22 replies
19h46m
Inspiring!
How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations?
(In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)
16 replies
18h37m
Really intrigued by how he got into this: “I thought I could do it just as well and cheaper,” effectively trading product market fit issues for direct competition.
15 replies
16h49m
That's how essentially 99% of businesses get started. The obsession with PMF and being "unique" is a very strange affectation specific to software startups.
7 replies
16h11m
Being unique is important if you actually want to dominate the market. A product like his has captured a piece of the pie, but someone with equal distribution can easily eat into that since he has no moat.
3 replies
14h35m
His moat is his price. And it absolutely is a moat because most bigger competitors would not bother competing in the segment with even lower prices, as there’d be no upside
1 replies
12h26m
there's no moat. Indie hackers can build a tool like this in a month and i think there are already many copycats.
0 replies
42m
Indie hackers frequently think they can build tools like this in a month (hence the "I could build that in a weekend" trope). But making something that actually works well takes time (that this founder has taken).
0 replies
14h11m
His moat is his price.
His moat is a combination of pricing + cost structure + time spent to cumulate the customer base.
If someone were to enter the market and try to take his business, they will have to consider if their conditions can result in the same offerings. I don't think it's easy to match the same offerings.
2 replies
12h15m
What if he doesn't actually want to dominate the market?
The idea of an "economic moat" comes from Warren Buffett[1] and it was/is part of his investing philosophy to look for companies with some sort of unique feature which allows them to dominate markets and create effective monopolies on their particular niche. It makes sense in that context but it doesn't necessarily apply everywhere.
What if you're just trying to create a business that gives you a good lifestyle and you're not looking to dominate? Maybe the market is big enough that if you just take a piece of it that's plenty. There are plenty of businesses out there that are offering a product that is one of a range but the market is large enough to sustain multiple offerings.
Not everyone needs a moat because not everyone is trying to build a castle.
[1] I believe he first used it here in his shareholder letter where he describes GEICO's low costs as creating a moat that competitors couldn't cross. May have been earlier but most people credit the invention of the term to him anyway https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2016ltr.pdf
0 replies
9h46m
What if he doesn't actually want to dominate the market?
Agreed.
What if you're just trying to create a business that gives you a good lifestyle and you're not looking to dominate? Maybe the market is big enough that if you just take a piece of it that's plenty. There are plenty of businesses out there that are offering a product that is one of a range but the market is large enough to sustain multiple offerings.
Yes. In fact, the majority of businesses in the world are probably this way.
Not everyone needs a moat because not everyone is trying to build a castle.
That's a brilliant line and metaphor. Gonna steal and share it whenever and wherever I can. Thanks.
0 replies
6h25m
It depends a lot on if you have any competitors that do want to dominate the market and could undercut you on price or overclass you with features. It's fine not to want a castle but you should have a plan for when the enemy army comes by.
5 replies
16h23m
Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately.
You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper. Otherwise, your competitors are just a click away.
I'd argue the author HAS found PMF, just not the kind that gets you to $1b.
2 replies
15h0m
Literally every software I have ever used or company I worked for has had multiple competitors doing the exact same thing.
1 replies
14h35m
I really doubt "literally" every software you used or worked for has multiple competitors doing the "exact" same thing. VC money can temporarily prop up multiple competitors doing the same thing, but over time, winners definitely spring up.
A lot of software that on the surface does the "exact same thing" often has different nuances, either to the business or the product that makes them appeal to different niches in the market.
Understanding the nuances and exploiting the market niche is your only goal when starting a business. It's not something you ever do or think about when working on software, but people who strike it out on their own quickly realize that simply building is not enough, you MUST give people a good reason to use your software. Just because you don't see or understand the nuances, does not mean they are not there.
0 replies
13h53m
I can’t think of a single software that does not have fierce competition. Just today, YouTube, slack, chrome, Claude, burpsuite, interm, obsidian, nest, outlook, Zillow, AWS, cloudflare,GitHub, Roborock, jetbrains.
They could all be replaced and do 90% of the job immediately and a week later figure out the last 10%.
As as for work, coinbase is not the only exchange, square is one of many, meta is another social media site.
0 replies
14h16m
You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper.
I don't think you have to have a unique selling point all the times. You can make an exact product as the market leader and layer on top a distribution that you own or you sell the product to a underserved groups. It will work too. In fact, this way of doing business happens a lot to non software products.
0 replies
13h4m
Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately.
In theory? Maybe.
In reality? Your scale and delivery depend on the competence of your devs and your processes and there's a very good chance you could do it better than all the big companies from your garage as a solo dev if it has a relatively small feature set.
0 replies
11h51m
It's not "strange" nor an "affectation". Most software startups are consciously trying to innovate, create a new product that didn't exist before. That's a perfectly valid thing to try and do.
The fact that it's not what most new businesses try to do is true, but doesn't mean anything. 99% of people who go to university don't do it to create new science, but 1% eventually go the academic route and do create new science (hopefully). That's not an affectation, it's just a different goal.
