
How We Bootstrapped Our SaaS Startup to Ramen Profitability - a13n
https://blog.canny.io/saas-startup-ramen-profitability/
======
jorts
Tracking feature requests is a huge pain for most companies. A few pieces of
feedback after dealing with this for years:

The Customer Support teams of your customers are going to be one of the main
channels for capturing feature requests. We use Zendesk and have custom fields
for categorizing and sub-categorizing requests along with a brief description.
We do this so that the PMs don't have to read the entire Support ticket if one
sentence is about the feature request out of 10 pages of text. If you could
build an integration with Zendesk and other major ticketing tools that tie
support tickets directly into your product it'd be an easy way to get your
customers to have a huge influx of important data.

Sales will also provide lots of feature requests as they are also talking to
many customers. You have to make this as seamless and as easy as possible
otherwise they won't use it. Setting up a Salesforce integration is probably
your only way to do that.

Tracking feature requests for strategic customers need to be treated
differently than for other customers. There needs to be a system to categorize
tickets by customer cohorts. If you can tie ARR, deal-breakers or other
metrics to feature requests, that will help PMs prioritize them.

For your customers, publicly exposing feature requests is a double-edged
sword. You're going to capture a lot of feedback. Some of it is good, some is
bad. Not taking action on customer feature requests can build negative
sentiment in the community.

~~~
a13n
Hey, thanks so much for this. Zendesk + intercom + salesforce integrations,
plus segmentation (by MRR, etc) are all on the roadmap.

Feedback that internal teams track (opposed to users voting) is kept internal,
so users can't see stuff that sales/support adds. A few companies are using us
entirely internally.

The internal use case is definitely interesting but then we lose the nice
organic channel.

Thanks again for your insight! Really appreciate it. Say hi on our intercom
chat sometime.

~~~
kamilszybalski
Nice product, just gave it a quick try. Some off the cuff thoughts,

\- Consider a Zapier integration, might save you some time and make
delivery/adoption faster

\- In step 3 of onboarding you ask me to share a url with team members. Can I
make this url private/sso? If yes, make the discovery of that immediate. If
no, that's going to be a blocker for any internal adoption.

\- PMs tend to organize their internal priorities and roadmaps in specific
ways. I like that I can sort by "coming soon" "done", etc, in your list BUT,
what I really want is a consistent visual delivery, this seems to usually be a
kanban style board.

\- Internal teams and stakeholders need to understand why what you're working
on right now is the single most important thing that the teams need to be
working on. It's important that this assessment criteria is clearly
communicated, visually, and understand.

~~~
a13n
Hey, thanks for trying it out!

We have a Zapier integration! It's currently in beta, try it out:
[https://zapier.com/developer/invite/59728/b66bec80febabe914b...](https://zapier.com/developer/invite/59728/b66bec80febabe914b0bf0c507abb61b/)

Kanban coming soon. [https://feedback.canny.io/feature-requests/p/roadmap-
view](https://feedback.canny.io/feature-requests/p/roadmap-view)

> Can I make this url private/sso?

What exactly do you mean? Would love to chat more. Would you mind hopping on
our live chat sometime?

> It's important that this assessment criteria is clearly communicated,
> visually, and understand.

CRM integrations (Salesforce, Intercom) coming soon so you can tie monthly
spend to those votes.

------
AndrewWarner
Stop what you’re doing and link this post to your product.

Multiple times.

The logo at the top should take me to your product’s homepage, not your blog.

The article should link to it, every time you mention it.

In the end, recommend that I go see the product you mentioned.

I loved this article but realized I never bothered to see your site. It didn’t
occur to me.

~~~
a13n
Interesting, we actually consciously didn't promote because of your interview
with Eoghan. He said the more you try to make content convert, the worse it
does.

The blog post wasn't about us getting customers, it was about helping people
startup.

We still got 25% of blog traffic to our homepage anyway. Would you still make
the change?

~~~
DanBC
I'd politely ask that you have one link to your product page, and the blog
logo is a good place to put this link.

When I click Start I'd logo I expect to be taken to their product website, not
to the root of their blog.

I have nothing to support my opinion, and maybe most people use the web
differently to me.

~~~
dhimes
I'm with you. If I read a blog and am interested in the product, please don't
make me work to find it. I _expect_ that clicking on the logo will take me to
the product website.

