[mythrwy]

Absolutely.

I contracted for a person who built a small but very profitable SaaS app using contractors.

There are some caveats though. The person has a smattering of technical knowledge which prevented him from being completely taken advantage of by contractors. And he was an effective manager (a rarity to be sure). And he knew exactly what he wanted and stayed on top of details of how it was implemented. Although not a necessarily a "programmer" he also knew enough about using Git to review/merge changes. And perhaps most importantly he had the financial backing to complete the project.

I've also worked for other people who didn't have these qualities but figured they'd just hire some people to build some stuff without keeping on top of it or in many cases having a clear vision of what they wanted. Predictably these projects didn't turn out well for them.

But yes, it is possible. I've seen it.

[kaspm]

The key here is that he had the financial backing to complete the project. Unclear whether the original poster has enough of a cash runway to keep even a team of 1 at a fulltime salary.

[mythrwy]

You don't need a full time team or person (the guy I worked for doesn't have that) as long as you can deploy and manage the hosting and have someone you can call if there is an issue.

But no way to get building/operating capital? In general forget about it. Most likely not going to fly.

I'm convinced lots of people do this because I've personally seen at least two. But even more try and spend a bunch of money and fail (seen a lot more than 2 of those). The ones who succeed generally don't hang around HN posting startup related buzzwords though so it's understandable they are presumed not to exist.

[joe563323]

> But yes, it is possible. I've seen it.

Citation required. Please post links to the products.