13 replies
7h18m
I'd love to just make $1000 / month profit. I don't "need" the money per se, but definitely "want" it. Maybe for no other reason than to just to do it.
I just can't seem to come up with an idea. It has been said/written multiple times "scratch your own itch". It seems that I don't have an itch. If it takes me X-amount of steps or time to do some task, I don't ever look at how to reduce it, I just go with the flow.
In the grand scheme of life I am very satisfied. I don't NEED anything and for that I am grateful. However, I am a worrier and I do worry about the future and retirement (I'm in my mid 50s), specifically healthcare.
Anyway, better quite here and stop blathering on
12 replies
7h5m
I have the same problem. When I see the kinds of simple products printing HNers money I think “people pay for THAT?”
Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.
4 replies
4h39m
What blows my mind is that people tolerate paying monthly for what is a static service.
A service routine monitor doesn't need to be updated every month to function, so why would anyone pay every month to use it?
1 replies
2h7m
"Tolerate" is an odd way to describe a totally voluntary transaction in a market with plenty of alternatives. The service is either worth the price or not for each person, regardless of the COGS.
0 replies
58m
If only plumbers knew the value of having a toilet inside your house.
0 replies
3h13m
Offer a cheaper solution and find out!
Servers cost money each month, as do the services they use.
0 replies
1h42m
You've got a backend as well, and support?
2 replies
6h54m
Ok here is the playbook:
- Go here https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=it...
- Look at the list of products
- Copy one of them
- Do it a bit better (e.g. cheaper, faster, hosted in EU, targeted at some specific segment of users etc.)
- Launch asap (no longer than 3 months of coding)
- Reach out to potential users everywhere you can, until you get a few dollars of recurring revenue in
- Write blogs, and long form content, integrate with other libraries and systems
- Automate everything, pay for services that aren't core to your business (e.g. payments, backups, etc.)
- Do everything you can to help all your early users, keep improving the product every week
- Wait a few months/years, till it compounds up to 10-20k MRR
0 replies
4h3m
Thanks. I'll definitely take a look.
0 replies
37m
actually a pretty good playbook, would probably work
2 replies
6h55m
So in future, build a landing page, start shipping it around and see if you can get some early potential customers interested.
Or, choose a small thing you can build in a few weekends, get it built and try shipping it.
If you get no traction, you learned something. If you do, you can now invest more.
This is the whole idea behind lean startups: don’t assume tou have a winner or a stinker, go find out and adapt based on feedback.
1 replies
6h39m
start shipping it around
Can you elaborate on this?
0 replies
5h44m
Share it on social media, talk to potential customers about it, give people something to sign up to, in order to learn more.
0 replies
6h45m
It is all about execution. There are people making 10k/month++ right now with apps to take notes or newsletter
12 replies
18h54m
I really respect your choice to optimize for balance and enjoyment.
My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!"
Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day!
When I was a corporate engineer, I would get the sunday scaries every week and find any excuse to push back bedtime another hour. But now, I wake up excited and energized to work on a project I love... and maybe someday I'll give myself permission to do that less than 7 days a week.
Anyway, I digress.
I'm so happy to hear your SaaS is going strong after 9 years. Cheers! And here's to 9 more!
8 replies
10h15m
7 days a week
IMHO you're risking a burnout and working on your company 0 day a week.
It would be better to be reasonable now than to kill your company in a few years because you can't stand it anymore.
Take this next week-end off and go do something totally "useless" like walking in nature ;) It will recharge you.
5 replies
9h51m
I'm absolutely convinced that burnout is a function of spending time on things you loathe to do. Not how much time you spend on something you love doing.
Most people I know that actually work all-the-time, not self-proclaimed "I work X hour weeks people that say it to sound 'cool'" people. Never have a burnout.
Most of those people also go on extended vacations of say 5-7 weeks. But still work 2-3 hours every day.
Burnout seems much more common in the average worker that only works a 9-5.
0 replies
5h38m
That's a match for my experience so far. Never could have worked this hard for someone else.
Having full creative control, uncapped upside potential, and truly enjoying the work make it a lot easier to do every day.
As a long-term goal, I would like to restore better work/life balance.
But first, I'm trying to make hay while the sun shines, to hit escape velocity from corporate work permanently. Now that I've tasted freedom, I really don't want to be dragged back...regardless of the outcome with my current business.
0 replies
7h40m
Yeah, I don't know. If I love playing guitar, doing it 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, is going to get old. At some point it becomes counterproductive. Sometimes I sit in front of a screen, and I WANT to do something, excited even, but my brain is just not sharp enough.
With coding, it's also a matter of quality of work. You need to step back so you can look at your work with a fresh perspective, and oh, there are ALWAYS horrors you will find, the ones you created when tired.
0 replies
3h46m
To me, burnout is putting large amounts of mental and emotional energy into an activity where you don't have much agency on how it is done, or the outcome. That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life. The actual amount of work leading to burnout is only a small component IMO.
0 replies
9h40m
Can confirm, I work a 9-5 and have absolutely had projects where writing code felt like pulling teeth and I very much experienced burnout as a consequence of that.
