This document is a curation of useful resources & advice about the Software as a Service business, especially tailored for developers.
NOTE: This repo is no longer being maintained, but you are free to fork and/or contribute to it.
Table of Contents
💫 Core Knowledge- ♼ What's the Building Process of Micro-SaaS?
❓ FAQ🖼 Landing Page🛠 Tools used by bootstrapped founders📈 Success stories📉 Failure stories📕 Books🗞 Blogs & Communities🧱 Extra Material👀 Credits🎳 Contributions🗺 Roadmap📢 Disclaimer
💫 Core Knowledge
What is SaaS? and Micro-SaaS?
It stands for Software as a Service. That is: you're selling a digital service via recurring payments.
For example, Dropbox offers you storage for all your files for a monthly payment.
It doesn't have to be a huge VC funded company. For example, a developer named Tyler Tringas built Storemapper, a simple store locator app, all by himself. He later went on defining what Micro-SaaS is:
It is a software as a service business owned and operated by one person or a small team. These businesses are location-independent, high margin, low-risk with predictable recurring revenue.
The core concepts are the same for SaaS and Micro-SaaS, with the former being more complex and requiring a lot more effort and investment.
Why SaaS?
Why should you consider building a SaaS company over something else?
There are a few reasons why SaaS businesses have had success in recent years. First, I need to split SaaS into two major categories: micro-SaaS and full-on SaaS. I use this distinction just to clarify that as a business model, SaaS can be a lot of different things and I'm going to focus more on the "micro SaaS" idea, which is suited for individuals and small groups, rather than companies with huge funding.
- The first advantage is Predictability. It's much easier to predict revenue based on regular subscription fees rather than one-time purchases.
- Another pro is Automation. The system works 24/7 and it makes money every day and every month. Since you're selling a digital service, you can leverage automation in a vast part of your business (customer feedback, support, engagement, etc.).
It's not all roses though. SaaS is becoming increasingly difficult to pull off. In fact, most SaaS companies fail. Read this article by John Solomon to know more about why.
What does "bootstrapping" mean?
Bootstrapping is building a company from the ground up with nothing but personal savings, and cash coming from the first sales. It is the opposite of a Venture Capital funded startup.
In the startup world this is very common. In fact, more than 80% of startup operations are funded by the funder's personal finances and the median in-startup capital is about 10,000$.
♼ What's the Building Process of Micro-SaaS?
This is the process which outlines the necessary steps from idea to success of micro-SaaS businesses. Use this list to get a bird's eye view of the entire bootstrapping process.
The goal of this document is to present you with as many different view points as possible in order to give you a broader understanding of the topics. Further personal research is advised, and you can start with the sources of the documents linked in the below sections.
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💡 Get Ideas for your product
The Meat Grinder approach (by Tyler Tringas)
Many people think the biggest road block to successful entrepreneurial life is having that one "great idea", but this is entirely the wrong way to think about it.
You should be coming up with at least five possible business ideas every day. This part should be basically effortless. The secret to coming up with a successful business idea is putting hundreds of ideas through the "meat grinder".
The process goes like this. You see a problem. You quickly sketch the outline of what a business that solves that problem might look like. Then you put that business through a brutal meat grinder of questions. You’re actively trying to poke holes in the idea and stress test it. Beat it up. Be actively trying to discard it and move onto the next one. You need to refine the meat grinder, get really good and fast at obliterating ideas. And then move on to the next one. If it fails even one part of the meat grinder, ditch it. The worst thing you can do is hold on to that one idea, which is actually fatally flawed, and talk about it with your friends for decades never actually getting to the one that you could have actually built and launched.
Here are some example questions that you should use:
- Are people currently paying for this service? If not, ditch it.
- How will I get the first 25 customers? You must have a clear and easy path in mind.
- If it works, will it be sustainable? For example, can your competitor copy your main feature in a week? If so, you'd be basically giving him free R&D.
- Am I the person to build this business? Think of what your day-to-day life would be if you started that company with that idea. Do you like it?
Solve your own problems: "scratch-your-own-itch" (by Pieter Levels)
Look at what your daily challenges are. Then you see if you could make those challenges easier using technology you already know. Chances are you're not the first one to have such problems. You should focus on problems that are rare and niche because if you look at broad ones, they're probably solved/being solved by a billion dollar company.
Solving your own problem is also nice because you can better understand what features are crucial and what is secondary. You are the greatest expert at the problems which you've had for a long time.
"How well do I need to know a problem to make something for it? How much can I learn along the way?" Short answer: a lot. At some point, don't follow yourself anymore, and start using customer feedback as input.
Imagine a scenario where you build your idea and your company grows, and you stop becoming the target audience. You face the risk of not understanding the customer anymore.
Example: Rappers who start out in the ghetto and become world stars, then loose the inspiration to write since they're living in big mansions and aren't a part of their audience.
What makes a good micro-SaaS idea? Basic guidelines (by Tyler Tringas)
- You must be either 5x cheaper or 5x better than what customers already pay for.
- Don't invent something completely new. You aren't big enough to create a market from scratch. Find something in your niche that is done inefficiently or with out-dated software, or that could be improved.
- Choose something not too easy to copy for your main competitors.
- Have a target audience. If your product could be used by anybody it propably will be used by nobody. You must know your small target niche so it'll be much easier to focus on the features that matter for them.
- You should be able to build it in a week, not in 6 months. You need to iterate fast and if you fail after 6 months of coding you probably won't ever try a SaaS business again.
Scratch-an-itch-you-understand (by Arvid Kahl)
The best products happen at the intersection of an existing niche you are a part of already, and a technology that has not yet been adopted in that niche.
There's one approach which works very well with my mentees:
- Figure out which "special interest groups" you are part of (beyond software engineering). That can be "aquarium owner", "coffee lover", "morning person", "diligent grandson" — the less technical, the better.
- Among these "niches", find the ones that could benefit from a transfer of technology, like "teachers who work from home" (education niche) + "automated submission and pre-grading of homework" could work (digital document collection and rule-based checking logic), or "aquarium owner" + "nitrate cycle tracking IoT device" (hardware-enabled analytics) + "optimal light scheduling" (machine-learning-supported recommendation engine).
Do that for all the small groups you're part of, and you will find lots of ideas that aren't just "scratch-your-own-itch". They are 'scratch-an-itch-you-understand-and-know-how-to-remedy'.
"Scratch your own itch" is misleading (by Kevin Conti)
There's so much debate around whether or not it is a good idea to scratch your own itch. CoderNotes.io is definitely my itch. It's the product I wanted to see in the world. However, as business advice, I think that we need to look deeper. In reality, "scratch your own itch" has two different definitions, and they are heavily confused:
- Build something you want to exist (mistake!)
- Build something you've experienced as a legitimate gap in the market.
I was listening to the sales for founders podcast episode with Frank Breckner, who took a product from zero to 5 figures in only five months! In the episode, Frank talks about how he saw that his company needed software like the one he wanted, he spoke to people in his network who were also having the same struggles around the problem, and went ahead and built it.
That's very a different (and much better) version of "scratching your own itch". If you're thinking of making a "scratch your own itch" product, consider which of the two versions it is before making the decision to move forward.
Change focus: Focus on finding Problems over Ideas (by Tom Zaragoza)
By now you've probably understood that finding an idea is all about solving a problem. So why don't you start in reverse by looking for problems and go backwords? Once you've found a problem, it's pretty easy to come up with ideas on how to solve it.
Here are some methods to find inspiration for ideas if you don't know where to start:
Method #1: The Job Search method: Find an industry, and look for job offers in that specific industry. Pay attention to job descriptions. Look for the responsibilities that this job requires. Then, start building keywords of responsibilities that align with the current industry you chose.