------
evaneykelen
Tip: add a link somewhere on your blog to
[https://canny.io](https://canny.io). I had to manually enter the URL in a new
tab to look at your site. For some strange reason many blogs forget to include
a link to the Real Thing.

~~~
hanley
This drives me nuts. I don't understand why it's so commonly missed.

~~~
osrec
Lol yes. I've often seen the logo on a blog post link to the blog homepage
rather than the product homepage. Sort of defeats the purpose of the blog post
(which is presumably to drive traffic to the product)!

~~~
marksomnian
On the contrary, if I'm done reading a blog post and I want to read more from
that blog, it infuriates me to no end when clicking the logo on the top sends
me to a product landing page and I have to hunt around to find my way back to
the blog.

~~~
sumedh
The click that goes to the product landing page is more valuable than the
click that goes to the blog main page.

------
gameguy43
Sales funnel feedback: I want to know what this will look like on my website
to my users. That screenshot on the top isn't quite enough--I'm not sure which
parts of that are my website and which are your widget. Is your widget always
a big brick like that, or does it collapse into a little icon (like intercom +
others)? Why not just put the actual widget on your homepage?

So I started the trial setup, but I bounced at step 1/3\. Didn't want to write
5 feature ideas. And I still don't know what it'll look like on my site.

(Small side thing: I wanted to use the sample "board" name that you gave, but
I couldn't just hit enter--I had to re-type it into the text field.)

Good luck! Looks interesting, from what I can understand so far.

~~~
a13n
Hey! This is great feedback, thank you. The widget is always a full page.
Here's a public example: [https://kitsu.io/feedback/feature-
requests](https://kitsu.io/feedback/feature-requests)

We've heard that "small side thing" a few times before so we'll fix that soon.

Happy to answer any other questions on our intercom chat!

~~~
martinml
I know it's my fault and probably obvious but that site doesn't load on Chrome
if you have disabled third-party cookies. You might want to show an
informative message instead of an infinite spinner :(

[https://www.chromium.org/for-testers/bug-reporting-
guideline...](https://www.chromium.org/for-testers/bug-reporting-
guidelines/uncaught-securityerror-failed-to-read-the-localstorage-property-
from-window-access-is-denied-for-this-document)

~~~
a13n
Known problem: [https://feedback.canny.io/bug-reports/p/fix-widget-for-
users...](https://feedback.canny.io/bug-reports/p/fix-widget-for-users-with-
third-party-cookies-disabled)

------
buf
I have raised money for a company and I have boostrapped a company. Both have
their perks, but bootstrapping makes me feel so damn proud. Here are my
numbers: [https://i.imgur.com/rm5ChOD.png](https://i.imgur.com/rm5ChOD.png)

Solo founder. Saas product. 70k users all word of mouth.

Congrats to the folks at Canny.

~~~
jlangenauer
For those asking where these graphs are coming from, that's ChartMogul
([https://chartmogul.com](https://chartmogul.com)). We're free if you've got
less than $10K MRR!

~~~
a13n
We use ChartMogul at Canny. It's a huge relief not to have to keep track of
customers + revenue + churn in a spreadsheet. And it's FREE for under $10k
MRR. Such a no brainer.

------
amasad
It's been awesome to follow Canny's story from the start. The founders faced
incredible skepticism from "experts" early on but they soldiered on and
against all odds they're making it!

Repl.it has been one of the earliest users of the product and we couldn't be
happier. It's embedded here:
[https://repl.it/feedback](https://repl.it/feedback)

~~~
photonios
Quick piece of feedback (and yea, I'll submit it), is that when I go to
repl.it/feedback, the only visual clue that I am on the feedback page is the
URL. Maybe it should say "REPL.IT Feedback" in the header, as a visual clue?

~~~
amasad
Ah thanks, will do

------
nathan_f77
Congrats, that's awesome! I think $3,500 per month might be ramen-profitable
in the Bay Area, but that's pretty much retirement money if you're living in
Spain or Thailand.

But seriously, that MRR graph is very impressive!

~~~
pascalxus
Congrats on getting out of the Bay Area. Getting out the Bay area is a like a
million dollar starting bonus!

~~~
a13n
We'll be back someday. :)

------
ivanzhao
Such a humane way to describe your startup experience. I really enjoyed
reading it!

I also noticed in a linked article that you are using Notion. (I am the co-
founder). Happy to give you guys a free account to help you bootstrap. You
should receive a message from us shortly ;-)

~~~
davidpelayo
I would be interested on that, btw

~~~
ivanzhao
Sure. Sign up Notion ([https://notion.so](https://notion.so)), reply with your
account email down here, and we'll hook you up with a free Pro account.

We'll check this thread periodically till this Friday EOD.

