
Ask HN: I need advice on my first B2B SaaS startup - oliverx0
Hello, I am a technical founder of a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company. Our solution is a very horizontal process automation platform that has the potential to adapt to a lot of different industries and company sizes with the goal to automate pretty much any business process. I do 100% of coding and my co-founder does sales. Our pricing model is $10&#x2F;user&#x2F;month.<p>We started working on the product 4 months ago, and are still in the validation phase of the idea, which is showing a lot of potential, yet this hasn&#x27;t materialized into revenue &#x2F; paying customers just yet. Trying to look objectively at our progress, it seems we have accomplished a lot in 4 months: we have a working product, 5 signed pilot agreements (to start once we finish a couple of features), and we definitely get a &#x27;wow&#x27; impression when we showcase our product. Business process consultants seem to particularly see the potential of our platform.<p>We have only 8 months of runway left, and will need to raise capital to stay afloat. My questions are:<p>- Most blogs seem to suggest that in order to raise a seed round you need around $100k in ARR. How are we supposed to get anywhere near that, considering we started working on the product only 4 months ago? Even if we go through the rest of our savings, I don&#x27;t think it is likely we can hit such a number in the next 8 months.<p>- Is the advice from these blogs for startups in a later stage? How likely are we to raise money without the kind of traction these blogs talk about?<p>- What strategy would you recommend for companies in our stage? Is friends &amp; family &#x2F; business angels our only option at this point? How much would be a good amount to raise from them? We think that if we could hire 4 - 6 people we would be able to move significantly faster. Even if we have a good product, it still needs a lot of work.<p>EDIT:<p>Product link: www.seliom.com
======
codegeek
I run a B2B SAAS company (small but established). I like to be straight and
honest and hopefully my advice will help. You are making the classic mistake
of overspending time building stuff at this point. Here is why:

You have no paying customers yet. But you are going with a "horizontal process
automation platform" which means you are very generic. When you are starting
out, it is better to find one specific niche and go hard at it. If you get
great at it, you can then expand slowly.

If you are selling to everyone, you sell to no one (unless you are amazon but
that takes 2 decades). You need to get more specific about the immediate value
your product brings and to which audience ? Every business technically can
automate their processes. But are you really selling to every business ? 99.9%
chance you will fail if you are not established already.

Few more things:

"platform that has the potential to adapt to a lot of different industries and
company sizes with the goal to automate pretty much any business process"..
You are just starting out. This wouldn't work for now. Get more specific.
Think of one industry to start with and then expand slowly.

"5 signed pilot agreements (to start once we finish a couple of
features)"..Sorry but the moment the contract is contingent upon features, it
is in trouble. The customer should have seen enough value already even though
I am not undermining it completely. This is risky for you. What if you are not
able to convince the customer that those features are now delivered. How
specific were those features ? I would count this as no customer yet. brutally
honest.

Ok, now the good news:

You have a working product. That is awesome. STOP DOING ANY MORE CODING. It is
time for sales and marketing like yesterday. What marketing and sales
strategies do you have in place if any between you and your cofounder ? When
you say "my co founder does sales", what does that mean ? Right now, you both
need to focus on Sales and Marketing.

Sorry for the long post but this hits close to my heart being a bootstrapped
SAAS founder so I thought to share my own experiences.

~~~
oliverx0
Thank you so much! Don't apologize for the long post, quite the opposite, it
is very much appreciated!! After discussing things with my co-founder, we have
defined a more specific target market we are going after (at first) and are
coming up with a proper marketing strategy to set in motion.

~~~
codegeek
That's great. Remember the keyword is "Positioning". Spend a lot of time on
your marketing website/copy and specially the Landing Page. Put yourself in
the shoes of your best clients and imagine that you landed on your own site.
Is the copy compelling and clear enough to show me value for ME within less
than 5 seconds ? Also, setup an Outbound strategy with your co founder where
he/she finds prospects through things like Linkedin etc. Rinse and repeat.

~~~
oliverx0
Thanks again, this is very helpful.

------
ericmarcos
I'd recommend you to do some consulting. I know it's counter-intuitive and
something you don't want to do forever, but at the beginning of a B2B company
it's extremely useful for 3 reasons:

1) It provides quick cash so it removes the stress of having to look for money
too soon.

2) Direct customer feedback while working with them on day to day problems. At
this point you really want to understand your customers pains so later you can
solve them with technology.

3) Initial validation/traction for your product. At the beginning, customers
will value your consulting way more than your product, but for every new
customer, try to provide less consulting and cover the rest with your product.
Check if your customers are equally happy.