Lastly, Google the keywords you found and research if there's a place for a micro-SaaS product.
Method #2: The App Store method: Choose an app store (Apple, Salesforce, Chrome, Shopify, ...) and a category in that store. Sort the categories from top to bottom based on reviews or installations. Then, find the 1-star reviews of the top apps in that category, and you will find plenty of problems that people have with their current solutions. Look for reviews where people discuss problems they care a lot about.
Method #3: The What-they're-using-Excel-for method: Listen to what people use Excel spreadsheets to. There are probably many competing ways to solve the problem, some involving employee time and paper, some involving spreadsheets, and some involving one of several competing software solutions, none of which have dominant market share.
This much activity suggests that people are genuinly having this problem, but there isn't a total stranglehold on the market by a company which you'd have to fight for mindshare.
Think about Channels (by Courtland Allen)
In the beginning, your best strategy towards finding customers will be direct outreach leading to 1-on-1 conversations via phone or in-person. That's usually the easiest way. You'll be much more persuasive than any landing page could be, and you'll learn crucial lessons from these conversations.
The only reason big companies don't do this, is because it's expensive and it doesn't scale. You don't have that problem because you're a small company. Stop thinking like a big company if you're not.
Later, however, scale is important. It's not enough just to launch your product on Product Hunt or Hacker News because you can usually do so just once. You need to put some thought into scalable, long-term, repeatable sales channels.
Luckily, since you've already met your customers and talked with them, you should know what platform they make the most heavy use of. Analyze those channels and use them to keep growing. If you can't think of anything decent, that's usually a sign that you don't know enough about your target customers and how to reach them.
This is the kind of advantage you can only get if you've identified a customer and their problems before you started on the solution. Otherwise you'll build something generic.
Your Idea doesn't have to be earth-shattering (by Pieter Levels)
Short excerpt from Pieter's book "MAKE book", explaining why you should start small and not focus on your long-term vision. You can find and buy his book here.
[...] Your first idea does not have to be (and probably should not be) earth-shattering. You start with something small. Don't think too big. Then slowly, you can get the big part by extrapolating, scaling your idea to a bigger market, from a niche market, and to a bigger more abstract idea (just like Uber went from a taxi hailing service to an autonomous car vision).
[...] You don't know what you're going to end up with. That's another point. You need constant feedback from your users in the market to see what people want and what people use and whatnot. You can't just think of that. You can't think big immediatly: you have to start small.
Sources: good micro-saas-ideas, makebook#2, meat-grinder approach, AskHN: looking for ideas, find saas ideas, nugget, first principles
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✏️ Validate your Idea
You wouldn't build a house without knowing how tall people are. You don't build a product before knowing if anyone will use it. — Arvid Kahl
Validating products before building them by Patio11
The goal of the idea validation stage is to answer this question: how do you de-risk product creation by verifying that there exists an audience who will pay for your solution prior to that solution existing?
The ideal product for a bootstrapped SaaS solves a problem which is well-understood but poorly solved. There are many competing ways to solve a problem, some involving employee time and paper, some involving spreadsheets, and some involving one of several competing software solutions, none of which have dominant market share. This behavior suggests that people are genuinely having this problem, but there isn't a perfect solution available.
How do you figure out what people in your niche think of your problem?
Just ask them. Seriously. People love talking about their problems. Interview at least 20 potential customers.
Going back to the "Get an Idea" section, Tyler Tringas wrote that "you must have a clear sales channel for the first 15-20 customers". This fits perfectly with the interview process because people that you've interviewed and ARE INTERESTED will be your first leads. If nobody of the interviewees is interested, you're probably on the wrong path and you should go back to the drawing board.
Why bother spending time to validate your idea? (by Peter Thaleikis)
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. — Benjamin Franklin
Planning isn't the most exciting task, especially at the beginning of the adventure of building a company. But there are good reasons to spend time in validating your idea.
- Building a business costs time and money, the two things you probably don't have a lot of as a solo founder. Planning ahead and finding out if a project is worth your scarce resources is crucial.
- If you start without a plan, you're at a way higher risk of losing motivation along the way. Firstly, you'll underestimate the time needed to build your MVP, because you haven't defined a clear scope. Secondly, if you haven't researched before starting, you'll eventually find out about a competitor which does the same thing you're building. This is extremely demotivating. Lastly, after the project is done, you are facing the reality that nobody knows of its existence and you don't have any way of marketing it and it'll end up in the graveyard of "completed but not marketed" online projects.
- Validating your idea ahead of building can give you a lot of information which will be useful when you'll actually start coding it, and this way you'll also find your first customers.
Think about Channels (by Courtland Allen)
In the beginning, your best strategy towards finding customers will be direct outreach leading to 1-on-1 conversations via phone or in-person. That's usually the easiest way. You'll be much more persuasive than any landing page could be, and you'll learn crucial lessons from these conversations.
The only reason big companies don't do this, is because it's expensive and it doesn't scale. You don't have that problem because you're a small company. Stop thinking like a big company if you're not.
Later, however, scale is important. It's not enough just to launch your product on Product Hunt or Hacker News because you can usually do so just once. You need to put some thought into scalable, long-term, repeatable sales channels.
Luckily, since you've already met your customers and talked with them, you should know what platform they make the most heavy use of. Analyze those channels and use them to keep growing. If you can't think of anything decent, that's usually a sign that you don't know enough about your target customers and how to reach them.
This is the kind of advantage you can only get if you've identified a customer and their problems before you started on the solution. Otherwise you'll build something generic.
Step by step guide to validating your business idea (by Peter Thaleikis)
There are many more ways than just Google to find out if someone has already built your idea or considered and decided to abandon your latest idea. It’s all a question of finding the right information and evaluating it in the context of your idea.
Get started with brainstorming terms, keywords and potential names for your project. It helps to keep a Google Sheet for this. UberSuggest is a simple tool to get more ideas for keywords and other related terms. If your list is very short at this point it helps to write a short description of the key features and unique selling points (what makes it different from existing projects) - this is often called an elevator pitch. This way you should find more keywords/phrases describing your idea. Collect all of them in the sheet. We will weed the terms out as we go.
The following list is naturally not conclusive as there are many niche websites and communities you can consult, but it should be fairly comprehensive to get started. It contains a list of websites and platforms you can check to see if your idea has been built, discussed or launched. I recommend to check each of your terms on these platforms. After a few websites you will get a feeling for which ones aren’t giving you any results and you might want to leave them out for future searches. But you can also pick some promising platforms if you are only after a first impression at this point. Let’s get started validating your idea:
- Surely one of the first things that comes to mind is searching on Google. Besides similar projects what is interesting is really the kind of results you find when you search for your keywords. Do you find articles on popular platforms or niche blogs? Are these “how-to” articles? Are there older or newer discussion forums? Are the developer blogs discussing solutions for your problem? Are there blog posts by potential users/customers discussing their manual approach and solution?
- After Google, YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine. Are there videos around this topic? Keep an eye on how many times the videos have been watched. What kind of comments are below the videos? Are the comments speaking of excitement or rather on the negative end of the spectrum? Are people mentioning service or tool in the comments related to your idea? If so, add them to your “Competitors” list.
- Unknown to many, Facebook is one of the top 3 search engines worldwide. Put some of your keywords and key-phrases into Facebook. Make use of the filter bar on top and focus on “Groups”, “Pages”, and “Posts”. Depending on your idea, the “Events”, “Marketplace” and “App” can also be very useful. Especially groups are interesting, check the metrics members as well as the activity. Look out for significant problems people discuss. Does your idea address these? If so, very good.
