Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

[9967d2cad_askhn]

I started a SaaS business official in May 2019. (Although I spent about 8 months developing the application). I didn't officially acquire my first customer until May 2019. Fast forward to May 2020, and I've got about 8 paying customers. I'm really proud and impressed by this accomplishment.

Growth is, however, slow. I have a good understanding of who my target customer is now, 1 year later, after talking to them and noticing common patterns in terms of their needs.

This is my first real business. I would really love to hear from someone experienced in building a SaaS business from scratch. Your insight would be appreciated. What should I expect in terms of growth? How fast did businesses grow in the beginning (BaseCamp, for example, Digital Ocean, MailChimp)?

Thanks

[mherrmann]

I've been running various online businesses, including SaaS, for eight years.

There is no general answer to your question. Are those 8 customers paying you hundreds of dollars each per month, or tens of dollars? What's the reason you haven't gotten more? Have you lost motivation to work in this space / on that project?

I was in a similar situation to you a few years ago. I had started a clone of patio11's appointmentreminder.org for the Austrian market. After 2 years, I had 8 customers and €2k monthly recurring revenue. But it was very difficult to get new customers. I decided to stop growing this business. Since then, I've lost 4 of the 8 customers, but those that remain now pay me more for additional services, so I'm back at €2k MRR. I'm satisfied with my decision.

Another project I worked on is https://fman.io, a desktop application. There, I wish I had stopped sooner. I spent 3,000 hours and made <€20k. I actually recorded videos about this and the other business I mentioned above [1], [2].

In general, I suspect most founders keep going longer than they should. The fact that you are even asking the question indicates to me that you are losing motivation. Maybe it is time to move on.

If you'd like to talk about more details privately, feel free to reach out by email. You can find my address at http://herrmann.io. Good luck!

1: https://youtu.be/I1K3IkOlaVw

2: https://youtu.be/NWCOwvp23uk

[kev2908]

Thanks Herrmann, for the videos! They are really nice. I think that a lot of "business" videos are made by guys in the US. I often wonder if business advices are applicable here in Vienna. But hearing this from a guy of my own hometown makes this very valueable information.

[mherrmann]

Happy to hear you like them!

[bootloop]

Thanks for sharing. About your customers (not limited to SaaS), are they local (Vienna, Austria) or from all over the world? As I have the feeling here b2b is still done door-to-door. But of course this might depend on the target audience.

[mherrmann]

They're very, very local. My customers are doctors. They need face to face conversation to be convinced. The big sales effort was a big reason why I stopped.

[zerr]

What do you think went wrong with fman.io? E.g. Total Commander is a one guy shop and he is doing fine for 20+ years now - so seems like people pay money for a good file manager. Does fman.io miss some features or is it wrong marketing?

[mherrmann]

TC entered the market at a much better time. There was much less competition, huge demand and people were still used to paying for desktop software. For that reason, you can't really compare fman to it.

Having said that, yes fman misses important features. It is I think the main reason why fman does not have more adoption. But adding the features would take another x,000h.

[iopuy]

Interesting product in fman. May I ask what percent of the <20k came from one off sales (18 euros) vs paying for the ongoing updates? Trying to figure out how a license a product of mine. THanks

[codingdave]

The most solid SaaS I've been a part of was not a fast start. It was almost 20 years from the first customer until the acquisition/exit. It was bootstrapped, and added about one employee per year. It maxed out at 2 developers.

But it grew to around $15M ARR in that time. That might not sound like a huge number compared to the best known startups, and VCs would have no interest in such a company, but it does prove that slow growth does work.

So to answer your question... when should you give up? Give up when you no longer feel fulfilled by working on it. There is no magical growth rate that makes it a good project vs. a bad project. It is all about your personal goals and whether it fulfills them.

[mandeepj]

> $15M ARR > That might not sound like a huge number

As a founder, I'd be more than happy to work on it for my entire life

[jwr]

I think it takes a very long time to grow a SaaS. Think multiple years. I started 4.5 years ago and it took nearly 4 years until I felt fully comfortable. Slow growth is to be expected. My growth curve, in fact, isn't a curve at all: it's pretty much a straight line if you plot paying customers. It looks better for MRR (monthly recurring revenue, your main metric), because I've been working on raising ARPU (average revenue per user).