~~~
fernandopj
Second it.

If right now you're bootstraped, no revenue from SaaS yet, you and your
cofounder are on your own and consulting, if related to your product, can give
you 2) and 3) but more importantly 1), at a far bigger payout than you'll get
from an early MRR.

This advice is opposed to common YC advise "don't lose focus, consulting IS
losing focus" and I agree, but right now you're not funded, not accelerated,
not incubated or anything and you're trying to finish your product. Stay
afloat and don't burn your savings to the ground.

One more advice: finish your MVP soon, and at some point, early than you
imagine, tell your first customers that's the version you're putting in
production right now and it'll be like that for a while, because waiting for
that customer(s) that "will definitely buy once we do X and Y" will KILL your
roadmap and KILL your startup. You'll be doing features after features, won't
focus on your core features and propositons, and won't discover what is your
killer feature that you must polish. That's what will keep your first
customers with you.

~~~
oliverx0
Thank you!! This is part of the reason I was hesitant to do consulting.
(Losing focus)

------
gotrythis
Hi.

$10/month for a B2B product is very very low and companies don't sell
$10/month products with sales people. It won't cover the cost of a sales
person's time, or ads for that matter. If it costs $100 to get a client, you
need them to stick for 10 months before you make anything. With an 8 month
runway, your math won't work. It only works if you have great "free" inbound
marketing and the time to wait. That's Netflix level pricing, where they have
millions of clients and had the funding to cover initial losses while growing
the user base.

My first advice is to raise your price! Either that or you need millions in
funding to build a marketing campaign and to have the runway to wait until the
CAC is covered. I would 10x your price at least, and then offer early adopter
discounts to clients who pay for a year now, not when the product is ready,
with extra off if they prepay for two years. Then each sale pays you enough to
do some development and get the next sale, as opposed to paying you enough to
eat at McDonalds once a month.

Also, list yourself on Sploda.com (no association) and update your profile
every time something happens, so they start seeing progress.

John

~~~
oliverx0
Thanks for the feedback, but this is $10/user/month. Many Saas companies
charge similar amounts and they seem to be doing fine. I appreciate your
feedback though!

~~~
gotrythis
Oh, missed that. Sorry!

------
LeonM
You need someone with sales experience.

Without knowing what business you are in, $10/month/seat sounds _way_ to
cheap. You are working with businesses here, not consumers.

At this price point you would have to sell about a 1000 seats just to pay for
yourself and your co-founder. If you want to bootstrap and hire 4-6 people,
you would need to sell a whole lot more.

If you can really 'automate pretty much any business process' as you claim,
than your product is worth much, much more than you are currently charging.

See if you can sell it at $1000/month/seat. Yes, sales will be twice as hard,
but you'll need 2 orders of magnitude less customers to stay afloat. If you
can't sell for that price, rethink your product or ditch the bootstrap idea.

~~~
oliverx0
The logic we followed when pricing it so cheap was: we are just getting
started, this will help get some revenue in quickly, etc. Will think hard and
perhaps reconsider the pricing model.

~~~
throw_14JAS
Your first customers will be sold to in person. Let them tell you when
something is too expensive (then discount to make the sale). If they aren't
commenting on your pricing, you are charging too little.

Also reconsider your pricing model. Charging per user per month will place a
limit on how many people use the service, limiting what you can learn. Get
them focusing on the value you're adding more than optimizing price. What you
learn from them will be hugely valuable.

------
persona
> 5 signed pilot agreements (to start once we finish a couple of features)

Just a word of caution here. It would be important for you and the client to
already be aligned on financial terms / paid pilot when based on feature
development. When dealing with larger organizations, it’s not unusual do see
B2B postmortems caused by ‘death by a thousand features’ where the deal never
happens. Until the organization has to pay anything you may not have a deal at
all (didn’t go through procurement, legal, etc).

~~~
oliverx0
Thanks for your advice, will take this into consideration.

------
jbob2000
Stop coding and start selling. If you have something that is up and running,
you need to get it in the hands of paying customers. Until you have actual
paying customers using your system, you will be guessing about what features
to build.

Push the people you have signed agreements with to start using the system.
Maybe they don't need the features they asked for. Push them to pay you.