- Are people seeking help with the problem you are planning to address? Check Quora for questions relating to the idea. Take note of the related topics and browse the questions listed under these topics.
- Search jump on Twitter next. Look out for accounts dedicated to the project. Are there tweets about this? Are people complaining about the problem you are looking to solve? What are the responses? Do people point to a simple solution?Are there commonly used hashtags for your idea? Add them to the “Spaces & Links” list in your template.
- Reddit is a platform used in various ways. Type in some of your successful terms, but don’t leave it at this. Search also for some unpopular terms - Reddit has a lot of niche communities (so-called “reddits”). Take note of any reddits related to your idea and add them to your list of communities (called “Spaces & Links” in the provided template).
- Identify what people are connecting with your idea by using Answer The Public. Simply put some of your winning terms in and keep especially an eye on the questions.
- Search for articles on Medium. Are there long articles on how to deal with problem? Take note of the people who wrote the articles. Add them to your list of people in the space.
- Check for projects on Upwork. Are people posting regular projects addressing your problem? Look for bundled up packages solving your problem on Fiverr and PeoplePerHour. Look at the number of purchases and the reviews. If you find listings on Fiverr and PeoplePerHour that’s a very good sign there is a paying market for your idea.
- Head over to Amazon’s Kindle store. Search for ebooks about this problem space. Are there any? Are they popular? Look out for bestseller badges. Check out the reviews, especially the more balanced ones (2-4 stars). Also take note of alternative books and links mentioned and add them to your sheet as needed.
- Are people trying to learn a solution to your problem? Check out Udemy, Udacity, and SkillShare. How are these advertised, as a time saver to reduce long manual processes or to make them much easier? That’s a good sign. Check metrics such as enrolled students, if available.
- Bootstrapping businesses is trendy. It’s always a good idea to look on bootstrapping communities like IndieHackers and discuss.bootstrapped.fm and see if anyone has been discussing or working on your problem. There are also communities aiming to support building projects in public. Two notable examples are WIP.chat and MakerLog. ProductHunt is a good bet to look for launched projects. See if they are alive. Bonus tip: For any existing project you find add “/open” at the end of the URL, to see if you find an open statistics page.
- Check the crowdfunding platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo to see if there have been any projects solving the problem. Keep it broad - changing or extending a business model happens fairly quickly these days. Interesting metrics here are the funding status: Is the project overfunded or not founded at all? How many people backed the idea? Check any related project websites for engagement signs such as comments, links to YouTube videos with comments.
- HackerNews is a niche website and worth a look, if your idea is in the tech space. The search form is at the bottom of the website here. Interesting are the projects mentioned under “Show HN”, these are launched projects. If you find a project which solves a part of your problem you might want to add them to the competitors list.
- It might be a good call to research on GitHub as well. GitHub is a platform where many software engineers share code and even complete projects. Maybe someone is building a project solving a similar problem and there is an option to cooperate or building on top.
The results of the research done on the platforms above should give you a fairly good idea of the interest in a solution around your idea. If you stumbled across a “no-go” such as a competitor, you might want to reconsider this. Competitors don’t mean your idea isn’t good, it means that it’s good enough for someone to pursue it. If there are established players, even better. This means there is enough money to sustain these companies generated by the business.
Learn from your target audience and establish relationships with them (by Paul Jarvis)
This excerpt is taken from the book "Company of One" by Paul Jarvis:
Assuming you’ve identified your target audience and developed a marketable skill set, you’re now in a position to provide a product or service for which they would be willing to pay money. You just need to convince them to take advantage of your talents!
Of course, that’s easier said than done, and there’s a whole process involved in reaching that point. First, you need to connect with your audience and learn about their needs, so you can know how to fulfill them. One way to do that is to reach out to potential clients and offer them free, no-strings-attached consultancy.
For example, if you were trying to establish a web-design side gig that could turn into a company, you could begin by finding people who were looking for a web designer or had already found one. By having conversations with them about their experiences, you could learn a lot of useful information, such as the manner and places in which they’re searching for web designers, the factors behind their hiring decisions, the objectives they’re trying to fulfill, the problems that lead to bad customer experiences and the questions they have about the web-design process.
By answering those questions, you could then begin to position yourself not just as a consultant, but as a trustworthy authority in your field – someone with valuable expertise from which other people can benefit and on which they can depend.
But again, you’re not charging any money at this point; you’re not even offering or trying to subtly push your services. You’re genuinely just trying to help your audience, in small but meaningful ways.
The word “small” is crucial here. You’re not redesigning someone’s entire website for free or anything like that. You’re just offering answers to questions, as well as advice, second opinions, brainstorming sessions and so forth – mini-consultations, you could call them.
By doing all this, you’re both learning about your audience and building a reputation – and developing mutually beneficial relationships with them. Indeed, by the end of your mini-consultations, they’ve already helped you, and you’ve already helped them, and you haven’t even done any paid work for them yet!
Having established these relationships and demonstrated their value, who do you think your audience will go to next time they need to pay for a web design service: a stranger – or you, the person they already know and trust as an authority in the field?
In the author’s own experience, the answer was the latter; nearly everyone with whom he consulted went on to want to hire him.
Businesses that have to explain to users why they are valuable CAN be successful... but YOU shouldn't make one. (by Kevin Conti)
Imagine you are hungry, and decide that you are hungry for an apple. You know that you like apples, you've had apples before, and in particular you're a fan of crisp, red apples. Suddenly, someone comes up to you and offers you a banana. "Thanks," you say, "but I'm looking for an apple." "Actually," they respond, "a banana is much better for you! You'll be more full after eating this banana, my bananas taste better than apples, and in fact there are no other bananas quite like mine!"
The banana salesman has spent time and energy into convincing you into the sale. But for all his effort, he was trying to pitch you a solution to your problem that didn't fit the solution you had in mind.
When you have a product that customers don't already know, you will spend a lot of time selling it to them. Instead, if you can compete in a market where a customer is already solution-aware ("I want a red apple!") you simply need to compete by being the best in one specific category they care about (in this case, the crispness of the apple).
Is it possible that the banana company will be successful? Yes, but they need to spend time convincing the apple-lovers that bananas are the way to go. That's going to take a lot of marketing, and they are relying on a change in consumer behavior to get that result. For a bootstrapped company, fighting that battle doesn't make sense.
Many startups compete in established market categories and do so successfully by first breaking up the market into smaller pieces and focusing on one piece they can win. The goal of [this strategy] is to carve off a piece of the market where the rules are a little bit different - just enough to give your product an edge over the category leader. – April Dunford, "Obviously Awesome"
Treat compliments as red flags, not validation!
Compliments are warning signs. If you catch yourself or your teammates saying something like this, try to get specific. Why did that person like the idea? How much money would it save him? How would it fit into his life? What else has he tried? If you don't know, then you've got a compliment instead of real data.
Rule of thumb: Compliments are the fool's gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and worthless.
– Rob Fitzpatrick, "The Mom Test"
Sources: validating product ideas, business idea validation, how to brainstorm business ideas,Company of one (book)
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🛠 Build your MVP
The Minimum Viable Product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Since this reference is aimed at developers, I won't include tools like Github or BitBucket. I'll assume that you're already comfortable with a toolbox of technologies. That being said, here are some tips on the production aspect which put technical founders to struggle.
When to build your MVP
You shouldn't start coding a single line of your MVP until you have a CLEAR sales channel for your first 15-20 customers. This point is discussed in the Get an Idea section above, but it's too important so I'll repeat myself. You mustn't build your product and THEN find a sales channel, but quite the opposite.