~~~
dubed1505
Hi ivanzhao, Looks like a promising product. Just signed up
vincent@dubedout.eu

------
vmarsy
Interesting post! About living nomad, is there any pain points regarding the
management of the company from anywhere?

I read the post linked[1] in this blog post which talks about day to day life,
even if work-life balance can be tough, it must be awesome for you guys! But
what about administrative paperwork or hurdles (IRS, legal mail, and whatnot)?
Was there anything different due to the fact that you guys are digital nomads?

[1] [https://blog.canny.io/building-startup-digital-
nomads/](https://blog.canny.io/building-startup-digital-nomads/)

~~~
a13n
Right now we're just 2 co-founders. We don't have employees, investors, or an
office. So there isn't much management that we can't do online.

We talk to our customers using Intercom and email. Most of them are in the US,
so being in Europe works well.

I don't think we could go to Asia because we'd be sleeping while the US is
working. Or we'd have to pull off a crazy sleep schedule.

We use a family's place for our business address. Filing taxes isn't any
different really.

------
ankyth27
Superb write-up Andrew, I would recommend you to read this awesome book called
Traction, it has definitive ways to market any digital product. Would love to
read more about your journey as you progress, keep us posted.

~~~
a13n
Hey there, I have read Traction! Definitely a great way to brainstorm channels
that might work for your product. Revolutionary when it came out.

Marketing is hard. I think we had a good day!

~~~
ankyth27
Awesome, I wish you get most sign ups today than ever before. Best of luck.

------
shusson
Happy Canny user here. Do you have any plans to introduce a free tier (or
almost free) plan? We have a low amount of traffic and compared to the other
services we currently get for <$10 a month (hosting, auth0, sentry, github)
I'm struggling to justify the cost we are currently spending on Canny.

~~~
a13n
Hey Shane, we have toyed with the idea of introducing a free tier, but aren't
100% sure if that's the right move for us.

Would love to chat more, want to message us on Intercom whenever you've got a
few minutes?

~~~
overcast
Offering a free tier, just invites freeloaders, who are THE WORST end users to
deal with. They are the most demanding, and will tie up valuable support time.
Do not do free anything for SaaS. If you're product is good enough, make them
pay for it.

~~~
a13n
You should tell that to Slack! Clearly didn't work out for them. /s

In all seriousness, ChartMogul wrote a great post about how freemium can work
for SaaS [https://blog.chartmogul.com/saas-pricing-two-sides-
freemium/](https://blog.chartmogul.com/saas-pricing-two-sides-freemium/)

------
franciscop
I am originally from Valencia! I'll post this into the Slack tech group there.

~~~
a13n
Cool! We're currently staying in Ruzafa and loving it. One of our favorite
cities in Europe so far.

~~~
franciscop
How long will have you been in Valencia/will you stay around? I can give some
tips if you are interested, both about just nice living/food places or the
tech community: public@francisco.io

~~~
a13n
We've been here for a few weeks, and are leaving in a week. Headed back to
North America for an undetermined amount of time. We'll definitely be back
though! Valencia has been great.

This cafe, Cafe ArtySana, is one of my favorite spots to work in the whole
world! Great coffee + food, great wifi, plenty of outlets, and they don't mind
if you work all day.

------
CodeWriter23
I'm guessing by the result I obtained trying to read your post (see below),
that somewhere in your article there's a paragraph about running the entire
operation on a single 2GB DigitalOcean Instance.

[https://imgur.com/a/7vCyx](https://imgur.com/a/7vCyx)

~~~
a13n
Actually it was a 500MB instance, upgrading to 2GB now. Hang tight.

~~~
CodeWriter23
Funny how I have been recently thinking we will need a way to open up feature
requests to our customers for a bootstrapped project I'm working on. We can't
take the $50/mo. rate just yet. Canny will be in when we get there.

We're probably not ready for this just yet. We're currently in a good place
with a) solving a problem we have and b) a couple dozen paying customers who
are helping us see the cracks in our MVP. Some of whom we can work with face-
to-face. That's huge considering our target market isn't the best at
articulating the challenges they are facing, so watching them use the app is a
great insight vector. It's also really motivating to hang out with people who
are excited about using our product.