Even now I have a project where I have to fix a bunch of hastily written code and while I’m making progress and it’ll eventually be fine, it’s quite unsatisfying.
0 replies
9h33m
Just checked my preconceived notions.
The commonality of burnout in some form to full burnout seems to be roughly 75% for employees[1] and roughly 70% for executives[2] and 25% ~ 75% for entrepreneurs[3].
My experience is based mostly on the latter.
[1]: https://www.gallup.com/topic/burnout.aspx / https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/flexjobs-mha-mental-healt... [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2023/01/23... [3]: https://wifitalents.com/statistic/entrepreneur-burnout/
The statistics on this vary wildly, so I'd take all these statistics with a giant grain of salt.
1 replies
8h21m
Not an expert or anything, but when I looked into burnout it was predicted by lack of expected reward. So there's two things you can change. The expectation or the reward.
This matches siblings comments where employees experience burnout more probably because employees are rarely rewarded for their best work. But executives and entrepreneurs are.
I suppose even if the reward is intangible that protects from burnout.
0 replies
8h6m
But executives and entrepreneurs are.
Until they are not. The most promising entrepreneurial project can take an unexpected turn south, and if you’ve worked yourself past the burnout threshold at that point it can be hard to come back.
2 replies
18h19m
He found the right niche, a passive product-led no-stress B2B low-maintenance & non-critical tool (because it is monitoring).
It is so difficult to find such niches, so congrats for the success!
1 replies
11h6m
Isn't it somehow critical as it is monitoring? Thinking of monitoring critical prod interfaces
0 replies
9h40m
Useful and important certainly I agree, but it is not blocking you in your work if the SaaS provider goes down (unlike a payment provider, a hosting company, a CRM, etc…)
9 replies
17h50m
Web servers upgraded to Hetzner’s AX42 (AMD 8700GE, 8 cores). On the old machines, saw a few nonsensical Python exceptions. A kernel update and a reboot didn’t fix it. Rather than messing with hardware troubleshooting, I upgraded to newer, faster, and more efficient machines.
Database servers upgraded to Hetzner’s EX101 (Intel 13900, 8+16 cores). I was setting up new database replicas after an outage and failover event and took the opportunity to upgrade hardware.
Does anybody know if this setup is containerized? I have to say, I love that this is running on dedicated servers. I don't know how many times I burned myself out trying to setup infrastructure in AWS for personal projects only to accumulate a significant monthly bill and nothing substantial to show for it.
6 replies
17h42m
From the blog posts:
Main values: Simple is good. Efficient is good. Less is more.
The core infrastructure runs on Hetzner bare metal machines. Hetzner offers amazing value for money and is a big part of the reason why Healthchecks.io can offer its current pricing.
No containers, no auto-scaling, no “serverless”. Plain old servers, each dedicated to a single role: “load balancer”, “application server” and “database server”.
The machines are closer to “pets” than “cattle”: I have provisioning scripts to set up new ones relatively quickly, but in practice the working set of machines changes rarely. For example, the primary database server currently has an uptime of 375 days.
4 replies
17h30m
So much nostalgia reading that. I wish we could go back
0 replies
17h10m
Nothing is stopping you. Reject modernity, embrace stability.
0 replies
16h51m
Oh, we will. This is just another swing of the fat-vs-thin client pendulum.
0 replies
17h0m
fwiw that's what most of the big companies do on their product that actually make money. All the "kubernetes revolution" is pretty new, as are contianers, and companies move very slowly. The core products only move if they really see an advantage
0 replies
10h54m
There are tens of thousands of companies who continue to work that way. You don't hear about them often, because there's nothing to write about.
0 replies
17h39m
Further here (https://blog.healthchecks.io/2022/02/healthchecks-io-hosting...) it says no auto fail over.
1 replies
17h1m
If you're using Go, Rust, OCaml etc. then you can deploy a static binary and have a systemd-service or similar take care of keeping it running with nginx as a reverse-proxy. I do that with NixOS which enables me to also have my infra as code.
Another simpler alternative is to just run a cgi-bin on hetzner webhosting (https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting/level-9/).
0 replies
11h6m
Static binaries make things easier, but even without them things can be quite manageable depending on what you need.
I suppose it sits halfway in between as you do need the java runtime, but with fat jars you can also quite reliably and easily run on bare metal managed through systemd.
There are a few things to consider outside of that, though those are also fairly easy to manage.
Log rotation and clean up is something a lot of cloud native people will not be familiar with.
9 replies
13h13m
I wish the best for OP but I really wonder if advertising your one-man-SaaS to the wider world is a good idea. Especially on a forum like HN where competent people are few clicks away from stealing your idea.
2 replies
12h55m
Stealing ideas is a lot of work.
1 replies
9h29m
Right.
And it is even more work to, you know, actually (as in real life deploy) implement the copied business idea, and then to keep it running on an ongoing basis, showing up daily, even if not for a mad number of hours. This is the point where most of the glib talkers would fail, early.