The product is 1/3rd of the product (by Kevin Conti)
For my first product, I thought that the main thing I was building was... well... the product! Turns out, the actual product that you build is only a piece of the puzzle. A business isn't just a product. It's a system:
- A business includes a set of inbound and outbound channels that help drive customers to the product.
- A business includes positioning that defines what market it is a part of.
- A business is the pricing, payment, and customer service model it follows throughout the customer life-cycle.
- And finally, a business includes a product.
I've learned that, instead of thinking of a business as a legal entity that collects money for a product, it's better to think of a business as a set of puzzle pieces, all of which need to function for the whole thing to work. Conceptually, I think you can break this up into three pieces:
- The business has a defined market where customers already exist.
- A business has reliable channels to reach customers in the above market.
- A business has a product that serves customers in that market.
In other words, a product is only 1/3rd of the final "product".
Sources: MVP vs MLP
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🚀 Pre-Launch & Launch
How to Build Buzz & Backlinks on a Bootstrap Budget (by Irina Nica)
Here's what I've learned about launching online products (by David Perell)
David is a strong advocate of the "audience first" approach, which is becoming ever more common these days, and for a good reason. These tips are valuable if you're publishing anything from a blog article to a full-blown SaaS company on the Internet.
- Give tons of free stuff away: The Internet rewards people who teach. Share your best ideas for free, and you will attract an audience of like-minded people. Build an audience before you launch your first product.
- Build a niche audience: Large audiences are sexy, niche audiences are profitable. Unique creators benefit from a lack of competition and loyal audiences. Build knowledge, gain a unique perspective, and share it with the world.
- Listen to your audience: Write about what you're interested in. Then, double-down on what your audience wants to learn about. Listen for phrases they repeat and write them down. Then, once it's time to write your sales copy, you can speak to your customer directly.
- Start creating now: Start before you're ready. Some people spend their whole lives waiting for the sound of a starting gun that never goes off. Don’t wait. The thing you’ve been waiting for is… your own permission.
- Remember the compounding effect: Audience building is a game of compounding. You start slowly, but once you gain momentum, you can hit escape velocity. The beginning of any compounding curve is a flat line. Keep publishing, listen to your audience, and aim to improve.
- Have a vision: Your product should come from the heart. Solving your own problems is the best way to do that. Here's a trick: Find something that bothers you, and if you can find ten people who have the same problem, build a solution. Then, write about your creation process.
- Write a manifesto: It's time to craft your story. Write a short (250 word) manifesto about your product. It should have three parts. First, outline the problem. Second, share your solution to the problem. Third, talk about the specifics of your solution.
- Build buzz before your first product launch: Remember the 3-2-1 strategy. Three months before you launch your first product, publish your manifesto. Two months before, share a preview. One month before launch, open your product for pre-sale to generate word-of-mouth buzz.
- Show people your product: When you buy a shirt, you want to feel it. You want to touch the nylon and examine the cotton. Launching an online product is no different. People want to see your product before they buy it.
- Share your hit singles: Before a new album comes out, musicians freely share the best songs. The added hype is worth more than the allure of secrecy. Your product should have a hit single too. Share your best nuggets of insight in free online articles, videos, and podcasts.
How to launch on Product Hunt multiple times (by u/Michal_A)
Judging by the sheer volume of threads and comments on the topic, people expect great results from their Product Hunt launches. So is it worth a try? Let's have a look at a couple of popular writeups.
- This guy made $74.55 over four days from 1000 visitors. Doesn't seem too bad, until you compare that with a professional's daily rate and notice he also launched in six other places.
- These guys got 450 upvotes from 100 sign-ups and 2000 visitors, and no mention of paying customers. It seems the number of upvotes bears no relation to the value of your product. Most upvoters will only read the description.
- And these guys spent a lot of effort preparing their launch and contacting everyone they could about it. They got nearly 2000 visitors, 138 signups, and again, no mention of profits.
- I myself got over 1000 visitors. Tens of curious Hunters decided to sign up. I spent hours talking with them, it felt so good to receive their compliments. None of them paid.
It appears that blogging about your Product Hunt launch will drive more traffic to your page than the launch itself. And still, why would you care about the traffic? Traffic is a vanity metric. All that matters are your profits. Is PH useless then?
Product Hunt is a Twitter or Facebook of sorts - a place you mindlessly check to get a quick dopamine boost before getting back to work. The products that thrive are the ones that draw attention and entertain, not solve problems. It's unlikely launching your product on PH will make it magically start growing. That's not to say it's completely useless.
-
An Indie Hacker had a cool idea with these intentions: "This past week I spent building Startup Gifs: A collection of gifs to brighten up your startups Slack channel. The idea is (fingers crossed) I can use this it as a honeypot, to draw some attention and then from that some new users check out my main project: "Marketing Examples"! I made sure to host the project on my own domain. That way if I get any backlinks the “link juice” will flow to other pages on Marketing Examples helping them rank better". The project itself was just a few gifs. And it became the #4 product of the day.
-
Similarly, Dan Siepen recently got 3000 page visits and 400 newsletter signups from his campaign that included a Product Hunt launch. The product? A list of fourty articles. Read more about how he executed his campaign. Dan is an expert growth marketer and made several Product Hunt launches before. Most for the same product. Free guides and newsletters get the most upvotes. Products? Not so much.
-
Chris Messina, the #1 Product Hunter, recently launched a new version of Slack. They already had the copy and the screenshots. This launch looks like it took 15 minutes. It didn't get much attention, but I dare you to find an easier way to get in front of a few thousand eyeballs.
How to get started then?
Give Product Hunt users what they want: a freebie that fills up time, but isn't too demanding. Make a side project. Make it free and entertaining. Insert CTAs for your money-making product in it. And then launch. Here are some examples:
- Curated free article
- Email course
- Newsletter
- Non-obvious looking blog post
- A free subset of your main product
And after you launch make sure to stay around (or configure a monitoring tool like syften) and reply to comments.
Sources: David Perell, Marker product hunt strat, checklist of pre-launch marketing, launch multiple times on PH, 4 steps to a successful launch, build buzz on a bootstrap budget,Where to launch your SaaS, 100 places to share your startup
🌱 Grow organically
From the book "Traction" (by Gabriel Weinberg)
How do you start building traction? The key is to create a traction channel, that is, a way to market or distribute your product.
- Don't discount traditional media — a great PR campaign can locate a lot of new users! In order to achieve this, consider both traditional public relations, like stories in newspaper, and unconventional PR, like flash mobs centered on your product.
- Use social media to encourage traction and build a stable customer base. The fast way to achieve traction through social media is via viral marketing: encouraging your existing users to refer to new ones. Once you start the ball rolling, it gathers its own momentum. Viral marketing is cheap and fast, but it can also be difficult to pull off. There are two factors that make it successful: first, you need as many people to recommend your product as possible, for example giving incentives (Dropbox offered users more storage space if they referred a friend); second, you need to maximize the number of referrals who go on to become users. Make your sign up process simple and fast.
- Online advertising allows you to target potential customers. How? The first factors to consider are Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Optimization (SEO). SEM are the ads displayed next to search engine results; so when someone does a related search, they see your ad and are informed about the product. SEO on the other hand, involves pushing your website to the top of the results people get when they search for related words. This is important because data shows that only 10% of all clicks happen beyond the 10th search result.
- Partner with others to gain more traction. Partnering with other companies in a mutually beneficial way is called business development, and it's a clever way to build traction. For example, Google partnered with Netscape and Yahoo in 1999, by becoming the default search engine for the former and improving the search results of the latter. It was a win-win situation since Google enhanced these sites and it gained itself many new users in the process. Other collaboration ideas include attending trade shows, speaking engagements, parties and other offline events.