Do not pursue an investor until you have actual clients or money coming in.
This is the first thing they will ask about and you will close doors if you
approach them too early.

~~~
oliverx0
Thanks, we will continue to push hard on this. I am concerned however about
staying afloat long enough to reach product-market fit. I really think we are
on to something, but the constant stress over my head of "what are we doing to
do in 8 months when we run out of runway" is concerning.

~~~
jbob2000
I think you should put on your sales hat. I know you said that you are the
"coder" and your partner is the sales person, but I think you should start
selling and supporting them. Trying cold calling and cold emailing. Use some
money for a marketing push.

Use the stress of your short runway to push you to sell. Every conversation
you have with potential customers should be about how you can get them to pay.
Talk past their requests for features or whatever, something like "This is a
great feature that we are working on for you and if you sign up for a year's
service, we'll discount you until the feature is delivered".

~~~
oliverx0
Thanks a lot for your advice, really appreciate it!

------
sharemywin
accelerators [https://thembaisdead.com/list-of-startup-accelerators-and-
in...](https://thembaisdead.com/list-of-startup-accelerators-and-incubators/)

pre-seed and/or angel investors

freelance to stay a float.

funding portals:

[https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2018/03/131246-finra-
approv...](https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2018/03/131246-finra-approved-reg-
cf-crowdfunding-portals-38-and-counting/)

[https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2018/06/134408-there-are-
no...](https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2018/06/134408-there-are-now-41-reg-
cf-crowdfunding-portals-2-years-after-jobs-act-exemption-commenced/)

~~~
oliverx0
Thank you, we also thought of accelerators as a plausible option. Part of the
reason I asked the question though, is that I am curious how others are able
to get from just an idea to VC funding. It sounds simple: build a great
product, and get enough traction. But actually doing it, even if we believe in
the product, seems to take a lot of time. Are we missing anything that other
founders do? Or are the suggestions you posted what everyone else does?

~~~
dkarras
It is usually about coming up with an idea that addresses a burning need.
Getting enough traction becomes quicker that way and provides you with the
necessary runway. So instead of getting "wow" as a response when you showcase,
it becomes more like "we need this yesterday, when can we talk?"

~~~
oliverx0
Thanks, thats a great way of putting it. Will try to aim for this more, and
iterate until we get to this.

~~~
dkarras
I mean it all depends on your runway. If you are young with very little
responsibilities and can run on noodles, with some savings you can extend your
runway and can chase more difficult to sell ideas. But if you have very
limited time (cash to survive) then you better come up with something good
because it needs to sell quick.

------
fab1an
It is difficult to provide useful feedback without much more context, but -
very generally:

\- since you are just starting out, it is likely that your pricing is too low.
Again, hard to say without understanding more about your product and market.

\- at your stage it's probably best to try and close a few customers. Having
>0 real, paying customers will help with fundraising (and maybe eliminate the
need/desire to do any fundraising, who knows?)

\- make a few extremely specific customers very very happy (instead of already
aiming for "a lot of different industries and company sizes" as you put it.)

\- pricing: once you have an idea on what type of customer to for first,
figure out what your likely customer acquisition cost will be, and extrapolate
your pricing from there. If it costs you 5k $ to get a customer, you probably
want to get at least 3x from them over their lifetime.

~~~
oliverx0
Thank you, this is very helpful and insightful.

------
tin7in
I'd recommend you to use the 8 months of runway as much as you can to build
and make revenue. When you run out of money you will get a job anyway, try to
not stress about it right now.

Sales: Try to sell what you have and listen to customers who pay you. Pilot
customers might request a lot of features that nobody wants to pay for later.

Consulting: I imagine that process automation is often implemented by
management consulting firms with deep access to the company processes. You
could try consulting clients while using your software. You will be able to
understand better their needs and generate some revenue at the same time.

------
refrigerator
> Most blogs seem to suggest that in order to raise a seed round you need
> around $100k in ARR

This isn't true at all, even in Europe! Companies regularly raise seed rounds
on significantly less progress than an MVP + 5 pilot agreements 4 months in,
so if you want to raise some money, don't let the advice from these blogs stop
you.

I've just gone through the process of raising a seed/pre-seed from a mix of
both US and EU investors — happy to chat about the experience if you're
interested: taimurabdaal@gmail.com

Also, as everyone else has said — charge more!

~~~
oliverx0
Interesting, thanks for letting me know! I will be reaching out :)

------
omarhaneef
Where are you? If you are in San Fran or Seattle, rumor has it that you can
convince an angel investor to give you a convertible note, 20% discount at a
$5mm cap without any real sales.

But every where else that I have seen, your intuition is correct:
friends/family.

This might be a good thing, because the sales is really what proves the
product. Look at the dozens of low code platforms that compete in your space
(if I understand your concept).

Good luck.