The "long slow saas ramp of death" is real. Google it.

You can supposedly grow faster if you do marketing well. But from what you wrote I'd guess that you do not do marketing well. My adventures with marketing came down to the following conclusions:

* Spending money on ads is basically burning money and does not work for me. (tried Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook ultra-targeted ads, Quora). This became painfully obvious after I implemented my own conversion tracking, because I did not trust their metrics/analytics.

* You will find plenty of marketing experts all around you, but none of them will work for a commission, which speaks to how much trust they really place in their "skills".

* Since I am a solo founder, I eventually decided that I'm OK with my organic growth and I'd rather concentrate on making the product better. This helps in building bigger product value, improves customer retention, allows me to raise the ARPU, and in general works great. I just don't get the marketing-pumped stream of new customers. But I'm OK with that, especially at this point.

That said, I think I would expect more than 8 paying customers after a year. My ramp-up in the first year was slow (the product didn't have a lot of value back then), but it was quicker. I just checked, and I had 25 paying customers after one year from the first one.

[csa]

> You will find plenty of marketing experts all around you, but none of them will work for a commission

There are many marketers who will work on commission (e.g., affiliate marketers, some/much of which is not BS). The challenge is creating a context in which a producer and seller can work well together. Specifically:

1. The seller needs to have a product that people want. That’s product-market fit.

2. The seller needs to be willing to pay the marketer enough to make it worth their time. Many producers fall woefully short in this department. Sometimes it’s because the producer is cheap, sometimes because they don’t value marketing, sometimes it’s because they don’t price the cost of marketing into their product (either not at all or not correctly).

3. On top of all of the above, there needs to be a sales funnel that converts. This can be set up (even crudely is ok) by the producer, or it can be set up by the marketer. Note that a good sales funnel takes time to develop and refine, and doing so is expensive —- expensive to the point that the marketer maybe should be a co-owner rather than a hired gun.

If a producer is missing any of the above, they will naturally only attract folks who will work for a flat fee rather than a commission, and that’s because the groundwork has not been laid for a commission system to work / be worth their time.

[Veen]

> You will find plenty of marketing experts all around you, but none of them will work for a commission

You won't find many developers who work on a commission either.

[zeptonix]

The developers have a lot more risks (the product never gets built, the product at its end isn't compelling, the founder moves on to something else and/or there never is any follow-through). The marketers are being asked to help take something that already has been built and make it take off. I think his point is a valid one that this isn't something you often see, which does run a bit counterintuitive to what you'd expect especially since commission-based structures are so common generally in sales.

[Veen]

One of the issues is that sales generated by a salesperson are a lot easier to attribute than sales generated by marketing. Let's say that, as a content marketer, I write an article for a client's blog that is widely shared. The article increases mindshare for the product, helps to establish the brand, and makes a material difference to the number of sales over the next year. But how does the business attribute those sales to me so that I get my commission? Many of those sales will not be from people clicking a CTA on the blog article, but from people who remember the brand and make a purchase weeks or months later. It's not even as easy as it seems to attribute sales to PPC or other forms of advertising.

[nickfromseattle]

Developers building products that noone uses is the status quo.

There are likely hundreds of thousands, or millions of developer built apps with no users.

Just because a product was built does not meet the only thing left is marketing.

In fact, I would rather have great marketing than a great product.

A lousy product with revenue can be iterated on more quickly than a great product with no revenue.

[jwr]

I don't think this is a good analogy, for many reasons.

Also, the reason why I wanted to have a marketer on a commission is not because I don't want to pay or because I don't have money. It's because I want accountability. My strong suspicion is that most of the self-proclaimed marketing gurus do not deliver.

[Veen]

There certainly are marketing "gurus" who are nothing more than conmen. But skilled marketers also come across "founders" with nothing but a shitty MVP (or even just an idea), an inflated sense of their own ability, and grossly exaggerated expectations of the potential of their product to change the world, if only a marketer would "partner" with them to build a brand and traffic. It's a huge risk for a marketer to invest months of time in a product that could go nowhere because the founder is a flake or the engineering doesn't work out — all on commission with no stock options if everything comes together.

[nickfromseattle]

> * You will find plenty of marketing experts all around you, but none of them will work for a commission, which speaks to how much trust they really place in their "skills".