- Email marketing and traditional sales remain important ways to gain traction. Find legitimate ways of attaining email addresses, such as asking for them on your blog or at the end of a conference. And keep engaging with your email list with product announcements, feedback, or other news. Another avenue to consider is traditional sales: approaching customers and proposing the direct exchance of products for money. This works especially well for expensive products. That's because personal contact builds trust, so potential customers are willing to spend more on your products.
The most effective sales strategies involve trying multiple traction channels and being open to change.
How to find your best traction channel: The bullseye Framework
The Bullseye Framework is a 5 step process to help you find the best traction channels for you.
- Start by brainstorming the possible traction channels in your industry. Ask yourself questions like "Where would we get potential customer's email addresses? Which companies would we partner with and why?"
- Pull all the channels into one of 3 groups: really promising ones, possible ones, and long shots.
- Choose the three top options and put them on your A-list.
- Test these 3 options. Try to keep the tests cheap. Consider these questions: "how much will you spend in order to gain 1 customer with this channel? How many customers can you get this way? Are those the customers you want and need?"
- Focus on the channel that seems the most promising, or repeat the process if none of the channels seem to be working. Remember that with time your business will evolve and so will the traction channels.
Traction will determine the success of your business. This is why you should take time to develop a well thought-out strategy. To do so, set clear and specific goals and frame your strategy around them.
Even great products don't sell themselves. A start-up stands or falls on the customer base it can build. This is why you need to think about traction early and often, and build your company's goals around achieving that traction.
Sources: traction channels, Traction (book),
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🌠 What's next?
Consider everything before Launch to be the first half of the entrepreneurial football game, and scaling up the second. Mid-game scores don't count, what's important is how the match ends. — Geoffrey Moore
❓ FAQ
I've found these questions rather commonly on forums and social media. Here are the best voted answers.
What are the key metrics of SaaS?
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” – Lord Kelvin
SaaS/subscription businesses are more complex than traditional businesses. Traditional business metrics totally fail to capture the key factors that drive SaaS performance. In the SaaS world, there are a few key variables that make a big difference to future results.
In this regard, this blog post by David Skok goes in-depth and explains a lot of the main principles of SaaS metrics. He also has made a talk at #WebSummit about this topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RR6M_d6eKc&feature=youtu.be
Note: This article focuses on bigger SaaS companies. You probably don't need all these fancy metrics to get started as a small group or even by yourself. I still recommend watching the video because it highlights some crucial growth tracking metrics that you can adopt later on.
- Brief summary of the key metrics that are discussed in the article/video:
- MRR/ARR: monthly or annual recurring revenue
- New bookings: Net New ARR
- Conversion rate %
- CAC < LTV: Cost of Acquiring a Customer must be less than its LifeTime Value.
- LTV: LifeTime Value = 1/Churn
- Churn: customer churn and dollar churn. With dollar churn, you can have negative churn. Negative churn is the real key to success when it comes to exponential growth.
How do I sell my SaaS product? (by Colin Dowling)
The wrong way: you built your MVP, ask a friend for feedback, launch it on Product Hunt, and nobody uses it. Then you Google "How to sell my product".
The right way: when you still haven't coded a single line of your project (or if you prefer, only build a landing page), gather feedback on your idea. As much as possible. Then get your first 10-15 clients who are willing to pay, and only then start building your MVP. Then, you won't be agonized by not having any users, and you'll be motivated to keep building and doing a proper launch.
Selling is difficult. Here are some simple tips:
- Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. My advice is to just go and hit the ball.
- Sales is about people and it's about problem solving. It is not about solutions or technology or chemicals or lines of code or artichokes. It's about people and it's about solving problems.
- People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you'll fail.
- People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occasionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.
- All things being equal, people buy from their friends. So make everything else less equal then go make a lot of friends.
- Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Do this consistently.
- No one cares about your quota, your payroll, your opex, your burn rate, etc. No one. They care about the problem you are solving for them.
What's the Customer Lifecycle of SaaS?
The SaaS customer lifecycle covers the acquisition, engagement and retention of your customers. Depending on where they are in their lifecycle, customers need different things from your company to help them achieve their desidered outcomes and move beyond the next stage in the cycle.
Read more:
- Understanding the SaaS customer lifecycle
- The 6 stages of the SaaS customer lifecycle
- Driving SaaS growth through the customer lifecycle
What's the best pricing strategy?
https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/newsletter/episode-29/
Where do I publish my MVP?
There are many ways to publish your first product or MVP. Here are the best websites that are solely focused on giving exposure and attracting users to your website.
- Product Hunt
- Indie Hackers
- Hacker News (Show HN)
- BetaPage
- BetaList
- SaaS Hub
Note: This isn't a complete strategy. You should take time to publish to each of these platforms but keep in mind that you'll get general traffic, not targeted to your niche. It's more effective to publish your MVP on forums and communities that you're a part of, and that are devoted to your niche.
🖼 Landing Page
A landing page is the minimum requirement for any online businesses. Don't underestimate the value of a good website for your product. It's your shop window.
Page Builders
If you're a web developer you can probably spin up a decent-looking landing page in hours. Let's be honest though, everyone knows that you'd spend weeks fine-tuning every small detail of your landing page until it's perfect. This isn't compatible with the fast pace at which you'll be updating and changing content on your page based on feedback you get from users. You need to move fast, and you probably can't devote too much time in landing pages. This is why page builders can be a good idea for micro-SaaS. Here's a list of the best page builders for SaaS:
- Softr: "The easiest and fastest platform for founders to build responsive websites & web-apps". Pros: easy & fast to use, uses building blocks to assemble the website. Great integrations. Price: free trial + 29$/mo
- Versoly: "Conversion Focused Website Builder". Pros: optimized for SaaS, SEO editor, included form submissions and management, analytics tools. Price: free trial + 15$/mo
- Unbounce: "Fuel Growth with more lead-gen campaigns". Pros: quickly create A/B tests, huge learning resources on their blog. Price: 14 day free + 99$/mo
- Leadpages: "Turn clicks into customers". Pros: solid integrations with other marketing tools, good customer support Price: 14 day free + 25$/mo
- Webflow: advanced page builder with steep learning curve. Not recommended if you want fast iterations and testing. Pros: extremely good design if you master their building tools. Price: free trial + 12$/mo
- Unicorn Platform: simple landing page builder focused on SaaS. Free trial + 8$/mo.
- Windframe: Visual builder for tailwind css for rapidly building and prototyping components, websites and webpages. Free trial + 25$/mo.
Landing page Templates
This is another good option to enforce good design and best practices on your landing page. These themes are specifically suited for SaaS. You can also simply use them as examples for inspiration.
- Themesberg Rocket — 69$
- Inovatik: SaaS landing page templates built with HTML — free
- Creative Designs Guru: React and Next JS templates for SaaS — 29$
Curated examples websites
These websites are endless wells of examples from which to take inspiration when designing and building your landing page:
- SaasPages: popular landing pages divided into sections or "blocks" like navbar, pricing, faq, etc. Also contains useful advice & tips about copywriting and design for specific sections. Made by the creator of Versoly.
- LandingFolio: landing page designs from across the web. Included color palettes and filter for desktop or mobile.
- SaasFrame: not just landing page examples. Email flows, marketing pages, product page design, blog post examples & more — 9$/mo
- SaaSLandingPage: Discover the best 440 landing page examples and get inspiration for your next project.
