
Ask HN: What's it like to build Saas business? - selmat
Recently I had discussion with my 3rd party business partner about idea to build SaaS application suite for SMB. I started digging about everything - feasibility, technical options, requirements, limitations, business models, payment models, etc.<p>I have found blogpost : https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saastr.com&#x2F;if-youre-going-to-do-a-saas-start-up-you-have-to-give-it-24-months&#x2F;<p>I am wondering what are your real world experience? How long it take to build MVP, functional product, get into green numbers? What about further customer support, bug-fixes, security, SLA? Is it worth to spend so much time and effort if i don&#x27;t have huge savings to focus only on this thing? Especially if my expertise is somewhere else and don&#x27;t have real-world experience with SaaS operation? (Too much questions in one paragraph)
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patio11
I ran two SaaS companies through sale (small-scale both times), consulted in
~20, and spend way too much time talking to other SaaSy folks. Know that
you're asking a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string question, because the answers
here vary _tremendously_ if you're building a small one-man operation versus
building e.g. the next Salesforce.

MVP: The purpose of an MVP is collecting signals of interest that, if you had
a better software product available along the forecast vector, people would
pay money. MVPs can be as simple as mockups or a few sentences of description
if people in your audience already trust you. If you want something which
demonstrates core functionality, that can be done in a day to a few weeks.

Functional product: You can reasonably ship code people will pay for in 2~6
weeks on the short end; a lot of people spend much, much longer, either
because they're doing it part time, because their product is inherently
complicated (e.g. infrastructure), or because (most commonly) they waited too
long to ship.

"Getting into the green": Welcome to running a business! You now have to start
getting precise about ideas like "green." If you simply mean "product covers
its costs", the cost of running a SaaS app is plausibly under $200 a month, so
you can very easily cover the costs by selling it to 5 people before launching
it. The more interesting question is "How long does it take to get to ~$10k in
monthly recurring revenue?", which is generally enough such that you can
devote your fulltime effort to the business going forward. The mean time to
that milestone among my friends is ~18 months; the shortest ever was almost
$30k at the end of ~4 weeks and I took ~4 years to sustainably hit $10k/month
myself in one business. (There's a story there.)

* What about further customer support, bug-fixes, security, SLA*

Less trouble than you're modeling them as being. Marketing and sales are hard;
if you can successfully sell it to people _and_ build it, none of the above
are beyond your capabilities.

 _Is it worth to spend so much time and effort if i don 't have huge savings
to focus only on this thing?_

I think the plurality of my friends with SaaS companies started them as side
ventures w/o having sufficient savings to buy their full-time attention from
day one. This is less common on the investment seeking track, though they have
a pack-it-in-if-we-don't-raise-a-seed-round-after-N-weeks built into their
model.

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djs070
Hi Patrick. Thanks for the ongoing great info you provide. Do you have any
thoughts on how a desktop/native deployment impacts these timeframes or
figures?

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brudgers
If you have not already looked at it, it's probably worth looking at Patio11's
(Patrick McKenzie's) website and reading his blog and listening to his
podcasts. [http://www.kalzumeus.com/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/)

