ExSaaSperated: A blog about the struggle to start a sustainable SaaS

ExSaaSperated: A blog about the struggle to start a sustainable SaaS(exsaasperated.com)

170 points by con-cat 5 years ago | 42 comments

This is likely going to sound too harsh (and the folks behind this seem lovely), but content creation efforts like this are a red flag to me in terms of evaluating whether or not a bootstrapped SAAS is going to "make" it.

This isn't because they're inherently bad or that the people writing them have bad intentions, but that they're a time/attention trap.

Meta articles like this, "How I made my first $10", "Breaking $1k MRR" and similar tend to do really well in attracting clicks but fail to connect with an actual target audience for whatever it is you're making. This makes them really dangerous as when you're starting out you don't have any "signal" as to what's working and these types seem positive.

Unfortunately, they're the equivalent of handing out free candy when your intention is to open a restaurant.

These folks would be much further ahead if they instead:

1. Started writing/learning about specific tactics and skills for starting and marketing a SAAS.

2. Randomly picked some industry or vertical and just started writing articles about learning that industry and the problems they had.

I say all this as someone who has drunk too deeply of the bootstrapped startup literature well, don't make my mistakes.

iends 5 years ago | |

One of the trends I’ve noticed is that people who have minor SaaS success can 5x their income by creating an ebook + course + masterclass about how they did it. Selling shovels in a gold rush....

Cenk 5 years ago | | |

Similar to how most of the money in dropshipping is in selling learning materials and a dream to people who want to do dropshipping

sudhirj 5 years ago | | |

Every success story is really about people selling the secret of success, which is to sell the secret of success. Twitter is full of this. Every success guru is selling a course about selling courses.

puranjay 5 years ago | |

If your target audience is other startups, then it is absolutely worth it.

But if its not, you shouldn't bother at all. Focus on creating content that solves core pain points for your target customers.

(And if you don't know these pain points, you don't have a product)

alixanderwang 5 years ago |

I actually feel like I've been hearing a ton about failures, though they're all preceded by "you never hear about failures", and proceeded by, "and then I took what I learned and succeeded".

What I actually never hear about is stories of trying to build a SaaS, failing, and then just giving up and going back to being a salaryman and retiring after a few decades. It's either that these stories are rare -- which signals that persistence works --, or the stories are just never shared.

utkarsh_apoorva 5 years ago | |

I was planning to write something along the same lines, if I make it. I guess the reason of this happening is this - after you fail, you are too busy picking up the pieces, and trying to survive.

I have written so much about small wins at my previous startup. And when it shut down, I was just trying to avoid falling.

In the current one, we built and failed with 5 products. And then got more traction in 10 days than we'd ever had ! When I put it this way, it sound like the story of success (in the making).

But it isn't. It is (if I write it), the story of how we got it wrong, and what not to do. The bonus is that we make it.

Check out LightCat.io to see what got traction eventually.

You guys are smart - yes, this is a shameless plug. I am poor and cheap, and this is all I've got.

zomglings 5 years ago | | |

> yes, this is a shameless plug. I am poor and cheap, and this is all I've got.

It will be difficult for you to know how much I empathize with this statement. Beautifully put.

Good luck to you Utkarsh.

Sevii 5 years ago | |

This kind of describes @patio11's career. I still want to build my own SAAS though.

pc86 5 years ago | | |

Does it, though? He's sold SaaS businesses for non-trivial sums (though much less than you'd expect if you read strictly his descriptions of it), and spent most of his time consulting and writing before going to Stripe.

wastedhours 5 years ago | |

I did that in 2010/11. Made all the mistakes you read about (not talking enough to customers, launching too late, not iterating, not doing effective customer development...), a year later went and got a job.

Haven't made more than £1k on the side since (not for lack of thinking about trying). Will potentially launch something soon, but am almost certain I won't ever want it to be my "main thing" again.

tluyben2 5 years ago | |

At least in the EU (in my experience ofcourse), people won't openly talk about that. It's still a shameful thing if you went properly bankrupt (not just quit, but with actual declaring bankruptcy legally; 3 times for me out of 20something companies).

