
HumanPredictions – Bootstrapping a SaaS app to $18k/mo in under a year - csallen
https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/humanpredictions?utm_source=hacker-news&utm_campaign=interview-promotion&utm_medium=social
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hiou
He basically gets a spot in the family business which he uses as a launchpad
to creating a SaaS product. Come on, this title is so far off from reality. No
problem with what he did and it sounds like he does a great job, but let's at
least keep the titles from indiehackers somewhat accurate. It gives a lot of
people thinking about starting their own company really unrealistic
expectations.

~~~
gregorymichael
As someone who has known Elliot from the Chicago scene for the last ~10 years,
I have to push back on this.

Elliot hustled his ass off doing his own thing, working recruiting for
Groupon, working as one of the founding employees of DevBootcamp Chicago to
get graduates gigs (and doing so with great success), and then back to his own
recruiting before launching Human Predictions based on feedback from his
clients and experiences.

He became, at least in my circles, the most trusted recruiter amongst
developers. Many thought of him as more of an "agent" than a recruiter.
Someone you could grab coffee with every six months who'd keep you in mind if
the perfect gig came up. I referred friends to him all the time without
concern that he'd spam them, hard-sell them, put them in whatever spot that
was open just to reap the commission. He's always had the developer's interest
in mind first and foremost.

I understand the sentiment that these stories can sometimes over-simplify the
journey. Yes, he had the privilege of learning the family business at a young
age. But it's not as if "having a dad that does X" makes it a trivial effort
to launch a SaaS that does X. In Elliot's case, there was at least ten years
of self-motivated hustle in-between.

~~~
hiou
Absolutely agree with you and my apologies if my comment made it out to sound
like I felt like he did not work for what he has accomplished.

 _> No problem with what he did and it sounds like he does a great job_

My comment was about the indiehackers title and link. It seems to be a pretty
common occurrence for that site to greatly exaggerate the 0 to $X and this
article is unfortunately no exception. Much respect to Elliot for all he has
accomplished.

~~~
csallen
IH founder here. Why do you think the title is exaggerated? He did start his
business less than one year ago.

Of course, any business depends on the skillset and knowledge that its
founders started to build previous to its founding, but how do you put a start
date on that? To build a company, you need business skills, a network, money,
programming knowledge... for that you probably need professional experience...
for that you need the ability to read and write... etc. Where do you draw the
line? Everything always depends on what came before it. People get this. They
aren't naive enough to believe that founders are born on day 1 of their
companies with no previous life experience or knowledge of the world.

I agree it's dishonest to refer to a 5-year-old business as "an overnight
success" as often happens, but how exactly is it misleading to call a 1-year
old-business a 1-year-old business?

------
kpwagner
Wow! Maybe just me, hearing about a company bootstrapping to success instead
of raising large rounds of financing is all the more inspiring.

~~~
dave_sullivan
80% of the inc 500, the fastest growing private companies, haven't raised
outside capital.

~~~
thenaturalist
Do you have a source for that?

~~~
dave_sullivan
Some inc article I saw on HN with Sam Altman talking about how important
startups are to the economy, couldn't find exact one.

~~~
gexla
Here is a link to the HN discussion to the article I assume you are thinking
about. The wording was a bit different, which may have been why you didn't
find it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642)

~~~
dave_sullivan
That's the one. The exact quote:

> Only twenty per cent of the Inc. 500, the five hundred fastest-growing
> private companies, raised outside funding.

------
0xmohit
The underlying assumption seems to be that everyone uses
LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter. While it would be largely true, not _everyone_ uses
those. What would your tool say about them?

~~~
dpick
Unfortunately because we are just looking at public data online (including
Github, StackOverflow, and Meetup) if people don't use those services (or
contribute to open source) we won't discover them or be able to a make a
prediction about their likeliness to leave.

~~~
0xmohit
Maybe you should start looking at Keybase [0] too. It might help you link
personal websites, github, twitter, ...