Your product is unproven. How do I know you can convert and retain a qualified audience?

[jwr]

In my case, it's very much proven. I can show organic growth over 4 years, retention stats (excellent), etc. — it's very clear what the traction is and compared to incoming traffic, all parameters are excellent. So this is not the problem.

[ht85]

That's because it's fairly easy to link acquisitions with different marketing channels, whereas that is not possible for most technical work.

If you want to give engineers a financial interest you do it through options / stock, which is very common.

[rsoto]

> You will find plenty of marketing experts all around you, but none of them will work for a commission, which speaks to how much trust they really place in their "skills".

As a marketer myself, it's not that we don't trust our skills, it's that few things happen in short term. If I'm going to work with you with commisions it's because I have trust in your product in the long run (2+ years, at least).

Otherwise I could spend a year optimizing your site, your funnel, your strategy and you could easily fire me and keep all the strategy, SEO and branding done to your site.

[jwr]

This a very good point. And it's also exactly how I see a potential relationship. Beginning with a proven product (4 years history of organic growth with low churn), and with a long-term outlook.

I've yet to find a marketer that would be interested. To be honest, I'm not that surprised — I want accountability, and there are many others out there who do not, and with faster-growing businesses.

[shostack]

Others have beaten the "marketer on commission" horse to death. I fully agree with their comments, but I want to address something else.

>"Spending money on ads is basically burning money and does not work for me. (tried Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook ultra-targeted ads, Quora). This became painfully obvious after I implemented my own conversion tracking, because I did not trust their metrics/analytics."

When I hear about solo founders decry poor results from paid media, lack of trust in tracking and metrics, etc., I often wonder how much time they've actually invested in learning what they are doing.

Managing paid media is a career and industry in and of itself that is highly-technical, rapidly evolving, and requires deep understanding of the specifics of individual platforms, creative, audience, etc. The metrics themselves are INCREDIBLY nuanced, and I've come across more fellow marketing professionals than I would like who aren't familiar with the impact of view through conversions, how they should be viewed in relation to other efforts, where/when/why they will mess up your analytics in different platforms (for example, FB view throughs are counted by default, but will not show up in Google Analytics).

So when you say they are basically burning money and not working for you, my gut tells me that there are decent odds things were not setup, tracked, or optimized according to what many in the paid media industry would consider best practices.

This is NOT a knock against you. This stuff is difficult, but the platforms go out of their way to make it easy to get started and spend large sums quickly with settings that may not actually make sense for what you are trying to accomplish.

Which brings me back to the commission thing again. People who know this stuff work on a variety of models. Many of them value their time quite a bit (myself included) and would not be willing to shoulder all of the risk. That said, paying for an initial flat rate consult to evaluate your previous efforts to validate your approach and gauge how much they reach the same conclusion (ads don't work for you) might well be worth the time and money.

[jwr]

It is entirely possible that I have no idea what I'm doing with ads. I did try to learn and apply all the knowledge I had. My conclusion was not that it doesn't work at all, just that it doesn't work for me and I would not recommend it to other solo founders.

As to commission-based work, I still think that when presented with a SaaS with a good 4-year track record, a confident marketer should at least consider something else than a flat rate. What exactly is the risk here? There is organic growth, there is customer retention, there are MRR numbers. After a customer learns about the service, everything else is known and very clear. What remains to be done is work on what happens before a customer learns about the service, which in my opinion is entirely on the side of the marketing person.

I guess my skepticism is also before I haven't met a marketing person that is convincingly good at what they do.

[shostack]

>"It is entirely possible that I have no idea what I'm doing with ads."

If you've managed the ads with a total time investment that equates to the equivalent of < 1yr full-time work, this is likely the case. Keep in mind that when I've trained dedicated digital ads people of all levels from entry-level to managers, I would never let someone with < 3-4yrs full-time experience run an account on their own.

Again, not a ding at you, but it may be helpful to replace "ads" with "software development" when thinking about how much you might expect out of someone's coding and architecture skills if they had the amount of experience equal to the time you've invested in learning and managing ads, and the projects you've managed them for.

For solo founders who have a substantial amount of hands on digital media management experience, I would absolutely recommend it to them if they felt their market research had shown a potential for them to be successful.

