Four years of running a SaaS in a competitive market

> Competitors don't really matter

This is so spot on.

I am also in a competitive space. Couple of my competitor man-child founders blocked me on social media for simply being on their feed. I took it as a blessing. I tuned out from their noise quickly and focus on customers rather than social media attention disorder.

Do yourself a solid. Don't watch competitors. Watch customers and the market.

> Competitors don't really matter [...] Sure, there are more "table-stakes" features that customers need before they'll even consider using you, but the real competitor is a lack of awareness of your product, more than anything.

I like this quote a lot. I think it addresses a common execution paralysis where someone identifies a solution to a rich problem space but decides against building it due to there being an obvious competitor.

I almost skipped reading the article, thinking it was just another bragging/survivorship bias story. It wasn't. Thanks for sharing.

I want to add another anecdote: I built an app for creating certificates[1]. It was originally a case study for a book I'm writing, so I didn't think much of "target users". But then I decided to make it a real/standalone product. I was struggling to find real users.

Then, just by sheer coincidence, a friend shared his struggle with existing ticket sales platforms. I thought, "Hey, with what I've built so far, it's just like adding another 10% of work" (It wasn't). So I "expanded" the app to become a white-label ticket sales platform[2]. People started using it, and they also use the certificate generation feature ("Your app can create certs for attending events? Sweet!").

I don't know how to distill this into advice, but you get the idea. It's like a South Park meme: Step #1: Listen to users, Step #2: ???, Step #3: Profit!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43483919

[2] https://pentas.id/

Very well rounded and grounded article. Like it very much!

Indeed as someone else in the comments said, the personal touch is the best asset you have as indie. So talk with your customers.

I run a Android app, next to my day job, and I pride myself on always putting the customer first, and actually fixing their pain points or implementing their suggestions. Empathy is so important, and something a big company will struggle with.

I'll checkout the recommended books!

TBH, I find it extremely hard to acquire customers. Even with a rock solid product that is NOT, in any way, below the competition. I get the visits but the signups are non existent. Probably because my audience is geared towards programmers and tech oriented businesses. I can do almost any project but marketing kills me.

> Ship first, worry about scale later

This is repeated constantly, but I fear that it is internalized as “write shitty code and throw money at it later.” If you have taken the time to learn your language well, you can avoid a lot of really bad decisions that don’t cost you additional time.

Similarly, on the infra side of things (where this advice is usually doled out), maybe take the time to have a modicum of understanding about the tools you’re building on. If you’re using a DBaaS, your vendor almost certainly has monitoring built-in, often for free, or a nominal cost. USE IT, and learn what it is you’re looking at. “The DB is slow” could be anything from excessive row locks due to improperly-held transactions to actually hitting an underlying resource limit – and for the latter, 9/10 it’s a symptom of something that’s misconfigured, or not understanding your RDBMS’ operation.

For example, do you have a write-heavy table with a UUIDv4 PK, lots of columns that are heavily indexed, and some medium-large JSON blobs in it? Congratulations, you’ve created Postgres’ (and MySQL, but for different reasons) worst nightmare. Every write is amplified by the indexes, and even if you’re doing an UPDATE and are only hitting one of the indexed columns, all of them will be rewritten. The UUIDv4 PK means your WAL traffic is going to skyrocket from all the full page writes, and if your JSON blobs are big enough to be unwieldy, but not big enough to have be TOASTed, that’s another huge amplification to writes. All of this can easily result in hitting IOPS limits, network bandwidth limits, or CPU saturation from additional queries piling up while this one is dealt with, and all of it could be easily avoided by having a basic understanding of your tooling.

> Never give away "unlimited" anything

This is resonating very much with me, but perhaps for a different reason. I'm launching a product within a business that is already successful. I get to give demos to potential customers, and I've been making a point of saying, "And this aspect of the product is unlimited" about many things in the product. On the one hand, related to the above, it's potentially possible that a whale user could cost us, but it's frankly unlikely. But it occurs to me that if I put a limit on certain aspects of the offering, it will likely make it seem worth more -- it's a scarce resource if we treat it as such.

I can relate, though I am not that far. I spent few years working full-time on developing my product, had a business plan, spent money and things like that. Only to finally go online and get zero bites. I was counting on few people to become instant customers, none of that materialised. Even friends left me hanging out in the cold. So that was quite a cold shower and a slap in the face. But in the end, it was my own miscalculation. Also, the mobile UI is important. I did not underestimate it, I just had no time to implement it. It will take weeks or months to do and I pushed it as the next thing, after I am done developing the current feature. In the end, you cannot do it all, certainly not out the gate. I am still kinda on schedule and progressing as planned with things, I was just expecting more interest. I had to adjust and refocus, but in the end, it is about being able to keep going.

This is one of the best articles about running a bootstrapped business that I've ever read.

These are all great tips that obviously come from years of hard work and introspection.

> When I started, I integrated with standard SaaS product analytics software that most big SaaS products use. They tend to have features like session recording, where you can see exactly where their mouse moves in your product, and funnel tracking for working out how many users make it the whole way through from landing page to using your product.

I had the same experience. When I started out, I'd see people talk about complicated views in their analytics with cohort analysis and A/B testing. I'd think those people were succeeding because of their analytics, so I kept trying to build complicated views in Google Analytics or investigate expensive alternative analytics platforms. And I eventually just landed on going even simpler than Google Analytics and not checking it unless I had a specific question I wanted to answer.

> People will suggest you should build particular features to improve your product. They'll never use those features.

I've experienced this as well. Early on, prospective customers would tell me that they'd definitely buy if I had X feature, and I'd spend a week implementing it, and then the customer would disappear or say they couldn't purchase for some other reason.

> When a user signs up for OnlineOrNot, I have an automated email going out asking what brought them to sign up today. I explicitly tell them I read and reply to every email. This is the main source of my insight for building product.

I like this a lot. The main competitive advantage indie founders have is a personal touch and direct access to the founder.

I think too many indie founders over-automate and over-outsource their customer interactions. It always drives me crazy when I use a product from an indie founder, and I reach out with feedback and the response is just a generic, outsourced customer service rep who says, "Thank you for your feedback. I'll pass it along to the team."

> Tracking your MRR is a crap way to measure how you're doing as a business... Find another success metric to figure out if people are actually using your product, and whether it's bringing them value. Things like number of images generated, or number of form completions, for example.

I agree, but I'll add the caveat that the other metric should be as proximate to revenue as you can get.

Early on, I made the mistake of measuring success based on things like social media followers or SEO rank, even though those things didn't directly translate into revenue. I felt like I was succeeding, but I eventually realized I was pursuing metrics that were too loosely related to revenue.

Great read. What success metric are you using? Total requests?

So... what happened?

Did 2 hours a week work? Is it profitable now? Is it your only job? If so how many years of 2 hours a week did it take to become a livable income?

I love this philosophy of beating out the enshittification and not hypergrowing.

Congrats on four years, Max! Thanks for mentioning my book, glad to hear it has been helpful!