[fmavituna]

Although it's one of the worst models for startup. If volume is possible that means too many players in that market. Startup is already a risky business, why make it even harder by going into a space where you have to fight with lots of other big / small / medium players?

[mattmanser]

What a load of utter nonsense. Many of HNs favourite startups operate in saturated spaces.

[fmavituna]

Survivor bias?

[riffraff]

isn't there something to be said for "a smaller slice of the bigger pie" ?

[fmavituna]

It applies to certain things but I don't think that applies to $5 SaaS. Because to be sustainable you'll need 1000-5000 customers, even though those numbers can be small in that big pie, it's still extremely hard to reach and support.

However you can easily get a smaller slice of the bigger pie in an enterprise market with 20 customers instead of 5000, and that's much easier to accomplish.

This model seems more suitable for "go big or go home" players.

[nicholassmith]

Depending entirely on how you structure and how much you want to get out of it $5 a month with 2000 core customers is $120000, minus operation costs like servers and such. Not an unhealthy amount of money if the time you need to invest in the product each month is relatively low.