>"a confident marketer should at least consider something else than a flat rate. What exactly is the risk here? There is organic growth, there is customer retention, there are MRR numbers." .... "everything else is known and very clear." ... "what happens before a customer learns about the service, which in my opinion is entirely on the side of the marketing person"

The risk is it not being worth the return. Full/partial commission models for marketing are a question of who is shouldering what risk, and the balance against potential rewards. On the full commission side, depending on what resources you provide, how much control you give said marketer over your site, your in-product funnel, etc., they may demand 100% of first year revenue, up front, or more depending those variables. If they are fronting their own capital, they need to feel it will be worth their while for their target margins after paying media dollars, any creative/content/web production costs, taxes, etc. The premium that carries is often hard for people who are not marketers (particularly technical solo founders) to stomach. It's much the same as the reaction many technical folks have to "idea people" that want them to invest their time and energy into building the entire product for negligible equity. Just isn't worth it.

Partial commission, or performance-based bonuses can be an option. But again, it comes down to the risk balance. Are you supplying the media budget? Will you get them whatever data they need for analytics? Will you make changes to your product and funnel if they find traction with an audience that the product UX doesn't support well or feel your current marketing site sucks?

These days there is so much that happens after someone learns about a service that is mission critical to converting to sale. Unless you are willing to pay them solely to deliver on what happens before someone learns about the service (ex: a CPA for a free trial), you shouldn't expect them to shoulder the risk for what happens after someone learns about the service.

If you're interested in debating further, I'm happy to take this offline (contact in profile, I'm not trying to sell anything). Nothing wrong asking the questions you laid out, but I think solo technical founders are really going to struggle to attract quality marketers with this sort of mindset and assumptions.

[jmchuster]

So, to get an idea of what order of magnitude you're dealing with, you'll want to run two experiments, at a cost of, say, $1000.

First experiment is to see how large a customer base there is. You want to see how often people are looking for a product like yours or your competitors. Make an Adwords campaign with the right keywords, bid high enough to always be shown first, and then run this for a while to get an idea of what the search traffic is like.

Second experiment is to see what portion of that customer base you can capture. So, continuing on from the previous experiment, you now want your site to be set up, and then measure what percentage of those searches result in people actually clicking on your site. And then what percentage of those clicks result in them actually putting in their credit card information and paying for the first month. If you can't have people signing up on their own, then give them a form to submit their information instead, and then make some estimate on what percentage of those will fall through.

Then, that gives you an idea of what your baseline growth is. And then anything beyond that, i'm sure you would've already hired someone who could give you way better industry expertise than you would find by asking HN.

[hellcow]

I started my current enterprise SAAS company 4 years ago. It took more than a year before we had our first customer (who left us!), 2.5 long years before we raised $350k on the promise of signing a big company. After 2.5 years "without a job" my whole family was pressuring me into just getting a job a tech company. "It was obviously not going to work if we hadn't succeeded by now."

But I knew we had something special in the tech.

That little bit of cash helped us hire a great head of sales with experience building companies like ours from the ground up. We couldn't afford to pay him even an order of magnitude less than what he would normally charge, but after seeing the product he turned down dozens (!) of offers from VC darling startups to work with us, for free, on the basis that we would pay him when the sales worked. For most of the next year and a half, we had steady linear growth, but it was enough to attract funding.

Now we've built a great team of 20 people and are on track to way exceed our numbers for this quarter. We still have a lot of work ahead of us.

If you know you have something special, then fight for it. It takes a lot longer than you expect.

[radihuq]

Awesome story. Where did you find this head of sales, and how'd you convince them to work at your company? I know you said the tech was special but was that really all that it took to convince them? Was there more at play (eg. Attractive company culture, industry, etc)?

[hellcow]

We met through our pre-seed investor--our first check. It was a combination of track record of founders and tech that seemed too good to be true, but he could see it working.

Same reason a later seed investor put money in. "If it works, why wouldn't any company buy it?" As we learned (and are still learning) great tech and an obvious market need are only tiny pieces of the puzzle to figure out.

None of us had any experience in the industry, and the company was 3 people at the time our head of sales came on board--not much of a culture to speak of.