0 replies
9h24m
Also, I totally agree with what sharmi says here:
0 replies
12h55m
healthchecks.io seems like a service which gets recommended on the web enough so that larger or even better competitors would have a hard time stealing his customers. It could lead to a slowdown in growth, but I suspect the growth so far is largely a result of success story posts like this.
0 replies
11h48m
The idea of hiding your business makes no sense. You need people to hear about it if you want customers.
Getting mentioned on forums like HN is exactly how a business like this gets more customers.
0 replies
13h0m
* Unlike how technical people often understand these stories, development is a smaller part of the story. From my own experience, it is a huge journey to understand marketing and sales. We generally undervalue marketing and sales in programming forums. Every founder has to pay their dues to cross this chasm and see success.
* Very few startups, probably a infinitesimal number, are overnight successes. Startups are actually a long grind. There are a lot more lows than highs and the lows tend to be really low. The effect is even worse when you go solo. It took the author 5 years to breach the 5K MRR ceiling. That's a long timeframe and it takes a great amount of fortitude, patience and persistence to stay focused, keep learning and handle uncertainty in the face of lack of visible progress (you are actually learning even in failures but it often doesn't feel good).
0 replies
4h45m
The idea is not super special or novel - I can type out 5 services like this from top of my head.
0 replies
9h13m
90% of the difficulty in booting a competitor is unrelated to copying the product. It's in finding and then convincing customers to spend money with you.
0 replies
8h42m
It only took 9 years for him to get to where he is now.
7 replies
13h20m
I've tried creating a few one-man SaaS's in the past and have always struggled to get customers to visit (let alone try it out and pay), any tips from people here who have had success? Thanks :)
4 replies
11h17m
There is no magic bullet I think. It also depends on the market you are after. If you are not after the big bucks from huge corporations, there are a few things I believe do help, things I also see on the healthchecks.io website:
- Have a no bullshit, clear description of what your product does right on the front page. No marketing lingo, no big overpromising. *Relevant* screenshots help.
- A free plan without huge caveats. This depends on your service, but it helps if people can actually trial the full service before committing. It also helps with word of mouth advertising, as someone who is using it personally might also recommend it for their company.
- Have clear and reasonable pricing.
- Don't hide documentation for your service behind a login. I have advised against using SaaS's services in the past because I couldn't easily find documentation.
- Actual have clear documentation for your product. It shows a level of maturity.
- Be clear about you as a company. You don't need to have an about page with mugshots of all team members smiling and their role description. But I do want to know what sort of company I am dealing with. So, I am looking for an about page with a reasonable description. Ideally, you have more than just a contact form. In fact, if you don't have a real address listed, I will not consider your service.
Disclaimer: Purely my personal experience being involved in selecting SaaS services. It also more or less aims at smaller to mid-sized companies, as with bigger companies you sadly do need some marketing bullshit. But with larger companies you also get to deal with more bullshit in regard to their requirements, something the healthchecks.io owner also specifically seems to avoid.
The above also assumes that you get people to land on your website. Which is really difficult, which is why I guess a lot of these services have a blog. Blog posts allow them to be posted on websites like hackernews and other media more often.
3 replies
10h0m
In fact, if you don't have a real address listed, I will not consider your service.
Great point. Always leaves a bitter taste, like the business is trying to hide behind their website.
In Germany there's a law that requires anyone doing business on the internet to have your real address on your website (commonly known as impress, see §2 DDG). From what I know this is even a EU regulation, so probably law in all EU countries. And honestly, I think that's a really good law.
2 replies
7h30m
I’m a little reticent to post my physical home address to be honest, are EU micropreneurs really ok with that?
1 replies
6h57m
There are a lot of office spaces available for single person businesses around here.
The point is that I don't need to be able to visit or physically mail anything. But it is just one more point of trust and something I can more easily verify.
Frankly, I'd be okay with a P.O. box if it is clear it is a small business operated mostly from someone's home.
It simply, at least here, is something that allows you to verify things like a company actually being registered at that address.
Another thing is that geographic location matters. For things like data protection laws and other laws the company I want to do business with might or might not follow depending on the country they are based in.
0 replies
5h50m
We're not a one-person shop, but as a fully remote startup we also use a forwarding address service. Not very expensive and quite convenient. Lets us rebind the final destination of our mail (like, when our "handles everything official" person moved!) without needing to update a lot of places.
0 replies
12h18m
The key is putting your SaaS in front of people who need it. Here are something I did: - Find a group that your potential customers there (on Reddit, Facebook,) ... post your work there. - Create content on IG/Tiktok/Facebook/... - Final is using paid ads FB ads/Google Ads/...
They call these works are "marketing".
0 replies
10h3m
Look at the MRR graph in the post and I think you'll see why most projects are abandoned before they find a market and become a success - the "long, slow, saas ramp of death".
6 replies
9h19m
I have a similar style of business, ~10K customers, ~150k users, ~7yrs.
The key points are:
- offer email support, but don't offer phone, video calls or remote support. This works for most people and forces them to properly phrase questions instead of just "jumping on a call" (so you can then effectively train them over the phone, which doesn't scale).
