[dangrossman]

Mostly free time. Probably not much different than most retirees with money in the bank.

I always wanted independence. I never wanted employees. SaaS is a wonderful business model for that. It took 10 years and a dozen ideas to find 2 businesses I could run on my own, be low-touch enough that I'd not have to be hands-on with every customer, and pay enough to be a viable alternative to employment. Most of my web app ideas didn't go anywhere, nothing happened overnight, but eventually I had the right mix of learned skills, experience, and luck to do something right.

I spent 10 years living like a broke college student. I was a broke college student in the beginning, but I didn't move past the one-bedroom apartments and cheap home cooked dinners until I had some solid business and a good runway in the bank. I was never a risk taker.

Now I pay myself a $30K/month salary. I saved enough to buy a house, rather than mortgage a house. Met an awesome girl and moved her, and her pets, in with me. She's always hated the work she originally trained for, and has gone back to school for a career she's passionate about -- working with large animals. I've been working every other day, a few hours at a time, recently. I work more in the summers than the winters, just because I prefer working outside in my sunroom with the fresh air, but it's not heated. We spend most of our time together, taking day trips, eating out, visiting friends, and don't worry much about money.

[mcintyre1994]

This is really awesome, thanks for posting it! If you don't mind me asking, have the 2 businesses you have active always been low touch or is that largely a factor of their success? Eg at this point it seems you could let someone demanding loads of support just opt out and go elsewhere - but did you initially have to be significantly more hands on?

[nthState]

$30k a month? - Incredible

[general_failure]

I read it as per year. I went back and double checked. Per month it is!

[arthurcolle]

How many relationships did you have before you found someone that was compatible with the lifestyle you had built up? I found it really hard to maintain a long-distance relationship while a CS undergrad, and I'm curious how that side of your life worked out.

[jplahn]

I find it interesting that you found it harder to maintain a long-distance while an undergrad, especially because from personal experience, it would be easier that way (IMO of course).

I'm also an undergrad and what I largely find is that it would be easier to be in an LDR with regards to your workload because you don't have as many daily "commitments" if you want to call them that, i.e. you're not trying to balance your projects with going out to eat a few times a week. The expectation is that you're not going to be seeing each other all the time, so theoretically you would have more time to spend on your work. I'd be interested to hear why you've found the opposite to be true (aside from CS, I think my true passion is relationships ;-) ). Now, give me a non-LDR relationship any day and I'll find a way to make time.

[arthurcolle]

On further thought, you're right that a non-LDR is harder in terms of balancing on the day-to-day and that's part of what made me comfortable with remaining in it for so long despite the discomfort of being apart so much - I could more easily do what I needed to, but consider this: frequently I felt guilty for not Skyping for a little longer, or having longer phone calls, or always keeping in touch with text messages, iMessages, FB, Couple.me, etc... and it felt really asphyxiating. I constantly worried I wasn't doing enough, and I frequently felt guilted with respect to "not putting enough into the relationship" which is probably my fault for not establishing boundaries early on. When we saw each other on bi-monthly trips, I still had to get work done (CS, other classes) and I was constantly guilted into "you should've done it before the trip!"

Originally the plan was for me to go down to go to her after I graduated (to Florida) but I got an interview for an internship in NYC, which I performed well in, which was converted into my receiving a full-time offer in Manhattan. I accepted since it is at a firm I wanted to work for since I was in high school. Literally my dream job. She was open to the idea of moving up with me but she enrolled in an academic program that would have added another 2 years of an LDR after already 1.5 years. She was perpetually sad over the summer when I interned in NYC (she was living with me for a month) because we couldn't spend time together even though my working hours were quite good compared to my friends in Seattle and Palo Alto, and I realized my ambitions were met with ambiguity and a slow-growing resentment.

The pushing back of an "end date" for longer and longer eventually led to my feeling that overall it would be healthier to end it, additionally considering the changes that happened in our lives over the course of the relationship. That being said our goals had also diverged significantly.