If people went 'big' announcing their 'thing' so everyone knows about it and it failed (bankrupt or just quit), they downplay it as 'sabbatical', 'helping out a mate with his weird dream' or 'over the top hobby' or something like that. Almost all my friends tried the entrepreneur path and all of them found that it was not worth it; 16-18 hour days on their own dream with no guaranteed pay vs 6-8 hours/day for a boss with guaranteed pay mostly got them to go for the latter eventually. They never mention it, ever.

I don't give up though and just keep building things. They usually make enough money to live even if they fail.

Trasmatta 5 years ago | |

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for before I haven't retired, but I had a successful side project, quit my job to try to make a living off it, failed to make enough money off it, and went back to a traditional development job. I'm overall happy working for a steady paycheck and benefits again, although there is part of me that is always itching to try again someday. I don't think I will, though. Maybe I'll write about it at some point.

SCUSKU 5 years ago | | |

You definitely should, your experience would be valuable to learn from and interesting to read.

czbond 5 years ago | |

I would suggest that the stories are never shared. SaaS are REALLY difficult to get off the ground.

blueboo 5 years ago | |

“But I learned something” Is an extremely low bar for evaluating an outcome.

“But I learned something and applied it to make the next effort a success” is the natural valuable contribution...that we (quite tellingly) almost never hear about.

pc86 5 years ago | | |

> “But I learned something and applied it to make the next effort a success” is the natural valuable contribution...that we (quite tellingly) almost never hear about.

This is literally every "success" blog post out there. They always start with an early failure and how that launched/pushed/pulled them toward later success.

xwdv 5 years ago | |

That’s because anyone who writes about a SaaS, failed or not, is ultimately successful.

codingdave 5 years ago |

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 5 years ago | |

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.

sky_rw 5 years ago |

"Also, all these whiz-bang success stories suffer from enormous survivorship bias."

Well that's because in 2 years when you finally pull the plug on a failing business so you can pay your bills, you end up shutting down the blog you stopped posting to regularly 14 months ago and nobody can find it anyway because you put it on an 'indie' platform.

alextheparrot 5 years ago |

The hosting of comments through Github is, interesting in a brilliant way. Maybe I've spent too much time triaging issues at work and I'm confusing Stockholm syndrome for affection.

Either way, this site has a certain tenderness, thanks for sharing.

toothbrush 5 years ago | |

> this site has a certain tenderness, thanks for sharing

Thank you so much for the kind words. It really means a lot to us.

> comments through Github is interesting in a brilliant way

Thank you! Honestly we're just cheap/lazy – we really wanted a super low-maintenance blogging platform, and static pages are amazing IMHO. This gave us "all" of both worlds, sort of.

fluential 5 years ago | |

You will like this one https://staticman.net/ same concept

jcun4128 5 years ago |

I'm trying to get into it but don't know what to make. I follow Indie Hackers/Entrepreneur podcasts/wip.chat/etc... now I'm looking into Shopify stuff, make some niche API connector or something... but it will be a time sink to learn their docs/how stuff works on the Shopify aspect. Possible oversaturated market, etc... but I figure if I cruise through the forums/see recurring problems, maybe I can find something to build.

Recently I had a friend who runs a shipping business have me make him a PayPal button generator built into an email template that was mailed out so they could specify a price/tax/name/etc... That was cool, but I would not have come up with that problem on my own as I don't run the particular shipping business he does.

chrismorgan 5 years ago |

There are two more posts at https://exsaasperated.com/ (“who are you?” and “our goal”) that further enlighten (though they still don’t cover what will be being built, I guess that’ll come soon).

toothbrush 5 years ago | |

Hey Chris, thanks for visiting. Author here. We actually have several projects we've tried to launch with varying degrees of traction. One of them (https://vistaserv.net) made the rounds here a while ago, actually. We plan to write posts about several of these projects, pick apart what worked and didn't. And, if we come up with resources or techniques that worked well for us, we'll be posting about those, too. Stay tuned :)

Thorentis 5 years ago |

ExSaaSperated: a SaaS to help you build your own unsustainable SaaS.