- offer as much self-service as possible
- work at your own pace and it's ok to just not work some days.
- finding a niche is hard, but they can be surprisingly basic. You're just saving someone time, effort, worry etc.
- lean on global cloud services for reliability. Let them do that.
3 replies
9h9m
One trick I may or may not have invented for the enterprise PO problem (manual processes etc) was to offer an Azure Marketplace subscription for the product.
That way they can just go to azure and subscribe to the license that way, without needing any azure resources etc, it's just a billing mechanism.
They can then bundle that into their usual Azure spend and even do manual POs etc that I never have to deal with.
0 replies
2h53m
Would love to hear more of that azure marketplace. Does it bring leads on its own?
0 replies
6h5m
Huh that's very interesting, need to check that out and keep in mind.
Thanks for sharing!
0 replies
6h39m
This is really interesting. I discovered AWS marketplace which offers the same feature. I started integrating but it takes some time, especially with their webhooks. Is it bringing leads directly, from the marketplace listing, or is it just a plus that will help streamlining the purchase process?
Edit: another question: do you advertise on your website the possibility to use Azure billing?
1 replies
8h51m
150k users supported by one man holy shit! This is obviously a B2C freemium app, right? Would love to see a writeup on how you handled the devops/deployment for this. Load balancers, serverless, or just one baremetal server?
0 replies
8h19m
Thanks :) - yes 90% of users are using the free version. It's a desktop app you install on servers. The API elements it does have are a combination of cloudflare workers, a windows server (for customer portal), linux for community discourse. Peak API use so far is 350M requests per month (was about $46 on cloudflare) but have managed to curtail that a bit. https://certifytheweb.com
6 replies
4h33m
How long did it take you to find your first paying customer and which channels did you find to be most successful in acquisition?
I've just launched my own SaaS as a Solopreneur (https://msgdrop.io) and and trying to figure out where to invest most of my limited free time to grow it now.
2 replies
2h54m
Nice looking page? Did you design it? If so, where did you get the graphics?
My design work looks like a kindergartener drew it with a fat crayon on Big Chief paper! ;-)
1 replies
2h28m
Yes I designed it myself and I did all the drawings myself on an iPad Pro with the pen. I wanted to create a unique and relatable website which didn't look like every other default Starter template and I also was too cheap to pay for professional images so whenever my brain was fried in the evening and I couldn't do any coding work anymore I grabbed my iPad and drew a couple graphics for the current page I was working on whilst winding down in front of the telly watching some British drama series which my wife picked and I didn't need to focus on anyway LOL
0 replies
1h42m
Completely understand fried brain and TV with the wife.
Thanks for the response
1 replies
3h31m
Paid advertising or organic marketing with reels/shorts and blog posts that are SEO optimized,lastly, a bit of luck.
0 replies
2h27m
Thank you, I'll try the blog posts with SEO route first :)
0 replies
2h1m
I started work on billing after this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10431524
Billing was ready in December 2015, and the first customer ($5 MRR) was in March 2016.
5 replies
19h36m
The linked email story was also interesting:
https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr...
The author's end solution goes against all common HN wisdom (!)
This is the way things should work. There should be millions of email senders and receivers, not just 32 mafiosas (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, MailChimp, etc).
There are endless counter-examples on HN advocating against hosting something as simple as email yourself, see: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=self-host+email
4 replies
19h4m
“As simple as email…”
You could at least be realistic instead of blatantly sounding like a zealot.
1 replies
18h59m
With things like https://mailinabox.email/ it is actually simple.
0 replies
18h53m
The difficulty has never been about the SMTP service software itself.
1 replies
18h28m
The notes on self-hosting[1], from somebody making $14k/month relying on Maddy, says it pretty realistically. The author goes into a fair amount of detail covering what he did and it sounds pretty simple compared to what it was ten years ago.
I'm not sure zealotry is the best way to push back against conventional wisdom, but otoh the parent comment didn't sound zealous to me.
In fact the more I read about Maddy[2] the more it seems to simplify running a mail server compared to when I did it back in the day. I mean you still have to worry about landing an IP address with a bad reputation but it takes care of soooo much of the rest of it.
[1] https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr...
0 replies
18h5m
How accurate are IP reputation checking services?
5 replies
14h5m
He has a twitter thread where he describes Hobbit Software: "Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them. Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub"
2 replies
3h6m
I don’t think that is possible.
Almost all software depends on other software. At the very least, it depends on the clients software. Which means you can’t ignore what Chrome or Safari changes for example.
0 replies
1h41m
It most certainly is. You can be pedantic and argue that you’re depending on an HTML rendering engine but so is everyone else. The key is minimizing unnecessary dependencies. This is seen as untenable in communities that love to crow about “social coding,” but there are other groups of people who are happily living that.
They just aren’t chattering away about it.
0 replies
1h23m
It depends on what you choose to rely on.
There's web tech from decades ago that still works almost entirely the same. If you stick to the most beaten path, you can really profit off it.