- Lander: Landing page copywriting template for SaaS
- Landings: Find the best landing pages for your design inspiration based on your preference
Explained examples with advice
These articles are useful for getting ideas and advice on key aspects of web design optimized for conversion:
- 33 examples of highly effective SaaS website designs by Tomas Laurinavicius
- What we learned analyzing 40+ top SaaS landing pages by Ed Shelley
🛠 Tools used by bootstrapped founders
- Free for dev: A collection of services for developers that offer a free plan.
Analytics and Tracking
You need to track how much traffic you're getting, and how users are interacting with your website.
When choosing an analytics tool, there are 2 core business models to evaluate: services that are free for you but sell your customer's data, and services that cost you but are private. I highly recommend going for a private and simple tool because Google Analytics is blocked by all mainstream ad blockers.
- Google Analytics: The "standard" analytics service offered by Google. It has a learning curve and a lot of extra functionality, it doesn't focus on customer's privacy and requires you to add a cookie banner on your website. It's blocked by most ad blockers. — free
- Simple Analytics: Like the name suggests, it's very simple. It has basic "page view" and "visitor" numbers, and that's it. You integrate it in 5 minutes in the of your pages and you're done. — starts at 20$/mo
- UseFathom: Simple, light-weight, privacy focused. Tracks bounce rate and average time on site among other things. — starts at 14$/mo
- Clicky: It shows how visitors interact with the site. You can see which pages they visit before signing up for a newsletter. Or how many days it takes for them to go from discovering the blog to buying a product. — free plan
- Splitbee: Analytics with A/B testing capabilities. User explorer, funnel builder — free plan for up to 1000 monthly users.
- Plausible: Simple, privacy compliant, great dashboard — 6$/mo
- Amplitude: Behavioral Analytics platform. Comparable to Google Analytics and has a lot of features. — free plan
- Toasted Analytics: Simple. Tracks pageviews and events. Only 3kb tracker file. Has API access included. — starts at 3.5$/mo
- Panelbear: Powerful, privacy-friendly analytics to grow your website. — free plan
Feedback collection and Feature requests
Getting feedback early on is crucial for your SaaS business. Here's a list of feedback collection tools.
- Canny: Collect feedback from customers and see a list of most wanted features ranked by upvotes. — starts at 50$/mo
- ClearFlask: Open-source community-feedback tool to manage incoming feedback and show off a public development roadmap. — free self-host, cloud hosting starts at 10$/mo
- Acute: Gain actionable insight from feedback with an embedded widget. Good integrations with other services. — free plan + 25$/mo after 20 suggestions.
- Hellonext.co: All-in-one customer feedback management software with product roadmap & changelog - starts at 12$/mo
- Kampsite: Get suggestions on new features. See what features your users would pay for. Discuss ideas with your customers. Share your roadmap. — free plan + 10$/mo after 15 suggestions.
- Tawk.to: Message customers directly on your website — free plan
- Crisp: Live chat + ticket handling software — free plan
- Intercom: The most popular live chat software for customer engagement & support — complex pricing
- Letterbase: Simple Live chat for small businesses. Simple to use & privacy friendly — 9$/mo
- Beamdock: Beamdock helps you gather features requests, schedule interview session and notify customers easily - free plan.
- Customerly: Live Chat & Marketing automation - free plan
- Upvoty: Instant feedback, changelog & dashboard - starts at 15$/mo
- Noora: centralized product feedback solution to collect and act on feedback from customers — starts at 9$/mo
- Loopliz: Product voting, feedback, bug reporting, and roadmaps - starts at 12$/mo
Recurring Payment Platforms
The core of SaaS is that you're collecting payments via monthly or yearly recurring subscriptions. Many developers choose a ready-made solution to handle payments because there are so many edge cases like card validation, fraud detection, card expiring date, invalid payments, different providers, etc. to take care of.
Most of these tools offer great free plans (up to 50k$ processed for free).
- Stripe: the Ferrari of online payment platforms. Requires some work to set up — free plan
- Paddle: also handles VAT for European countries — % fee
- Chargebee: revenue operation for SaaS — free plan
- Billsby: easy and accurate billing — free plan
- Superpayit: built on top of Stripe to be easier to use. — % fee
- 2checkout: smart subscription management suite — % fee
- Xero: Online accounting software for small businesses — starts at 20$/mo
- OpenNode: accept Bitcoin payments (not recurring) — free plan
- CoinRemitter: accept Bitcoin & altcoin payments (not recurring) - 0.23% fee
Miscellaneous Tools & Services
- Baremetrics: Revenue tracking service — starts at 50$/mo
- ChartMogul: Subscription analytics, revenue recognition — free plan
- LoginRadius: User Authentication Solution — free plan
- Wistia: Display marketing videos on your website — free plan
- Notion: All-in-one workspace. Notes, checklists, timelines, etc. — free plan
- Quaderno: Simple Worldwide Sales Tax Reporting, handles invoices & VAT — starts at 50$/mo
- HelpHero: No-code intuitive user onboarding tours — starts at 25$/mo
- GetTerms: A simple privacy policy generator for businesses — free plan
Complete Full-stack Boilerplates
As a developer, it's your choice to choose to either develop from scratch or use a starter. From personal experience, boilerplates can save you a lot of time if you already master the tech stack.
Most SaaS have a lot of common boilerplate, like marketing pages, login/signup flow, protected routes, dashboard, admin area, CRUD services, and more.
- Bullet train — Ruby on Rails — 1500$
- Jabloon — Ruby on Rails — 79$
- Jumpstart — Ruby on Rails + TailwindCSS — 150$
- Gravity — NodeJS + React — 600$
- Divjoy — NodeJS + React — 149$
- Nodewood — NodeJS + Vue — 300$
- NodeX — NodeJS + Vue — 100$
- Laravel Spark — Laravel + Bootstrap — 100$
- Laravel Voyager — Laravel — free
- Wave — Laravel — Built on top of Voyager — free
- Saas-base — Flask + Vue — free
- SaasForge — Flask + React — 239$
- SaaS Pegasus — Django + React — 300$
- Turbovar — Java + Bootstrap — 200$
- Grain Dashboard — HTML + Bootstrap (dashboard) — free
- Magpie — M.E.A.N. Advanced "Framework" (full-stack platform) — free and Open Source
- Serverless Page — React + Serverless — 200$
- Bookstack — NodeJS + Vue — 500$
- useRocket — NodeJS + React — 160$
- Nextless JS — React + NodeJS with Serverless — 499$
📈 Examples of successful Micro-SaaS companies and makers
Here's a short list of some Micro-SaaS companies bootstrapped and run by a single person:
Reflecting on 2 years Bootstrapping (by Pierre de Wulf)
In July 2018 I quit my job and tried to build a profitable SaaS with a friend of mine. And we failed, hard. $600 MRR after 1 year.
We tried again and had a bit more luck: $7,8k MRR within 1 year. Here's what I wish I knew when I began:
- This thing takes time: Bootstrapping a SaaS is long. Most of the time, when you look behind you'll find: years of building an audience, several failed attempts and consistency.
- If you need 30 emails to sell a 30$/month product, the problem isn't in your emails. If you're in this situation you should ask yourself: can you increase your price? Is your audience the right one? Is your product the right one?
- Talk to your users early: One easy way to do it is by offering 10x what your free plan offers to people willing to spend 15 minutes on the phone with you. You'll get feedback from people who really want to use your product. We did it and it had amazing results.
- For every customer giving your feedback, assume that 10 others felt the same way but didn't care enough to tell you. "3" is a number I like. We start thinking about implementing a feature every time 3 users ask for the same or similar thing.