ChrisMarshallNY 5 years ago |

Cool! I wish you luck.

I have authored one project that took ten years to reach maturity (It is now exploding). That allowed me to iterate it, and ensure that it would be top-quality, by the time I tossed the reins over to a new team.

It was free, though, and a labor of love[0].

I wrote another project as a "training course." It was sort of a dissertation. The quality is pretty much "off the charts."

I had originally thought about selling it, but was told that was a non-starter, because it was written in in PHP[1], so I simply open-sourced it as MIT.

Nowadays, I work on client-side code (native Swift for Apple stuff). I am not in a hurry to get back to SaaS.

I like the name of the blog.

[0] https://medium.com/@ChrisMarshallNY/the-story-of-the-bmlt-87...

[1] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...

ruste 5 years ago | |

Interested in why writing it in PHP made selling it a non-starter. I'd expect that if it provided value it wouldn't really matter much what it was written in.

ChrisMarshallNY 5 years ago | | |

Because PHP is not "buzzword-worthy." I was told, in no uncertain terms, that the fact it was written in PHP would mean that "no one would take it seriously," and that I would not get anyone interested in implementing it.

Considering the lack of interest in the project, I have to agree with that assessment.

czbond 5 years ago |

My suggestion is to look outside of SaaS. Software is much easier to bootstrap in the past decade, increasing competition (from within a customer, and competitors). We're in the phase where every single permutation of what one can do with software is being exhausted.

Businesses using the same concepts and business models outside of this scope have potentially less competition, higher available market, and higher upside purchase exit.

Someone mentioned patio11, he essentially referenced the lower exit, customer fatigue as why he joined Stripe a few years ago

chrismorgan 5 years ago | |

> every single permutation of what one can do with software is being exhausted

This is not in the slightest bit true. It’s just that most people that you hear about are just executing variations on a theme. But there is vast untapped potential, and also many novel things in the software industry being developed that you just never hear about, because the people making them are not present in this chamber.

CoffeePython 5 years ago | |

> Businesses using the same concepts and business models outside of this scope have potentially less competition, higher available market, and higher upside purchase exit.

What type of businesses are you talking about here? Non-software or just non SaaS?

czbond 5 years ago | | |

My line of thinking is this: For the past decade(s), the area of growth has been software. It has sucked in professionals into the industry who would have been biologists, chemists, physicists, etc.

So my belief is that those areas are actually void of progress, because 'software' took the intelligence that would have been applied to other areas simply because software often paid 1x-5x more in salary.

But now software, in both profession and product - is becoming overly competitive, and will become top heavy with engineers 'stuck' to move forward (in areas of innovation). One can easily see it in what the industry produces to show our phase - the low hanging fruit is gone. Progress is much less innovation, rather than efficiency, measurement, and tooling. Efficiency is like pulling in an MBA to remove the cruft - one can mostly expect linear, smaller gains.

hartator 5 years ago |

> We want to start a SaaS product

That’s not how you start a company.

lpellis 5 years ago |

I find it is hard to start an online company, especially if you do not already have a large network. What happens is you build something, and then.. nothing. I sometimes wonder just what percentage is luck, reaching that right person at the right time. (I launched my product on producthunt today so I'm very aware of the need for an audience )

chimen 5 years ago |

I struggle to find anything "frontpage material" on that page.

jacob_rezi 5 years ago |

Hello -

this is a post I wrote about scaling to 50k users without a marketing budget

https://medium.com/rezi-resume/0-to-50-000-users-a-candid-lo...

It might be interesting for your blog?