[radihuq]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

Just checked out your site - landing page looks very aesthetically pleasing and I think the product does have a ton of potential. I can see how others thought this was too good to be true 4 years ago.

Goodluck with everything!

[gcheong]

What were the signals that you had something special?

[hellcow]

We were trying to solve a difficult engineering challenge that no one in the industry had been able to replicate.

If we could get it to work, it would reduce costs massively for businesses, so it seemed to me at the time that it wasn't a question of product market fit. Of course the market wants this. The only question was, can we build it? Will it work?

When we saw it working, we knew we were close. Didn't know that close was still 3 years away though!

[simonw]

The biggest myth of SaaS (and startups in general) is "if you build it, they will come".

You win your first one hundred customers one at a time, through massively high touch sales.

Once you've hit a hundred, you might start seeing some organic growth via word-of-mouth - maybe. But you gotta put in the sales effort to get there.

If you're an engineer with no sales experience this can be a painful lesson to learn!

[fxtentacle]

It depends on the market.

I built an app that helps people have a better gaming experience and my domain is basically just the best Google Trends keywords concatenated. I immediately had 500 monthly unique visitors just from Google organic search.

But launching a bikini brand, for example, took lots of advertisement and social media presence and sales dropped as soon as we stopped paying everyone for ads.

[simplecto]

You might consider taking this question over to IndieHackers as well. That is a good community of people like yourself who are bootstrapped and working on their primary/side/exploratory hustles.

[1] - https://indiehackers.com

[throwaway413]

Off-topic, just an FYI, you have a typo in the blog link on your profile page.

[simplecto]

Fixed. Thank you!

[fxtentacle]

I've seen many founders slowly grind out their spirit in a bad market. So the first thing you need to clarify is:

- do your customers know that they have a problem

- is the problem painful enough that people are happy to pay for a solution

- do your customers have money?

I've been running a SaaS for professional freelance photographers for 10+ years now. Customers going bankrupt really drives up my churn rate. It's a frustrating market. I keep the company around because it's profitable, but I would never want to invest additional work in that product.

I also once built a sound plugin to add 3D audio support to existing movie production software. Pretty much no chargebacks and no returns at a much higher price. Here, marketing was easy because a good prospect would buy 20 licenses in bulk for the entire studio. We got featured on magazines, had interviews with famous actors, musicians, and directors. In short, everyone was feeling great about working on it.

I've also released some games that gained no traction even when I made them completely free with no ads. That was pretty frustrating.

What I'm saying is choosing the right market can make the difference between you feeling great and making easy progress, and wasting lots of effort only to feel frustrated later on. Make sure you choose a market that makes you happy.

There is a reason why nobody is making X optimized for broke cynics.

[k00b]

> Make sure you choose a market that makes you happy.

People really do underweight enjoyment when they choose something to build. There's a lot of dimensionality when choosing something to work on, but enjoyment is one of the most important.

[redis_mlc]

I hate to break it to you, but most startups take 7 - 10 years to reach their stride.

Your choice is to either slog this one, or use the experience and pivot.

BaseCamp - used Ruby on Rails consulting to promote and finance it

Digital Ocean - rode pre-AWS hosting craze

MailChimp - founders worked full-time until enough revenue, rode moderately-early email marketing craze

Are you riding a craze, and/or funded from side gigs?

[mkl]

DigitalOcean was founded 5 years after AWS launched. Were you thinking of someone else?

[redis_mlc]

Thanks for pointing that out. I thought DO was a vanilla VPS like the rest of the bunch, but it's not.

Hats off to DO (2011) for rolling their own cloud after AWS (2006), and gaining mindshare!

Anyway, to the GP: what DO has done when head-to-head with a giant like AWS is pretty rare.

[karolist]

AWS craze started much later than when it was founded. I'd say this was fueled by devops movement and docker, so around 2015

[michaelbuckbee]

Baremetrics has shared actual data on this exact topic:

How fast SAAS companies hit ARR milestones:

https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-fast-saas-companies-hit-arr...

[gingahbread31]

I'm gonna repeat what has been said but yes it really depends on your vertical. For example if we look at the companies that you quoted, they probably have had (and still have) completely different growth strategy. Moreover, it doesn't take as much time to build the MVP of Digital Ocean from scratch than it would take to build the Mailchimp's one. If you have customers you can talk to and if they are happy with your actual product, they might give you advices on what they're expecting in the future and you can turn that in features that a lot more people may want right now.