- If you can't have feedback, look out for clues. There are clues that you're doing something right. For example: people are angry when your product doesn't wok, people say that your product is too expensive but pay anyway. There are also clues that you're doing something wrong. For example: you had a 3 days down-time and nobody bat an eye, you have less than 1% conversion rate on your landing page, people love to talk with you but never pay you.
- When starting, focus on what matters, don't waste your time on futile things. For us, this meant to stop focusing on the product name, logo, domain name, or the color of a button. And start focusing on a clean landing page, better copywriting, getting feedback from users.
- Once you've found an acquisition channel that works, go all-in. You should really try to master one sales channel before choosing another one. Stick with what works in the beginning.
- Offer top-notch support: It's surprisingly easy to out-do your competition's support. You must reply to all emails in less than 30 minutes, have an in-app chat, be friendly, etc. Does it scale? No. Will you lose a bit of focus? Yes. But in my opinion, it's worth it. Many people were delighted about how fast we answered support tickets, even if we didn't solve the problem right away.
- Rate limit your payment endpoints. This is to prevent hackers trying out stolen credit cards in bulk.
- Apply to those new bootstrapper-friendly funds. These work differently from venture capitalists and in many ways they can be beneficial without the stress.
Jason Kester of S3Stats and Twiddla
"I run S3stat and Twiddla by myself and they combine to bring in a nice living.
I built both with the stated goal of bringing in recurring income while minimizing the amount of time I actually spent "working". As such, I had plenty of time along the way to bootstrap via consulting work and to travel and otherwise lead an interesting life while the product businesses ramped up in the background.
They're both ticking away nicely now, to the point where it's Officially Silly to continue working for anybody else, ever. As a result, "work" hours are defined as the ones where it's raining, the kids are in school and I've been mountain biking recently, or it's been sunny for a week and I need a rest day. Even with those constraints, you'd be surprised how many new features get shipped.
I mention this side of the business by way of convincing anybody sitting on the fence that it's probably worth giving this whole SaaS thing a try. It really doesn't impact your life in the way a "startup" would, can be done while still doing gainful work for others, and doesn't take much in the way of capital investment.
But if and when it starts paying dividends, it does in fact get as good as it seems it should".
Dan Grossman of Improvely and W3Counter
"I run Improvely and W3Counter alone. I initially developed Improvely in 2012, and W3Counter in 2004. They, along with some other side projects, are how I have made a living for most of the past 10 years".
At W3Counter, which is a web analytics tool, how do you monetize it? Aren't you afraid of competing with Google Analytics?
"W3Counter is freemium. People pay between $5 and $50 per month for extra features. It's really not hard to compete with Google Analytics (especially when you start before GA existed). There are a ton of large companies making millions and billions in the analytics space".
Arvid Kahl of FeedbackPanda
- Read how he founded, ran, and sold his SaaS in under 2 years
- His website is a gold mine for the micro-SaaS industry.
Pieter Levels (LevelsIO) of nomadlist, remoteok and more
- Read this interview he did for Abadesi of ProductHunt on his website.
- He published a book about bootstrapping small startups.
"I run Nomad List, which is not exactly a SaaS, but it is a subscription revenue based business. Nomad List is a website where you can find cities in where you can travel and work remotely. That's what I've been doing for the last five years. And this website lets you filter all these cities on things like internet speed, weather, safety, just anything you can think of pretty much. I've collected data and I let you filter on it. So for example, most people like probably mild to warm weather, so you can find places in January that are warm with fast internets that have kind of a nomad scene, so there's a lot of other remote working nomads there. So you can socialize with them".
Gary Brewer of BuiltWith
- Read this article about BuiltWith's story
BuiltWith is a free tool that allows users to type in a website address and then discover the technology that is powering that website. After some time, people started asking for niche-specific data, saying that they would pay for it. Gary then realized the commercial potential of BuiltWith and started a SaaS by implementing a membership subscription model.
Tyler Tringas of StoreMapper
Tyler Tringas is the creator of the whole "micro-SaaS" concept. Back when he created StoreMapper, it was really unconventional for a solo founder to navigate in the SaaS world. It was perceived only as a multi-million business model.
Nishant Agrawal of Formcrafts
"I run Formcraft and formcraft-wp and both are profitable, netting over 150k+ a year in total (posted in July 2016). They were my side projects when I was in accounting school."
Malcolm Ocean of Complice
"I started Complice 2.5 years ago while in university, with the goal of making enough money by graduation that I didn't have to get a job. I succeeded at that, and have now grown it to about twice that, and it continues to grow, mostly via word of mouth and a few communities.
I mostly work on it one day a week, when I have a super maker schedule day and code for like 14h straight. The other days of the week I answer support emails and sometimes write blog posts. Total time these days is about 20h/week, and if I want to it can easily be 4h or less.
I've written a bit about my experience getting to here.
In some senses it worked fairly smoothly for me, but I'm not assuming it's easy. Some basic advice:
- do things that don't scale
- charge people from the beginning: ideally get 10 people to literally send you cash for their first month's subscription before you do much work
- message friends directly rather than setting up a huge sales site - then gradually automate it with software
- (before you get monthly payments running on your app, you can run them with moonclerk which uses stripe, so it's a seamless transition)
By following these principles, you know that at each step of the way, you're building something that people will pay for, because you have people paying for it. This also forces anyone you talk to for advice to take you more seriously".
Mike Kulakov of Everhour
- Read this interview on IndieHackers about bootstrapping to a 1.4$MM SaaS business
"As of today, we have 2300+ paid teams from 70 countries. The main thing our customers love is how fluidly we integrate into third-party project management systems. Suppose your team uses Asana, that all of your tasks live there, and the staff is there too. Why constantly switch between Asana and a time tracker? Why duplicate data? Instead, connect Everhour to Asana and track time right there. We integrate with Asana, Basecamp, Trello, Jira, GitHub, and more.
We received our first paid client in September, 2015 and have been steadily growing since then without any external investment and with a small team of seven people. This month, Everhour crossed the $1.4M ARR mark".
Rick Blyth of RickBlyth.com
"I was unhappy in my corporate job despite being 'at the top' as a Technical Director. I discovered Micro SaaS when I was looking for a side project to get me back into programming again.
I started building small chrome extensions for a micro niche (Merch Wizard & KDP Wizard) which I eventually doubled down on and spent all my spare time on them and after scaling them up I was able to quit my unfulfilling day job. I've never looked back and love the freedom that you get as a Micro SaaS founder. I can't every imagine going back to cubicle nation!
Recently, I exited and sold my apps for a life changing amount of money and I'm now passionate about helping other software developers realize they can leverage their existing skillset to start a side hustle or even quit their job. So, I've started a blog and have written a 12 chapter free eBook called the Micro SaaS Handbook.
My advice is to simply take baby steps to get started and get some early momentum, build something to fix a small problem that you or someone you know is facing. Start small, embrace failure, fail fast and fail forward. You never know where it might lead!"
- Are you a bootstrapped founder yourself? Please tell me (see Contributions) so I can add you so your story can benefit others.
- Want a longer list? Check out this old HN post.
📉 Failure stories
While adding success stories and examples, I couldn't not include some failures too. It's natural that a lot of SaaS businesses fail, like any other company. There's a lot to learn from people who have failed. I thereby consider these stories precious insights and the people who've shared them are real contributors to the community.
I spent 2 years and I got 0 clients
staffer.space (by u/valenso)
Like the title says, I built a SaaS software for 2 years and got 0 users.
My product is most suitable for businesses where working hours are a key. It is a powerful tool when you need to plan work sessions and track results. Maybe I'm wrong, but from my perspective, there are a lot of cafés and restaurants who would love to use this type of software.