~~~
a13n
We've toyed with the idea of introducing a limited free tier. Shoot us a
message on Intercom and we may be able to make something work!

------
sulam
Currently HN DDOS'd, I do not have an archive link. :/

~~~
a13n
Oh no! Looking into it.

~~~
a13n
Fixed!

~~~
sulam
Thank you, and now that I can read it -- nice post. I like how you covered a
lot of the "wow that didn't work at all" stages. You didn't downplay it, which
I see a lot of posts of this sort do.

~~~
a13n
Thanks! It was 1.5 years of making no money, so it's definitely been a
grind... Feels good that something's working, and would love to save others
the trouble we went through!

------
tixocloud
Congratulations on your early success and thanks for sharing your story. It's
inspiring and I love your storytelling style. I don't think people realize
that it takes awhile to get everything started and your timeline/decisions
clearly show that.

It's also a great product for us but as a fellow bootstrapper, the price range
is out of our reach at the moment. We will be looking into when get more
scale.

We're building a simple CRM tool that tracks calls, meetings and all kinds of
details for companies. It would be interesting if you already have an API
available that we can integrate with.

If you're ever in Edinburgh/Glasgow, be happy to take you and your significant
other out for a coffee/beer.

~~~
a13n
Yeah! Literally 18 months of making $0. Such a grind. At some point you just
decide you're tired of making $0 and do anything and everything to not do that
anymore.

Reach out on our Intercom and we may be able to make something work.

Would love to visit Scotland! Probably next year when it's warmer again. :)

~~~
tixocloud
Can't seem to figure out how to contact you on Intercom :(

I don't blame you - it can get a little bit chilly in Scotland.

------
FidelCashflow
S!=aS. I can't think of many instances where I'd pay a recurring fee for the
use of a piece of code. Code to me is an end-product, meaning, I buy it then I
own it in perpetuity. I still have my copy of XP from the Paleozoic era but
it's still mine and if I choose, I could spin it up. I can only think of two
instances where I'd agree S[is]aS; signing up for a full class, and buying
tickets. I thought both of these were clever ideas but I'd still be hard
pressed to agree to pay anybody else for this "service."

That said, hat's off to those of you who make this work.

------
Tehchops
I'm curious if the $3,500 figure is raw monthly revenue, profit, or monthly
take home for the two founders.

If it's raw corporate revenue, then their take home should be _much_ less than
that after taxes.

~~~
a13n
Hey! Author here. It's monthly revenue. You get to write off expenses from
your revenue before paying taxes. Also for our bracket, tax is only 15%.

~~~
Tehchops
Thanks for the reply!

Is the corporation listed as a C-Corp? Doesn't the business have to pay taxes
on profits, then pay employment taxes on what it pays to employees as well, on
top of what the employee must pay?

~~~
robterrin
C corps pay taxes on operating profits which are gross revenues (that is,
revenue less cost of goods sold, which for software companies is usually 0)
minus operating expenses. Operating expenses include salaried employees. Then
you take out interest from any debt you have and pay a percentage on that
towards taxes, to get your net profit. Net profit is the amount available to
actually take home for shareholders. Once you make your distributions to
shareholders, you are left with retained earnings.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_profit#Example](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_profit#Example)

------
jaoued
Congratulations Andrew. Really great to hear about your journey thus far.

You're most welcome to come & visit us in Barcelona, Casablanca or London.

NB: your FB and linkedin links at the end of your post do not work.

~~~
a13n
Thanks! Just removed those FB + LinkedIn links... Dunno why they were broken.

Will keep you in mind if we visit one of those cities. :)

------
artur_makly
recycled idea. this reminds me a lot of UserVoice
[https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/13/uservoice-brings-its-
custo...](https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/13/uservoice-brings-its-customer-
feedback-service-to-facebook-pages/)

and how they cleverly highjacked the brand’s main users.

~~~
artur_makly
actually i was wrong. i was thinking of GetSatisfaction. remember those guys?

re: recycling ideas i guess if u are just starting on your first startup and
just want to feel things out for the first time — its worth the toil.

but life is short. better to focus on real innovate

~~~
Kiro
What is your point?