[0] [https://keybase.io/](https://keybase.io/)

~~~
dpick
Thanks! We do actually use Keybase for discovering social accounts as well.

------
shostack
I noticed the UTM tags you had on this link.

How is Hacker News performing as part of your interview promotion?

~~~
csallen
Just started using UTM query params a few days ago, so I'll have more data
when I write my monthly review for November! But in October, direct links from
HN accounted for around half of my total traffic. More details here:
[https://goo.gl/FMxdpc](https://goo.gl/FMxdpc).

------
dpick
Hey everyone, I'm the CTO and Co-Founder of HumanPredictions happy to answer
any questions anyone has about the article or the company in general!

~~~
garysieling
I'm curious if you've received feedback from software developers on what the
experience is like being recruiting with your tool.

The agency spam approach you mention is irritating, but I would imagine that
if you're correctly predicting when someone is looking to jump that would be
less of a problem.

~~~
dpick
We actually do have a significantly better response from developers both
because they're being reached out to at the right time, but also because a lot
of our users are CTO's and Engineering managers who by the fact that they are
technical can have a much better conversation with prospects.

~~~
garysieling
Cool, that makes sense. I think a big part of the spam problem is mass
template emails, so if your customers are emailing people directly it would be
much better.

~~~
dpick
Completely agree, one of our core goals from the beginning of HumanPredictions
has been to kill mass template emails.

------
hueving
Would it be possible for a dev to see their own prediction (to prove ownership
maybe leverage oauth of one of the sites: github, linkedin, etc)?

~~~
dpick
We don't currently support that through the application, but it is on our
roadmap and something we very much want to build.

For now though if you reach out to me at david@humanpredictions.io I'd be
happy to let you know what our current prediction for you is.

------
vsloo
Great story and many great lessons. Being "intentional about the people you
work with" is a great piece of advice and one that we usually like to stress
too when talking to aspiring entrepreneurs. We wrote about some of this too in
a previous HN thread [https://betterthansure.com/answer-hn-growing-a-side-
project-...](https://betterthansure.com/answer-hn-growing-a-side-
project-30f17f6a10da#.ntvqg0q7z).

------
desireco42
This is really cool idea, I like how it uses data to predict behavior.

I have few recruiters that always hit me around the time when I get a little
more free. They don't have this tool, just their spidey sense, but I bet they
would like something like this.

~~~
0xmohit
I heard of such tools a couple of years back. So I'm sure those exist.

How well do those work if an entirely different issue.

~~~
desireco42
Well, if people use twitter, github etc, they will be findable and their trace
can be used to predict if they are 'jumping ship'. It is common to start
blogging around the time you are looking to change work for example.

------
soheil
Sounds like very similar to my start up NetIn[1] We also look at public
profile updates and other signals to tell if a candidate is on the move. We
also got to HN frontpage last night for our candidate job portal[2]. If there
are people who would like to talk about what we've accomplished so far feel
free to reach me at s@netin.co

[1] [https://netin.co](https://netin.co) [2]
[https://netin.co/candidates](https://netin.co/candidates)

------
philip1209
It's great to hear about your success!

For discussion's purposes, it's worth pointing out that there is a venture-
funded company that is doing the same thing (but with a big data science
team):
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/entelo](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/entelo)

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iamleppert
Now just let me come up with a product I can sell to developers that
camouflages them to this product by simulating activity on these sites...

I wonder what their next line of business is at this company...selling this
data to current employers to see when their employee is about to jump ship?

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gizmo
This type of data mining of personal information feels kind of icky to me.

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k2xl
I wrote a similar tool for recruiters (only analyzes LinkedIn profiles that
you are viewing). Mine is significantly cheaper at $9 per month:
[https://recap.work](https://recap.work)

~~~
0xmohit
Your site redirects (301) from HTTPS to HTTP!