A lot of "legacy" software is still kicking because of this. Well... it works and solves the problem. And we can update it too, if we just stick to what we're doing. There's Perl scripts decades old still chugging along on servers all over the world. There's Windows applications written in the 90s that work pretty much exactly the same and are still updated in C++.
1 replies
12h25m
I'm confused. The article's author name is Pēteris Caune while the account you link is of one Dave Anderson.
What is the connection between the two?
0 replies
12h3m
The blog post by Peteris Caune includes a link to the Mastodon thread by Dave Anderson. The post you're replying to reposts the same Mastodon link, although it kind of implies that it was written by the same person who wrote the blog post, which isn't true.
4 replies
18h8m
I wouldn't be surprised if he 2x his price and wouldn’t have much churn.
Increasing your pricing is the #1 way to grow revenue and weed out customers who abuse customer support.
https://healthchecks.io/pricing/
With that being said, he clearly knows what he’s doing - don’t take advice from strangers :)
0 replies
15h58m
Why does he need to grow revenue if it's already supporting him and growing slowly but surely enough to where he can spend time of stuff that really matters instead of just making more money.
"Continuously growing revenue" is the trap.
0 replies
17h49m
Although I don’t disagree, the conception of the company was he found an industry and decided to undercut it. Raising prices might be a risk here, since his customers are (presumably) more price conscious
0 replies
17h29m
Ah, the Broadcom/VMWare strategy...
Small businesses that actually find a market and turn a profit live or die on reputation. I have a feeling that 2x the price (even incrementally over time) would burn a lot of goodwill.
But there is a middle ground. As long as your operating costs don't rise precipitously for whatever reason, you can keep your existing customers on their current pricing and give new customers your new higher price.
It works in web hosting, anyway. (Usually.)
0 replies
17h4m
Increasing your pricing is the #1 way to grow revenue and weed out customers who abuse customer support.
Unlikely with businesses like this. This business model is to offer a budget alternative to the big name services that doesn’t have the same level of support and reliability (it admits not having failover, for example) to customers who are okay with that in exchange for the lower price.
Once you start raising prices significantly, it no longer becomes the budget option. Customers may not churn right away, but growth would slow substantially as people started comparing to the full-featured mainstream services at similar price points.
The common startup wisdom is that raising prices dramatically is a magic wand to improve your customer base and grow your revenue, but that doesn’t work in the budget domain.
3 replies
19h34m
Wow, this reads almost as my story. Similar goals, similar time frames, even the hosting provider and the payment processor we use is the same. I have to contact my new-found twin!
1 replies
5h51m
Didn't see it in this article, which payment processor is that?
0 replies
1h57m
The payment processor is Braintree.
0 replies
15h38m
Similar MRR?
3 replies
19h21m
Inspired beyond belief. Personally I'd rather commit suicide than work for the slave drivers at apple and google who screwed my life over then gave me jobs proving their guilt.
2 replies
19h6m
Or you could, you know, have a normal job.
1 replies
14h10m
A normal job for some is working for themselves.
It's unbearable to have to work for someone imo.
I wish to be in charge of my life as much as possible.
0 replies
12h20m
Sure, but Narhem's comment read as if only self-employment and Big Tech exists. Most developers are employed at smaller firms and are living comfortable lives and don't feel overwhelmingly exploited.
Personally, I would love to be self-employed. But I am addicted to stability and am afraid of sales and sadly can't see myself in that role ever.
2 replies
4h0m
Are there any solutions for one-man SaaS to handle payments from enterprise customers? I'm assuming that the preferred mode of payment here is through wire transfers after some kind of PO process.
0 replies
3h2m
All major billing providers should support this, from some cursory googling both Stripe and Stax Payment support it.
0 replies
2h35m
Someone mentioned they use Azure for billing:
2 replies
9h48m
Massive respect for the no growth approach. We’re different in that we’re a consultancy rather than a SaaS but 14 years into running our “micro agency” (my wife and I). We’ve had plenty of opportunities to take on staff but have always chosen not to in favour of working with trusted freelancers. Net result is an extremely contented life spent living by the sea in Cornwall and a gently profitable business. We'll never be rich but it’s been the right choice to see our beautiful kids grow up in a place that we all love :-)
0 replies
2h13m
This rules. Congrats.
0 replies
6h2m
Kudos to you and your wife, definitely not the way most agencies are going and it's a shame.
2 replies
17h28m
Do you do marketing as well? I'd assume not based on the no JS-analytics so I'm curious what your customer acquisition methods are, as in how they find out about your business?
0 replies
9h18m
We're all here on the front page of Hacker News :)
0 replies
9h16m
Author here, I think most new signups are through traffic from search engines and through word of mouth, Healthchecks.io gets regular mentions in Reddit /r/selfhosted. I've dabbled with paid ads (Google search, Reddit, Twitter, EthicalAds) but without analytics it was shooting in the dark.
1 replies
18h34m
Good to see simple services generating 5 digit revenue! I would have liked to see a breakdown of expenses per month and profit though.
0 replies
18h25m
Infrastructure costs 500 EUR / month of servers, then on top you have to add the tools (e-mail, etc), so should be between 500 and 1000 EUR / month.
