[codingdave]

Almost every SaaS I've worked on did not start as people sitting down saying, "Lets make a SaaS". It started as people fell into a problem space as part of their ongoing work. In those cases, your first customers are already right in front of you, so you build what they need, then iterate to make it more useful for a wider community.

There are certainly pain points to find your 10th-100th customer. But if you don't even know who your 1st customer is, you are flying blind.

[skrebbel]

It's more general I think: it's hard to build a SaaS without a head start. In your examples, having ~10 launching customers is such a head start.

But there's also plenty SaaSes that started building tech for something else, that didn't pan out, but they realized they could sell the tech separately. Eg close.io did this and so did my company talkjs.com. There's likely many more examples.

But I agree that if you have to start without something to sell and without customers ready to pay, you're definitely in for a rough ride.