[alxmng]

I earn a living wage working as a software consultant. I work for myself primarily because it's the only way I know of to do software engineering with flexible hours. I work on retainer with weekly deliverables. Within the week I can choose to work whenever I want.

I'd love to bootstrap a SaaS that would replace this income. I've actually started multiple, profitable SaaS, but they don't match anywhere near what I can earn as an engineer. Total addressable market is a real bottleneck. Sales/marketing is a difficult challenge for solo developers since there's no leverage. Unless you have a very expensive product or a huge funnel and market, it seems impractical to scale to engineering salaries.

[freelancelot]

This is my primary motivation, flexible hours.

Your retainer + weekly deliverables arrangement sounds nice. Do you propose this to your client? Do you expect payments weekly? What medium do you get paid in?

Why do you suppose your SaaS products don't match your engineering rates?

Are you not charging enough or are these products not providing enough value as you can as an engineer?

Perhaps a low volume high price service might be the ticket? Have you tried increasing prices?

How much is the difference in the SaaS revenue/profit vs contract income? (%)

Thanks!

[alxmng]

I’m essentially a full stack / product engineer for hire. I’ve done proposal type projects but I try and avoid them, I think it’s harder (almost impossible) to land clients with well-scoped projects. I find it easier to find companies that just want a product engineer they can throw tasks at, fix a problem, or augment a team to get a release done faster.

I bill monthly, and get paid by bank transfer (is there any other way?).

My two profitable SaaS have combined a few hundred active subscribers, maybe 5% of what I can make consulting. They are low-cost consumer products, so I’d need 5k active subscribers before I would think about not consulting. Without a breakthrough in marketing, I don’t see how I’ll ever get there.

My main bottleneck is I don’t really know how to market them sustainably. Most customers have come from HN or word of mouth.

My next software product will be high-price ($200-500, ideally a subscription). But there’s no free lunch. Most high-price software is feature heavy, especially enterprise apps. That is potentially months of unpaid development work without any guarantee of success. Very difficult for me because I have a family to support. The trick for me is to find something where the MVP is not too time intensive to build, but provides hundreds of dollars a month in value to other businesses.

[freelancelot]

Thanks for your reply.

>The trick for me is to find something where the MVP is not too time intensive to build, but provides hundreds of dollars a month in value to other businesses.

I think that is indeed the target for most of product oriented solo entrepreneurs. And stretch goal being getting bought out or acquired.

Do you do market research for product ideas/customers willing to pay?

[alxmng]

For my existing products? No.

I made a resume maker product before, and in retrospect I feel stupid not doing more research. I had good conversion, but I quickly realized that SEO was the only viable marketing strategy, and the competition in that space is brutal. Ranking is very difficult without spending money on agencies to get backlinks and write blog spam. After some research I realized the people on the front pages of search had amassed millions of backlinks.

It’s absolutely necessary to understand the funnel before building something. Especially the top of the funnel. For high ticket products it’s simple because the top of the funnel could be ads or cold outreach. But for anything that relies on decent traffic volume you need some kind of organic marketing strategy. You have to figure out how to reach your audience sustainably.

[freelancelot]

Makes sense, thanks for sharing your insights.