1 replies
8h53m
If anyone wants some one-man-SaaS ideas, here's a few which I desperately want. Somebody please build these and let me know! I already have my own startup so I don't have time to build these other ideas.
- A cheaper and simpler version of visualping.io, they used to be really good but now they're too expensive and enterprise-y. Would be easier and better with AI.
- AI-based email assistant which instantly brings up the entire history of contact I had with a person (even if they used a different email or sent to a different inbox) and can quickly be used to draft replies based on that history and a set of canned response templates. Note that I don't want a full email client, I want to use my own email client, I just want an assistant that is plugged in via API/whatever. Yes I've already tried all the alternatives in this space like Mailbutler/Spark/Superhuman but they're all crappy and force you to be locked in to their client.
- An Apple TV/Android TV app for the Anki memorization app. Lots of people have made successful Anki plugins and little hardware devices and made good money, like AnkiRemote.com. TVs are extremely well suited to laid-back studying and memorization, so you could easily promote this within the Anki student community if you made one.
0 replies
59m
Regarding visualping, have you checked https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io, and if so, what's missing?
1 replies
15h51m
If the author is reading - what was the nonsensical Python exceptions that went away after hardware upgrade?
0 replies
10h2m
It was "../Python/getargs.c:2316: bad argument to internal function".
In one case, it was thrown from some_string.split(), in another case from some_string.encode().
1 replies
19h31m
Healthchecks.io has saved me on more occasions than I care to remember. Simple, effective, and works flawlessly.
0 replies
18h0m
Very cool, are you one of the paying users or are you on the free version?
1 replies
19h32m
Absolutely living the dream! Being a sustainable one man SaaS is what I'd ultimately love to be, but not only do I have no ideas about what to SaaS, I highly doubt I'd have the drive to follow through if I did.
Kudos to you, and to another 9 years!
Also I'm stealing the term Hobbit software, talk about comfy.
0 replies
7h16m
EXACTLY the same feeling here. No ideas and unsure of follow through.
0 replies
19h14m
Congratulations! This is awesome!
0 replies
12h30m
This is both inspirational and aspirational! Can the more knowledgeable members of the forum guide on how to find and validate such idea and start with the execution?
0 replies
14h43m
Hacker News is filled with thousands of inspiring stories. This one is simply the best for me.
0 replies
11h30m
In a similar boat, a run a few SaaS’s as a one man band. Around 1,000 subscribers. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, being responsible for uptime while you’re sleeping can be stressful, thinking you may have overlooked a massive security vulnerability is constantly in the back of your mind. I wouldn’t trade it for anything though, it’s a very fortunate position to be in.
I also don’t feel the pressure to grow the product features anymore similar to OP. In fact I struggle sometimes now from being overly comfortable and feeling stagnant.
0 replies
19h43m
This seems like it would be the dream. Work on your own thing and actually be successful at it. Really cool.
0 replies
1h55m
You are such an inspiration.
The explanation of why you became a solopreneur - because you didn't want to manage or be managed is simple, yet incredibly insightful. All the best!
0 replies
18h54m
Congrats.
Same with me. On my one year mark as a one person saas with 123x.dev . Helping Monday and Atlassian customers with custom apps.
0 replies
13h15m
Congrats!
0 replies
18h41m
That’s the dream
0 replies
16h20m
This has been my dream for the last few years.
I'm making progress as I am also acting as a fractional CTO for a few start ups where I only took equity and only used my platform. All the companies are going to migrate off at some point, but they found market fit and are staffing up full engineering teams.
Over the next few years, I'm going to continue just having fun building. However, I have a few verticals that I plan to launch in and start figuring out marketing for that is... reasonable.
0 replies
15h59m
It all sounds very... healthy :)
0 replies
19h17m
Thanks for posting. It was a great read and reminded me of the old @patio11 year in review posts which i also used to enjoy reading: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software-year...
0 replies
6h14m
Just wanted to say how much I appreciated self-hosted version of Healthchecks.io. It's so simple, it feels almost magic. Keep it up!
0 replies
19h6m
Am in a similar situation running a 1 person SaaS B2C product.
Recently wrote up a similar review post about the fears, failures and successes I experienced over the past year:
https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...
0 replies
14h34m
This is the DREAM.
0 replies
19h1m
I'm really glad to see he's doing well.
I love Healthchecks.
It's open source and easy to set up if you'd like to go that route.
His free tier is more than enough for my self hosting shenanigans and it's been one of the most reliable parts of my setup.
0 replies
11h33m
love this!
0 replies
13h19m
Thanks for the great writeup and inspiration. Nothing much more here to add, but I like the idea of hobbit software that you presented and the fact that you stick to what you want to do. It's a great thing to see someone not search for growth at all costs.
0 replies
10h39m
Pēteris' model with healthchecks.io was a large inspiration for me, and it is the reason why ntfy.sh is following the same model: open source, self-hostable, fun driven development.
Thank you Pēteris for being an inspiration.
0 replies
16h53m
Very cool to see, thanks for continuing to share updates!