In my very personal opinion, having 8 customers shouldn't give you the sensation that your product is finished and that you can scale (although I really don't know what you do so I may b wrong), so you must figure out what is missing to acquire more customers before thinking in terms of "Growth"

[sweeneyrod]

> Moreover, it doesn't take as much time to build the MVP of Digital Ocean from scratch than it would take to build the Mailchimp's one.

Shouldn't this be the other way round? The MVP of Mailchimp is a generic CRUD web app TM hooked up to a mail server, while the MVP of Digital Ocean needs something approximating a data centre.

[muzani]

https://a16z.com/2017/02/18/12-things-about-product-market-f...

"So what are considered some of the best tests for PMF? Rachleff writes that “You know you have fit if your product grows exponentially with no marketing. That is only possible if you have huge word of mouth. Word of mouth is only possible if you have delighted your customer.”"

Generally, if growth is slow, your product is not good enough, or rather there's no market for it. You should try different things until you get to a point where you have more customers than you can deal with. Slack originally worked on a MMO, then shut it down and worked on the messaging tool they used while building it.

[throwawayffffas]

You should really, include a link to your product. It will give people an opportunity to give a better answer to your question. Additionally this post made it to the frontpage, it could be good exposure. You should always be pitching. Edit: grammar

[135792468]

I’m not going to say don’t give up without knowing your business but you’ve got 8 paying customers so there is some validity to your idea. I’m one of the few non-programmers around here so my advice is different than most.

Alternatively to everyone in this thread: find a partner. There are plenty of folks like me who can’t dev but are able to grow businesses, you just have to find the right one that fits the channel your customers hang around in and you enjoy talking with.

One of my partners and I talk all day every day, we met on some random subreddit and three years in he’s one of my closest friends and we have quite successfully generated ARR

The side benefit of this is it allows you to focus on what you’re good at which is building the product.

I don’t have capacity but I could probably connect you with some potential people if you’d like or at least willing to talk through some potential marketing thoughts with you if you’d like to talk. Just let me know how to connect

[andrewstuart]

It's got everything to do with your business and product.

I had a business once that was not fast moving and I thought "probably because I'm not much of a salesperson". Then later I started another business and the work started flowing in hard and fast. I was the same person but it was a different business. That was a huge lesson for me - when you're selling the right thing, clients come running to you "take my money!".

If you've built something people want then the difference will be amazing - the work and customers will fly in on their own because they'll hear about it and want it.

Other less compelling businesses will be a grind forever.

From what you describe, there's no reason to think your product will suddenly take off. Sounds like it will be a long slow grind.

[dman]

It took me way too long to learn this lesson.

[drchiu]

Beyond the question of whether it’s your marketing, is it also a problem of the size of your addressable market? How novel is your solution compared to the ways (Ie. how well) existing solutions work?

I’ve been in projects before where things grew very easily due to no effort simply because people wanted that product. And then in other projects where the solution is elegant but people were already satisfied with existing solutions. And so the few who wanted it simply meant the product was niche.

Zapier is one that comes to mind where I could see the solution, before its successes, could have gone either way. Either people were happy with their existing workflows and ignore what Zapier could do, or it would change their lives. If your product is defining a new segment, this could be the problem.

[monkeydust]

With my Angel Investor hat on (doing it 6 years, multiple deals, few exits):

- Very difficult to be successful if this is your side project, if you cant take the leap because of funding then try to raise money, your in a better position than most because you have a product and traction (although without knowing the domain hard to say if someone will be interested).

- If your thinking about giving up, perhaps your not convinced enough to go full time on it (fair enough) then look to potential sell it - OR - merge it with a complimentary offering. There are SO many SaaS products now (just look at ProductHunt) but very few of them I would say are viable businesses on their own right but put together that could be a different story.

[zeuch]

I ran multiple side projects in the past years, including SaaS. In my opinion you should stop when you're not happy with it anymore and also not excited enough to continue building it until you're happy with it again.

But don't give up easily! Don't expect you should grow as fast as the popular startups you've mentioned. You can allow yourself to grow slow and steady and still be extremely successful. Growing fast is what investors want, not necessarily what your customers want. Focus on working for your customers, not your investors (or potential investors).