~~~
oliverx0
We are located in Europe. Thank you for your advice!

------
solresol
If you can possibly bootstrap without raising capital, do it. The QUT CAUSEE
study demonstrated that external capital doesn't improve your chances of
succeeding, it just gets you to success or failure faster.

It is much, much easier when you don't have to justify what you are doing in
your business to anyone other than yourselves. This is true even if you have
the nicest and most understanding investors.

------
aazaa
You didn't mention anything about your goals for the business. I'd start
there.

Taking funding might get you out of a short term hole, but it's a tradeoff
with costs down the road that will be paid one way or another.

> We have only 8 months of runway left, and will need to raise capital to stay
> afloat.

Depending on your goals, there could be a number of paths open to you that
don't involve outside funding.

~~~
oliverx0
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Our goals are to build a great product
and make a living. The more companies we can reach / revenue we can generate,
the better. In that sense, we would be open to going down the VC route, we
just don't know how to get to the point that a VC would be interested in
investing (how to get the traction necessary at our stage).

> Depending on your goals, there could be a number of paths open to you that
> don't involve outside funding.

Could you elaborate on this? Thank you!

~~~
aazaa
> Our goals are to build a great product and make a living.

If those are the only goals, then they might be accomplished by either joining
a company full time or consulting.

I hope you see what I'm getting at here. You'll need to be very specific about
your goals and the company's goals before enumerating options.

You've picked one option - outside funding, but don't seem to have considered
anything else.

As another example, you noted earlier:

> Our solution is a very horizontal process automation platform that has the
> potential to adapt to a lot of different industries and company sizes with
> the goal to automate pretty much any business process.

Your pricing model is $10/month. What other potential customer segments might
there be which will pay 10x of that?

In other words, getting funding from your customers rather outside investors
might be an option. You haven't said anything about what you tried in that
respect.

~~~
oliverx0
Fair enough. I quit a full-time job that paid a good salary because I was not
fulfilled with the idea of working for someone else the rest of my life. So
there is definitely more to it than the objectives I previously mentioned. I
want to make a good living, generate a lot of impact, and have the freedom to
work on my own terms. I see myself more fulfilled building a product than
freelancing too.

We have not tried to get funding from customers, but I think that perhaps the
idea of consulting + finding customers willing to pay for a solution that has
not been built yet is a good option to consider.

------
fernandopj
I think this post can give you some inspiration:
[https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-
engine...](https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-
find-product-market-fit/)

------
hartator
Marketing is the most important thing at all time every time. Where is the
link to your product?

~~~
oliverx0
Fair enough, edited post with link to product!

------
raleigh_user
id suggest proceeding with caution. these pilot agreements.....did cash
exchange hands? if no cash exchanged hands I'd treat these are essentially
worthless.

I dont mean to burst your bubble but: if you're solving a problem that is
serious enough businesses will give you money today. Usually (in my
experience) these "once you add these features" are things that wont actually
move the needle enough and you'll find yourself in continuous development of
things that won't actually produce revenue.

If no money has exchanged hands, I'd suggest telling your sales cofounder to
go get a pilot with actual money being handed over.

~~~
oliverx0
I appreciate the blunt feedback. Will definitely follow this. No cash has been
exchanged yet in the pilot agreements.

------
penetrarthur
No experience on launching B2B SaaS startups, but the video on the webpage
looks too abstract. I am not __sure__ this product is something I need. Some
real world examples would be better than Task1, Flow1. Good luck!

~~~
oliverx0
Thanks for taking the time to check it out! Feedback noted.

------
Four8Five
>a lot of different industries and company sizes with the goal to automate
pretty much any business process.

I'm going to take a different approach. Your audience so broad that you don't
know who your real customers will be. From all those "industries", you need to
pick one that will be the money maker and slowly expand to other ones.