I knew what was important to me so I decided that it was best to move on since our long-term goals were no longer aligned, but it was an incredible experience that I'm lucky to have had. Not everyone gets to meet someone that, for a time, they connect with so well. I look at it as a learning experience that has made me a better person which I'm told is the best perspective to have.

[dereking]

How did you go about gathering customers? Also, what are the 3 main lessons you learned from the other failed startups?

[dangrossman]

These lessons won't apply to 99% of startups, but they're what I've learned work for me:

Sell to small businesses. Not consumers (too hard to convince them to spend money), not enterprise (too much work for me; I hate sales).

Make something that will earn the customer money, or save them money. If it can earn or save them more than you charge, it's easy to sell, and they'll be happy to pay for it. That covers a surprisingly large number of potential business ideas any developer could create on their own. One of my first successful ones was just a WordPress plugin to add Amazon-style review/rating capabilities to any site, before anyone else had commoditized that. It saved money (versus hiring a developer) and earned money (most of the customers were affiliate marketers building product review/comparison sites, and their sites earned them more commissions when they had good-looking user reviews on the product pages). I made $250K from that plugin before selling the business on Flippa.

Make it easy to get that value out of your product as soon as possible. I do a free trial. I expect users to at least "get" how they can earn or save money using the product before that trial's over. The most important aspect to that is to get onboarding right: good lifecycle e-mails, a good first-login experience, and walkthroughs or something else that guides new users through the product. That's also what minimizes the customer service load.

If you have a good product, the customers will come. Well, maybe you'll need some AdWords ads to get the first ones; that's what I did. Now there's 2-3 signups a day that are just referrals from existing customers. It's enough to stay ahead of subscription churn.

Oh, and pricing is important. I doubled W3Counter's MRR by changing the plans around and adding annual billing. Improvely's MRR grows as the customers' businesses grow since pricing is tied to the level of traffic their sites get. The value they get out of the product grows with that too, so everyone's growing together and happy about it.

[bhayden]

Out of curiosity, and I don't mean this at all in a negative way: Why do people pay for W3Counter when Google Analytics is free and seemingly a lot more powerful? Do people really find GA that intimidating?

[dangrossman]

W3Counter's more fun. It's bright, colorful, nothing's buried multiple menus deep. Whole classrooms sign up for it every year while learning to build webpages. It gives your site a hit counter so you can watch the visit count go up every time someone new checks out your site. You can "spy" on those new visitors, seeing where they came from, watch them move page-to-page, stuff GA doesn't do with its aggregate-level batch-updated reporting. New site owners love that stuff. I also first created it years before Google bought Urchin and made GA.

[bhayden]

Unless I'm misunderstanding, I am fairly certain GA does everything you just describe. They have a real-time menu option and I can see my users going from page to page. I can see the number of people on my website right now (21).

I guess the bottom line is your platform is much more approachable and easier to understand. Thanks for the response.

[dangrossman]

Following individual users around (something W3Counter lets you do) is fundamentally different than a real-time aggregate dashboard of the same users (something both sites have). A dashboard is interesting to a business. Friend-watching is interesting to ordinary people. "Oh, I just got a new visitor from Facebook in Camden. I have a friend in Camden, that's probably Jessica! I wonder what she's looking at? Oh, she just opened the guestbook page and has started writing something!" is fun for someone running their first blog.

[Cyph0n]

Thanks a lot man! I'm currently in the brainstorming phase for my dream startup/business and your advice came at the right moment, especially the comment about targeting small businesses!

[147]

Hey Dan,

Got a ton of value out of your post. Just wondering one thing, how much of Improvely did you build before you started running ads?

[dereking]

Thanks buddy great advice!

[orasis]

I have a new saas product and I'm trying to figure out whether to sell to SMB or larger. Do you acquire customers via ads? What's your cost per acquisition? What's your CLV? I'm doing consumer stuff right now and the low CLV is driving me nuts because it gives me zero ad budget.

[cmstoken]

That's really awesome to hear. Thanks for sharing. I'm curious, how is your tax structure set up? Are you an LLC, C-corp, etc...?

[snowwrestler]

Your Zendesk link on the Awio site does not work.