If you're delivering value for those 8 customers, get closer to them, get into their shoes and then find more customers just like them (maybe they can even help you with that).

Then automate your operations as much as possible, and focus on getting your SaaS really stable for them. Then, slowly, deliver the most critical and important features for those customers, always focusing in high standards for quality and security.

Be a strong business, even if a small one. Run your business in a profit first approach. You might grow slow, but you grow healthy and strong this way, and if you persist, you may eventually find yourself grow really fast later.

[saluki]

Check out the StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com podcast. Lots of info on SaaS.

The latest episode is right up your alley.

https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-499-...

Some ideas/products will grow faster than others. Congrats on launching and having paying customers that is a BIG accomplishment.

Since you have the experience of creating one, start thinking about your next SaaS. Think more about the value it would provide, niche, market size, how would you market to them and idea validation.

I've built and manage SaaS for clients, I'm building my first one for myself right now.

I've been following SaaS for years, some have taken off right away to $10k, for most though the growth is very slow.

I think it depends a lot on your market/niche. How many people have the problem your app solves and what marketing channels you have available.

If you have happy paying customers chances are you're on to something. It just might not grow as fast as you want. Think about how to market it to potential customers similar to your current signups.

Congrats and good luck.

[chris_f]

Firstly, congratulations on getting people to pay you money for your product. That is usually much more difficult than many realize.

Without more information on the business (MRR, vertical, customers, etc.) it is difficult to provide better feedback, but now that you know more about the customers, do you have a plan to grow faster or at least a path of sustainability?

One year in most cases is not enough time to know whether to give up.

[aww_dang]

Keep running your existing project and build another with the lessons learned. Think about low hanging fruits, where customers are easier to acquire. Also consider the maintenance required to maintain the business. Work backwards from there and find problems you can solve.

Starting from a point of passion and personal interest isn't always the best strategy.

[StavrosK]

When it takes more effort to run it than what you get out of it.

I never give up on my side projects, I have too many to count now.

[econcon]

Without seeing your product it's very hard to give any advise.

Maybe you've not done marketing correct, maybe your product has steep learning curve. Maybe too many alternatives exist at lower price point.

There are lots of maybes, so send me an email I'll take a look [e-mail] and offer some feedback.

[winrid]

All I can do is share experience.

I worked on watch.ly for about five months. Cool product, no customers. Didn't do any significant marketing.

FastComments - couple months in had a handful of customers. I think almost six months in now. There were Sundays where I would wake up and just do marketing stuff all day, crash from the coffee, and then work the next day.

What you're trying to do is not easy. After you have something that even mildly works you should start spending most of your time trying to talk to potential customers.

As a famous salesman once said - "Major time is for major things".

Think and visualize your end goals here, then plot a path to them. You might realize you are way off.

Good luck!

[anoncareer0212]

if you're building a point of sale for $1000 flat, keep at it

if you're building a notifier for recent job postings for $9/month, stop

[mvind]

I'm sorry - I don't understand what you mean, can you expand?

[arcturus17]

I think they mean if after a year of operations OP has only sold eight $9 subscriptions, the business might not be considered validated.

[anoncareer0212]

yes, apologies for lack of clarity

basically if you have 8 users and you need 1,000 users/month to quit your day job, stop

[chucky123]

It really depends on your vertical. I suggest reading interviews of people who started businesses in similar verticals and see how much time they took to achieve profitability

[battery423]

I'm not sure where the urge comes from to have your own business. I dream of that sometimes as well.

But to be honest, i still focus more on my carrier and it looks good. I don't think i would make more money as a business owner.

It still sounds great to have your own business.

But what is your motivation? Did you create that specific SaaS because you wanted to have a SaaS Product or because you like your SaaS Product/Idea and you use it yourself?

Do you dream of becoming another Zuckerberg? If yes, forget it.

[simonw]

If you only ever work for other people there is a natural cap on your overall earning potential. This cap is lifted if you start your own businesses.

Starting businesses is no guarantee that you'll see that benefit of course. Chances are you'll earn less running your own business than you would if you worked for other people instead. But there's a small chance that you'll do a LOT better.