------
barry-cotter
> Our pricing model is $10/user/month.

patio11: charge more

Seriously, unless you’re going to be selling exclusively into businesses with
over 100 employees using b your service you need to charge more. The meetings
to consider whether to use your product are going to cost the buyers more in
employee time expressed in dollars than your product will.

~~~
oliverx0
Yes, it seems a few other comments also suggest this. Will have to consider
this. Really appreciate your feedback.

------
leonroy
I too would recommend consulting until your product can pay the bills. If you
can find consulting clients who can potentially benefit from your app so much
the better.

Clients who commit to pilots or trials without committing cash are not worth
anything. You can offer fully refundable trials, but always take some sort of
deposit.

Yes - friends and family rounds are a good source and I'd imagine common
source of funds for early stage startups. It's as much a part of your network
as the clients and employers you work with over the years. It almost goes
without saying that you should only ask those who can afford to lose their
investment. Awkward family functions can ensue if you lost Uncle Joe's much
needed $10k savings pot.

Cold email can be useful (look at Steli Efti's e-books and tips on this
subject). This was helpful to me when starting out and helped me find
customers _before_ committing to build my product:
[https://youtu.be/H0f0o5-liyM](https://youtu.be/H0f0o5-liyM)

Everyone you pitch - especially in enterprise - is time poor. Also when they
commit to buying from a new startup they are putting their reputation at their
firm on the line. Their natural inclination will be to defer the decision if
they're interested. So if they gave any kind of indication that your product
might be useful keep pinging them politely and semi-regularly - preferably
with useful product updates which could meet their needs - until you get
either a yes or a no. Introductions, warm referrals or partnering with a
bigger vendor who can vouch for you can shorten the sales cycle significantly
for enterprise.

Avoid falling prey to potential customers saying they'll bite if you give them
'feature X'. Do make a note of the conversations and feature requests though -
sometimes if the use case crops up more than once it might be useful to
consider adding to your backlog.

Consider blogging about what you guys do, how you do it, why you do it - this
will help build social proof for not just the product but you. If the product
itself doesn't work out all these articles are a nice thing to fall back on if
you have to go back to full-time work.

See everything as a learning opportunity but know when to delegate. As a coder
I wasn't very good at cold emailing or prospecting so I put everything into
learning that skill. I now try and delegate it when possible. Similarly if
you're not great at understanding Google Analytics etc. learn it - but know
when to get a specialist in to help do a few days work for you.

Upwork is great for finding skilled freelancers to parachute in and do some
work. Keep a list of all the top notch talent you work with, it's quite
possible the best thing to come out of your venture is the network you build.

Finally take care of yourself. Mentally and physically. Know that even if this
goes belly-up you are not your product - your product didn't work out - you
however showed a lot of initiative, courage and smarts to get something new,
that didn't exist before out the door and onto the market.

Good luck!

~~~
oliverx0
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I really appreciate it. This line
particularly resonated:

> Clients who commit to pilots or trials without committing cash are not worth
> anything. You can offer fully refundable trials, but always take some sort
> of deposit.

------
throw3982
To everyone saying they should do consulting, how can they they keep the IP
rights then?

If they consult for another company, wouldn't that company own the rights?

From what I've seen, not many companies are willing to pay consulting fees and
give up ownership of the work.

~~~
detaro
If you do consulting around a product, it's typical to exclude improvements to
the actual product from any rights assignment clauses, potentially in exchange
for better terms. So e.g. any integration on customer-side would be owned by
the customer (or grant the customer lots of rights to it), but changes made to
the service itself would not, but potentially be cheaper/come with included
credits to use the service/...

~~~
throw3982
But in this case their customers want specific features that would be
integrated in their own SaaS product.

How would that work, am I misunderstanding something?

~~~
detaro
Not necessarily they same customers as the ones that already have made feature
demands (ideally you'd find more while doing this!), or if them, then consult
on the entire integration, not just the features in the app they requested.

~~~
throw3982
I get it the consulting on the integration but on the features, the first
customers that request a particular feature would own the code for it.

~~~
detaro
No, that you would exclude in the contract so you keep it. If and to what
terms of course depends on the specific case, as a new startup you'll have to
give something.

------
brianwawok
A total runway of 12 months feels short if going enterprise. Though $10 price
feels small business. What is your target business size?

Is there anything you can do to stretch the runway to 24?

I don’t think you want to raise a new round with 0-$40 in MRR.

~~~
oliverx0
Our platform is actually aimed at small and medium sized businesses, hence our
pricing model. Having said that, we feel the platform has the potential to go
after the enterprise as well, and could adjust pricing accordingly. I do think
we will need to stretch runway, hence my question. I was wondering if outside
investors were an option, but based on other comments, I am not so sure.

~~~
jdtbuchanan
Without knowing the exact product I would suggest tightening up who your
target market is. Generally, a product that can be for any industry of any
size makes it really hard to focus. Start with a specific subset and it will
make your sales outreach a lot more targeted and keep you ultra focused. For
example instead of it's aimed at "small, medium and enterprise clients in any
industry" think "local service companies in the US with 30-75 employees". It
sounds like you might not have that ideal target market nailed down yet. Good
luck!