------
jomkr
I may be in Madrid next week, fancy a drink/bouldering sesh? I'm a 25 year old
Amazon SDE from the UK.

~~~
a13n
Would love to, but we'll be in Valencia for a few more days then leaving
Europe. For now.

Sidenote: have you climbed at the castle in London? That was such a cool gym!

------
nickporter
Congrats guys :)

Also good call on the name change!

~~~
a13n
Right??! I can't hear Product Pains without cringing.

------
gnufied
Clicking on "See Board" doesn't do anything on Chrome+Linux.

~~~
a13n
Looks like a bug! Thanks for the report. Will get that fixed asap.

~~~
a13n
Fixed.

------
noir_lord
Chrome says your site is using SFUI (which is beautiful) so I did some
digging, it looks like that is the Apple San Francisco font, how the hell did
you get a license for that as web font?.

~~~
a13n
Download them for free here:
[https://developer.apple.com/fonts/](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/)

------
Kiro
This is very meta but I want to post a feature request to Canny about allowing
anonymous features requests but I can't since I don't want to create an
account (hence the request).

~~~
a13n
A lot of our customers are SaaS companies. To them, a feature request is
worthless if they don't know who gave it. We don't plan on supporting
anonymous feedback until we expand our focus to consumer apps.

Also, if you don't leave your email, how will you know once the feature is
built?

------
pattle
Congratulations on getting to this point. In the article it says

> Canny spends hundreds a month, mostly on hosting and other SaaS

What other SaaS do you use? Forgive me if this was mentioned and I've missed
it.

~~~
a13n
I mentioned that in the comments section: [https://blog.canny.io/saas-startup-
ramen-profitability/#comm...](https://blog.canny.io/saas-startup-ramen-
profitability/#comment-13)

------
nik736
Where do you pay your taxes?

~~~
a13n
We're a US corporation, so we file there.

~~~
adrianmsmith
Do you have any problems living in Spain and paying taxes in the US? I mean,
does Spain require you to pay taxes because you're living there?

------
fusionflo
Blog not loading. HN DDos!

~~~
grzm
A term of art sometimes affectionately employed is "hug of death".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect)

------
erikb
Happy to see that this kind of startup still exists. It feels so 2008.

------
fierro
congrats guys! Cool write up

------
quickthrower2
"How we Bootstrapped Our SaaS Startup to Ramen Profitability"

Or as they called it in the 80s:

"How we Started a business"

~~~
andrewstuart
My recollection of the 80's and 90's was that almost all businesses required a
solid chunk of cash to start.

The idea of bootstrapping is only valid in recent 1-2 decades because it is
now possible to start businesses without a chunk of cash, thus
"bootstrapping".

I'm not convinced bootstrapping existing under another name in the 80s.

For the pedants, I'm not saying it was impossible to start a business in the
80s and 90s without cash, just saying that such a path was rare enough to not
have a common name such as "bootstrapping".

In fact, prior to Amazon ec2, even Internet businesses required typically the
cash to buy/house a server in a data centre which was often thousands of
dollars, and even that was considered incredibly cheap for access to a global
market compared to what it used to cost prior to the web.

~~~
blattimwind
> In fact, prior to Amazon ec2, even Internet businesses required typically
> the cash to buy/house a server in a data centre which was often thousands of
> dollars

You seem to imply that shared servers (shell or web) did not exist prior to
AWS?

~~~
orarbel1
EC2 offers scaling up and down the number of instances as you grow or shrink.

If you built a website 20 years ago and it exploded in traffic, shared hosting
without easy scaling would not be a solution. You would have to plan your
growth and pre-order shared instances. Thus making your business cash
dependent again without proven growth.

~~~
slackingoff2017
You really think business grows so fast that you need instant servers?

Google ran for many years on piles of commodity boards and they were expanding
pretty fast...

The amount of marketing hype around cloud services is insane because all the
big tech companies have a vested interest in your renting their platforms. It
doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't 15 years ago, just makes it
easy.

~~~
aorloff
Just makes it cheaper to get started and automate. But compared to setting up
a server and running something on it, modern cloud platforms are about as
complex IMO (to do right at least).

------
hn_hates_tor
a13n is on a role, blog post makes it to the top of HN and he likely received
an invite to YC W2018 (you did right?). Way to go!

~~~
esteban85
if you did but congrats :)

------
narvind
Great job, guys! Best wishes!

One of my friends is building a feedback system like this called qna.dog

The key thing is to use AI to come up with the right survey question to ask
the user.

