping business
he does.

~~~
utkarsh_apoorva
This is a pretty interesting place to be. Since you have not yet committed
yourself - so you sort of have a superpower that many of us crave for.

There are at least a few ways of thinking about this.

The well documented ones 1\. Think about problems you've faced. Solve it. 2\.
Research online, find problems, fix them (what you seem to be doing).

Less Documented ones: 1\. Pick a product you like - as a customer / user. Deep
dive. See what they got right and what they didn't. Who they serve well, and
who isn't happy. Then build something similar in a 'different' market (what
Notion did to Evernote and Roam is doing to Notion, Freshdesk to Zendesk).

2\. Think of 3-5 skills you've got as an individual. Forget products for a
moment. Think about people - who can you help with a combination of those
skills, better than most (or cheaper than most). Talk to these people. Offer
your service. Later build a product around this (Close.com, and if I remember
correctly, even Kissmetrics.)

~~~
jcun4128
I have a 9-5 job currently. Also contribute to a local "code for location"
thing. I have some time, I have a bit though generally being single/no
responsibilities other than myself.

I don't like that I have one income and I'm scared of losing my job sort of
thing, granted I get a lot of recruiters hitting me up(though am I qualified,
just string matching).

> 1\. Think about problems you've faced.

This mostly it's an attention thing for me, I'm trying to learn Android/make a
widget, I did the cross platform app part for the mobile/desktop app, for a
centralized thing... this is not something that would make money eg.
OneNote/Evernote/etc... Other thing is managing money I have spread sheet
tabs.

Yeah only thing I use really are the note taking/money managing stuff(not YNAB
or something just tabulating).

Yeah working with friends is hit and miss... I didn't get paid for that thing
I built was about 14 hours(had to figure out PayPal's API(which one)).

I actually have few friends, most are in specific niches eg. aero industries.

Thanks for the thoughts.

edit: I didn't get paid because I'm expensive(to this person)/weird to ask
friends for money even though time/expertise costs someone something. Arguable
too can you charge for something you don't know... anyway it's still like one
of those things where $60/hr or something is too expensive for a person.

At the end though, no I have not tried hard enough, I haven't launched
anything.

------
chrismorgan
There are two more posts at
[https://exsaasperated.com/](https://exsaasperated.com/) (“who are you?” and
“our goal”) that further enlighten (though they still don’t cover _what_ will
be being built, I guess that’ll come soon).

~~~
toothbrush
Hey Chris, thanks for visiting. Author here. We actually have several projects
we've tried to launch with varying degrees of traction. One of them
([https://vistaserv.net](https://vistaserv.net)) made the rounds here a while
ago, actually. We plan to write posts about several of these projects, pick
apart what worked and didn't. And, if we come up with resources or techniques
that worked well for us, we'll be posting about those, too. Stay tuned :)

------
Thorentis
ExSaaSperated: a SaaS to help you build your own unsustainable SaaS.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Cool! I wish you luck.

I have authored one project that took ten years to reach maturity (It is now
exploding). That allowed me to iterate it, and ensure that it would be top-
quality, by the time I tossed the reins over to a new team.

It was free, though, and a labor of love[0].

I wrote another project as a "training course." It was sort of a dissertation.
The quality is pretty much "off the charts."

I had originally thought about selling it, but was told that was a non-
starter, because it was written in in PHP[1], so I simply open-sourced it as
MIT.

Nowadays, I work on client-side code (native Swift for Apple stuff). I am not
in a hurry to get back to SaaS.

I like the name of the blog.

[0] [https://medium.com/@ChrisMarshallNY/the-story-of-the-
bmlt-87...](https://medium.com/@ChrisMarshallNY/the-story-of-the-
bmlt-8759f2de467d)

[1] [https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-
projects/#ba...](https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-
projects/#baobab)

~~~
ruste
Interested in why writing it in PHP made selling it a non-starter. I'd expect
that if it provided value it wouldn't really matter much what it was written
in.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Because PHP is not "buzzword-worthy." I was told, in no uncertain terms, that
the fact it was written in PHP would mean that "no one would take it
seriously," and that I would not get anyone interested in implementing it.

Considering the lack of interest in the project, I have to agree with that
assessment.

------
czbond
My suggestion is to look outside of SaaS. Software is much easier to bootstrap
in the past decade, increasing competition (from within a customer, and
competitors). We're in the phase where every single permutation of what one
can do with software is being exhausted.

Businesses using the same concepts and business models outside of this scope
have potentially less competition, higher available market, and higher upside
purchase exit.

Someone mentioned patio11, he essentially referenced the lower exit, customer
fatigue as why he joined Stripe a few years ago

~~~
CoffeePython
> Businesses using the same concepts and business models outside of this scope
> have potentially less competition, higher available market, and higher
> upside purchase exit.

What type of businesses are you talking about here? Non-software or just non
SaaS?

~~~
czbond
My line of thinking is this: For the past decade(s), the area of growth has
been software. It has sucked in professionals into the industry who would have
been biologists, chemists, physicists, etc.

So my belief is that those areas are actually void of progress, because
'software' took the intelligence that would have been applied to other areas
simply because software often paid 1x-5x more in salary.

But now software, in both profession and product - is becoming overly
competitive, and will become top heavy with engineers 'stuck' to move forward
(in areas of innovation). One can easily see it in what the industry produces
to show our phase - the low hanging fruit is gone. Progress is much less
innovation, rather than efficiency, measurement, and tooling. Efficiency is
like pulling in an MBA to remove the cruft - one can mostly expect linear,
smaller gains.

------
hartator
> We want to start a SaaS product

That’s not how you start a company.

------
lpellis
I find it is hard to start an online company, especially if you do not already
have a large network. What happens is you build something, and then.. nothing.
I sometimes wonder just what percentage is luck, reaching that right person at
the right time. (I launched my product on producthunt today so I'm very aware
of the need for an audience )

------
chimen
I struggle to find anything "frontpage material" on that page.

------
jacob_rezi
Hello -

this is a post I wrote about scaling to 50k users without a marketing budget

[https://medium.com/rezi-resume/0-to-50-000-users-a-candid-
lo...](https://medium.com/rezi-resume/0-to-50-000-users-a-candid-look-into-
creative-growth-2774bef993af)

It might be interesting for your blog?