Mistakes I made:
- The colour scheme is not really nice, it is terrible. I do not know what I thought about, but it looked nice to me. Now, a year after, I understand how it actually looks like.
- It is really complex, it is complex for business owners and complex for employees. Look at the setting! It is a monster!
- The main page is not handy, it is not intuitive, colours for progress bars make people confused.
- The planning tool is not simple, it is fine if you have 2-3-4 employees, but after this number, it is getting really annoying.
- Also, it is really important to have a company level overview and have easy access to change the schedule in one click
- There is no automation, you can’t copy/paste plans, you can’t create it with one click
- Also, if you want to cancel several moves, you have to do it manually.
- User custom variable is not an obvious resource. The same for dynamic variables. The idea is really good but implementation is not high-end quality. I thought, that it is really nice to have the ability to save any data about an employee, but in fact - not necessary.
- Analytics is too simple, there are no filters fo example
- What about checklists? Checklist idea is also really nice, it is important to document processes you use in your daily activity. It is nice to share and assign, but implementation is not handy. It is just not really nice design.
Most voted replies on Reddit:
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You focused way too much on the product, not on the business. (by u/Fewshot)
If you 'fixed' every item on your problem list, you still wouldn't have a single customer. The reason folks didn't buy you isn't because the color scheme sucked, or because you didn't write QA tests. It's because you didn't build something that they were convinced was worth paying for.
Focus less on making your own life easier and more on making your customer's life easier.
In any SaaS business, before you write a single line of code, the job to be done is to interview the hell out of who you think would buy it (at least 20 interviews) and grill the shit out of them on what problems they're having and what they'd be willing to pay to solve. Then go build that.
I see so many SaaS projects fail because the introverted founder is more excited about being able to code a thing themselves intuitively than having conversations with the people they’d be selling the thing to.
You don't need to be working in the industry for years to build a SaaS. It's not a requirement. Shopify knows a lot about how to do e-commerce without selling anything themselves.
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Your business failed because it operated in a vacuum where "creating a product people would buy" wasn't even an afterthought. (by u/RyanMatonis)
I’m not even exaggerating. You just eulogized a startup you never sold or marketed without mentioning that a lack of sales and marketing was the reason you failed.
You just made a 4 page Reddit post deeply analyzing why you failed when the reality is you have no idea.
That deeply reflects the core problem; you don’t really care what anyone thinks, you don’t ask what they think, and you just dig in and create without considering whether or not what you’re doing is useful, accurate, desired, rational, etc.
It’s all just based on what’s in your head and what you think will work and you never challenge your ideas in the real world.
You didn’t even ask the real world why you failed. You just decided yourself in your own head that it’s because your codebase was bad.
Your real world feedback system sucks and you will suck at every single thing you ever do with your life until you fix that. Once it’s fixed you’ll start being awesome at so many things because you’re full of drive and ambition and you can code products and stuff. But until you learn to put your ear to the ground and not your colon youre gonna have a tough time.
📕 Books
This is a list of some of the best SaaS books. I haven't read them all yet but I've read great things about every single one in the list. I even asked about book suggestions on several communities in the SaaS niche. In particular, one answer on my IndieHackers post struck me:
The problem with book lists is that the value you get from those books depends on where you are in your life. None of those are original toughts, so if you're reading your third book about habits then "The Power of Habit" will be boring for you, even though it's been life changing for many. — by akfaew
Keeping that in consideration, here are the best books for devs trying to make it in the SaaS world:
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Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl
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The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
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The Founder's Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman
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Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
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Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross
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The Science of Selling by David Hoffeld
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Zero to One by Peter Thiel
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Rework by Jason Fried
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Measure What Matters by John Doerr
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Crossing the Chasm by Goffrey Moore
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Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
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Traction by Gabriel Weinberg
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The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz
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Start small, stay small by Rob Walling
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Sales is not Rocket Science by Hal Carroll
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Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley's best kept secret by Raymond Fong
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Competing against luck by Taddy Hall
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The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
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Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
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When Coffee and Kale compete by Alan Klement
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Running Lean by Ash Maurya
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MAKE book by Pieter Levels
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Getting Real by Basecamp.com
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The power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
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Deep Work by Cal Newport
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Digital minimalism by Cal Newport
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Badass: making users awesome by Kathy Sierra
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On Writing Well by William Zinsser
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Value SaaS basecamp guide by Thiyagarajan M
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Micro SaaS Handbook by Rick Blyth
🗞 Blogs & Communities
- IndieHackers: The #1 best community for devs, makers, and solo founders. Can’t recommend it enough.
- HackerNews: Extremely prolific forum for technology enthusiasts & developers.
- SaaSX: from tools to advice to best practices about SaaS and more.
- SaaStr: the world's largest community for business software. Focus on B2B
- SaaSInvaders: great deals on tools & resources for startup growth
- r/SaaS: 10k members all interested in SaaS.
- Andrew Chen: thoughtful essays on startups and marketing from a true Silicon Valley insider.
- Tom Tunguz: One of the best VC blogs.
- Brianne Kimmel: Weekly essays on SaaS and articles about VC.
- For Entrepreneurs: Incredibly useful articles about SaaS & business. The 0-to-100 article is a must read.
- The SaaS CFO: One of the best blogs for SaaS metrics and forecasting.
- All that SaaS: A blog dedicated to everything about SaaS: Roundups, Product Reviews, Interviews, Tips, & Insights.
- Rick Blyth: Advice and tips on getting started with Micro SaaS, Passive Income, Quit Your Job, Chrome Extensions and more.
🧱 Extra Material
Did you think this document was long enough? Not even close. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what you should learn as a bootstrapped entrepreneur. This section is a list of links to additional awesome resources you may need at some point in your learning journey.
- Design Resources for Devs: List of design resources, including stock photos, UIs, templates & more.
- Nodesign: A collection of tools for developers who have little artistic talent.
- Marketing for Engineers: A curated collection of marketing articles & tools to grow your product.
- Unofficial Micro-Conf video directory: Videos sourced from MicroConf, finally free and gathered in one place.
- Growth.design: Great list of design psychology principles explained with practical examples.
- Free for dev: A list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) that offer free tiers for developers.
- Semicolon&Sons: Inside the Muse: A screencast series giving a behind-the-scenes tour of a profitable web-app, showing everything from code architecture to SEO strategies.
- SellYourSaaS: An Open-Source platform for end-to-end distribution of a SaaS company. From creation to invoicing to management, this project is an 8 years long effort, that just became open source.
👀 Credits
Made by Nicolas Racchi.
I've collected all this information over time. I'm trying my best to credit every single author so you can find more resources and research individual topics by yourself. if by any chance I forget to credit the authors correctly, please let me know by sending an email to [email protected].
🎳 Contributions
If you'd like to add something to this document, please do by contacting me by email. Feel free to send PRs here on GitHub too.
Email: [email protected]
🗺 Roadmap
NOTE: This repo is no longer being maintained, but here are some useful areas to look into if you wish to expand or contribute to this resource:
- Add Slack groups of prolific SaaS communities
- Add a Twitter List of micro-SaaS founders & makers
- Update Launch section
- Add What's Next section
- Add a brief description to every book to motivate why I've chosen it
- Add list of the best SaaS Newsletters
- Add list of best Podcasts for solo founders
- Add Screencasts/Videos/Youtube channels relevant to SaaS
📢 Disclaimer
This document doesn't contain any paid promotion, sponsorship, referral, tracking/affiliate link or anything of that kind. It's just a collection of resources that I've amassed over time.