[cambalache]

I have been absolutely miserable working for others, as in:"life is gray" miserable. I tried on my own, with very bad outcome, so now I am in the difficult position to choose between give another shot with more age and way less money or get back to the grinder.

[ackbar03]

A bit off topic but as a follow up response, personally I don't think most people go in expecting to be the next Zuckerberg, although it might defintely be something they hope for. If anything most people go in knowing that the expected outcome is failure but they do it anyways for whatever reason. It takes a certain type to really go for it I think, nothing wrong with sticking with a good career but some people aren't happy being a career man for the rest of their life and would rather face expected failure and take that shot

[demarq]

also financial security.

like if I ever got laid off, my world would begin to fall apart. I have savings but the couple of times I've had to live of savings has convinced me that savings are just not viable.

[gcheong]

If you have a good idea now of your target user and the size of the market seems sufficiently big that it could grow to the size you want and if those 8 customers can't live without your product or are at least raving about it then that would be good signals to continue. If they can just flip a switch over to a competitor without losing any value then maybe not so much.

[andrea_sdl]

There are many things that might influence the result and therefore your decision.

I once worked for a product in the SaaS business and what helped us is understanding "where are our customers". So, where are _your_ customers? How do they come to your product, how do they discover your product? After having this answer we focused on improving that conversion rate (for us it was all about being first on google and having a high-converting landing page, but in your case forums might be a better place to look at. It all depends on the target customer)

Also, one issue I've often encountered is that knowing the customer and selling to the customer might be very different things. Did you only sell online? One great piece of advice is try to sell the product IRL and record the audio. After many failed and successfull attempts you'll have recordings of _what works_ and what doesn't work for the kind of customer. That information will be useful to convey the benefits into your landing page / homepage.

Back to your question: How much growth should you expect? It is a generic question. How many people are impacted by your product? How many have that specific itch to be scratched? How fast can you get to them? How good is your product at scratching the itch? The (partial) sum of these questions might lead to the answer. If you have many people impacted by your product, if the product scratch a big itch and you can reach all the people at the same time, chances are you're going to grow fast.

If you grow slow, is it bad? It might be bad if you're asking 5$/month for an extra. If it is 100$/month maybe a slow growth might make sense.

In the end, if I were in your shoes, I'll wait a year to decide if it's time to give up, but at the same time I'll set some monthly checks to see how growth is going, what are the feedbacks and how the community is reacting and test each month a different way to market the product. A good book on this is "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg

PS I also run a side business creating cosmetic products (not saas) and my growth has been relatively slow. The product (in my case) fixes a big itche and had no competitors. Reason for that is that achieving a stable efficient result is quite hard, but we somehow made it (bootrapped obviously). In our case slow growth was a good thing because it allowed us to fix the issues in the product before being too much known in the public.

[edimaudo]

Congratulations buddy! All businesses are not the same so you can't really expect to grow at the same rate. You are in a great position as you have paying customers. I would suggest the following, looking at your niche to see what other needs they have. You can then add more ancillary products which you can cross/up-sell.

[kissgyorgy]

It is always a good idea to set concrete targets whatever you do. If you have those targets (KPIs if you wish), you will know when to quit.

Your goal can be 10 or 100 paying customers by the end of the year, it doesn't really matter, you just have to make conscious decisions whether you are okay with those numbers.

[krewast]

This video is a few years old now, but I found it interesting:

The long, slow, SaaS ramp of death

https://businessofsoftware.org/talk/how-to-negotiate-the-lon...

[syed123]

Never 1: Change market 2: Change product 3: Change team 4: Change yourself by upgrading your knowledge/experience 4: Market changes on its own 5: Customers needs changes 6: Environment changes All of the hunger has to come within

[quickthrower2]

Looks interesting but I’m finding that hard to parse, could you reformat?

[duxup]

Do you want to keep working on it?

Is there something else you want to do?

If you're still motivated and want to do it, keep at it. I don't think timelines for success (depending on how you measure that) are fixed.

If you're not motivated / want to move on, you probably should.

[adamzapasnik]

Hard to say without knowing the product.

But if you understand your customers better now, focus on a marketing towards the same kind and see where it gets you.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

From personal experience: before you start.

[scottporad]

What's the URL to the app?

[1cvmask]

What is your startup called?

[sturza]

Do you need help?