~~~
oliverx0
Thank you! We have definitely been struggling with this. Will try to find a
more specific niche.

------
tnolet
I’m very similar to you. B2B SaaS. Bootstrapped. Hitting 50k ARR right now.

\- 1 year is nothing. Do consulting up to two years.

\- screw partnerships, pilots. They add nothing.

\- Start blogging and evangelizing

\- Do anything feasible to get 10 customers. Worry about pricing after that.

~~~
oliverx0
Understood, thank you!

------
palidanx
I would suggest reading the book 'Predictable Revenue'
[https://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-
Practice...](https://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practices-
Salesforce-com-ebook/dp/B005ERYEGU/) . It will help in defining your marketing
segments and how to reach them.

When I first started my saas, I incorrectly didn't start by gunning for paying
customers. You could make a cool product, but your goal is to make a cool
product people will actually pay for.

The second lesson I learned was not charging enough, but once you actually get
people in your paywall, those are things to refine later.

~~~
oliverx0
Thank you for the book recommendation, will take a look!

------
ghiculescu
My story is very similar to yours. B2B SaaS, bootstrapped (still no capital
raised after 7 years), even the price is the same. We had 4 co-founders, I
wrote the code. Here's a brain dump of things we learned:

When we started we were all fresh out of (or still finishing) university and
had fairly small savings. Definitely not a year of runway. So we found jobs
that were relatively easy, well paying, and minimally distracting. Our goal
was to earn only enough to live off, so while we kept the jobs we had infinite
runway.

In my case I reached out to one of my uni lecturers and convinced him to add
me to the tutoring team for one of his first year programming subjects. It was
super easy content, the pay was pretty good, and I didn't have to think about
it at all when I wasn't working on it. The other guys took other odd jobs
around the university, for similar reasons. I am less a fan of the consulting
strategy - it feels too easy for that to take over your focus.

Our internal goal was 100K ARR within our first year. If we did that, we'd all
quit our other jobs and go full time on this, and start paying ourselves. We
got pretty close to that target but went all in anyway.

If you can hit 100K ARR and keep your costs of living low, you won't need to
raise a seed round. I don't know anything about you - we had just finished uni
so we were in a good position to live cheap. We would make 100 meals for $100
and eat a lot of chilli con carne + rice:
[https://i.imgur.com/9BtnOkP.png](https://i.imgur.com/9BtnOkP.png)

It was 6 months from first code written, to first customer paying us. And then
about 9 months from there to 100K ARR. Our typical customer at the time was
worth about $200/month ($2.4k ARR). Don't lose hope, you might be just on the
cusp of some cash. The advice about charging more in this thread is bad advice
without knowing how many users each business you sell to will have. In our
case it was at least 20 (we sell a whole of business product, so it was
defined by company size), which was totally sufficient.

We didn't hire anyone until we'd been going for about 18 months. Because we
couldn't afford it. But in hindsight it helped. If you hire 4-6 devs now
you're going to spend all your time managing them instead of learning what
product you are building. Learning to be a manager takes a long time and
you'll probably be bad at it at first - particularly if you'd rather be
coding. Anecdotally I think we had a year lag from when we first hired a few
extra devs, to when we got a significant increase in product output.

Don't do pilots. If you are building a feature for someone, make them sign a
contract to actually buy the product contingent on that feature. Pilots give
people an easy option to not buy after you've done a lot of free work.

Don't raise money from people other than customers if you don't have to.

My email is in my profile, reach out if you want to chat.

~~~
oliverx0
This is very inspiring and I really appreciate the time you took to write your
story. I will be reaching out soon. Thanks again!

------
saluki
Don't take/pursue funding focus on your product and getting signups. You
probably don't need funding.

I second the recommendations of taking on some consulting projects to extend
your runway.

Start listening to startupsfortherestofus.com, start in the archives.

Check out applying for the next round of tinyseed.com if you aren't profitable
when getting close to the end of your runway.

build your saas is another good podcast for inspiration.

Oh, speaking of inspiration.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY)
@DHH startup school 2008

Good luck growing your SaaS.

~~~
oliverx0
Thank you! I did try applying to tinyseed, but might have been too early. Will
have to try again after getting some more traction.