It's refreshing to see one person or small teams happily prioritizing work/life balance over the never ending treadmill of profit and growth.
Finding what "enough" means to you is hard, holding that line over nearly a decade of success is even harder.
0 replies
18h28m
Living the dream, man! \o/
One man army apps are generally dead simple to maintain and bug-fix. You write all the code, so when someone pings you with a problem you know exactly what caused it without any need to check for anything. I’ve maintained apps like that for years and have sometimes pushed a code change directly on the GitHub app on the phone and just checking if the site is fixed after.
Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete - thus you actually get fewer bugs. In my experience most issues in software come because the engineer misunderstood the requirements that someone else wrote anyway.
That is not answering the question.
How do you do to get alerted of your service going down when:
- you are in the wilderness, ouside or with little cell coverage
- drunk and dancing in a wedding with music at full blast
These are just 2 small examples out of many others. Also it means you need to stay connected when taking a plane, be able to stop and/or swap drivers if your are in a long driving trip so that you can fix your service in a rest area or while your partner is driving, etc.
I am pretty sure outages are very rare but if that happens the day your are out of cell coverage and unable to react, you might lose a lot of trust from your customers.
I am also suprised he relies on only one hosting service. I would have thought you might not want to have everything in the same basket.
The most important part is understanding that downtimes are not a problem!
Cloudflare is again down and your service is not available for an hour? You cant do anything. And nobody unsubscribes.
Most downtimes are because another service is down and you cant do anything.
Sometimes its really your issue. Your service is down for an entire day? Some customers may be pissed at the moment. But in the end they dont care if you are not a critical service - like this one.
Learning: Downtimes are not an issue. When such a message pops up just ignore it and look at it when you have time. This is strange first as we try to be perfect. But the world will continue to turn.
Keep in mind that 95% downtime happens when you deploy things or change configuration settings.
If I am drunk dancing in the woods as a solo operator no one is doing config changes on my servers.
The remaining 5% downtime like internet connection to the server facility, solar flares, UFO taking over the world - I would not able to do anything about anyway, would have to wait until it goes away.
Even Google has outages sometimes. The chances of an outage happening at that exact moment when you are "drunk and dancing at a wedding" are probably lower than "catastrophic deployment failure at FAANG, multi-hour outage", especially because you are certainly not deploying any changes at that time. And if the outage is due to a third-party dependency failing then you can blame it on them and there's not much you could do even if you were online anyway.
This is so true. To me, finishing writing the code means releasable code. I have done the testing along the way.
Can attest to this. Having a mental model of the code in your head because you are both the architect and the builder makes maintenance way easier. Still not always easy, but at least way easier in comparison to not having this mental model. After some years of developing this way it still feels as a continuous head start.
I also have a one man show Saas with 34 companies paying that pays my bills.
It runs on namecheap shared hosting.
If it goes down, I trust namecheap to fix it asap. If it goes down and someone called me, I don't really know what I would do anyway....
In 6 years it has never been a problem.
PHP and jQuery. I use phpmyadmin via cpanel to manage the database.
I swear to god that this is the future.
Here's my upvote!
Care to share the product here?
Not really, Id open myself up to countless nerds testing and poking.
If you’re not pushing code/changes the likelihood of incidents is significantly less. Also, not having a few enterprise contracts that make up most of the revenue, helps ease customer support load.
Do you know what a typical enterprise contract for a nice tool like this could go for? I have an open source saas tool in a different niche but so far the biggest contract I have is 500$ per month and that's for companies who need a lot of customisations, a very white glove service and a few days o work to morph the tool onto exactly what it is they want (typically via plugin so changes are easily manageable). One one hand it feels great to charge 500$ per month but then you sometime see numbers from companies like gitlab who are able to charge 100x that or even more, it's very hard to know how much to charge for something in the b2b sass space and I have that feeling that 1 large enterprise customer is the only thing you need in some spaces to sustain a company of 1 or even 2 that are not aiming for unicorn level
For any enterprise customer, I would recommend to increase their annual fees by two times the rate of inflation (or more if you like). Also: Ask yourself if you can afford to lose some customers during this process.
GitLabs pricing is hilariously, insanely, astronomically high. I'd love to move our org off BitBucket the GitLab, but it's just absolutely not possible, given their pricing.
Not OP, but this works for me:
- No phone number for support
- Extensive FAQs to let people help themselves first
- Vacation: take laptop along, check emails every couple days (but I haven’t tried remote vacation without internet ever)
Generally speaking: outsiders vastly overestimate the support burden of a one-man business. Maybe I’m lucky, but I only receive 2-3 emails per day with 25k active users.
People who don't have experience running servers imagine that you have to baby sit the servers like every 5 mins something happens.
In reality if you don't deploy new version or don't change config or don't post your product to HN server will be there simply running.
In big companies you might have bunch of people doing config changes all the time on different levels and you might never know when someone will break something you rely on.
Probably just uses some on call pager support (PagerDuty, xMatters, …) and configure it to alert if infra goes down.
Then just remote into systems, and fix issues. He’s pretty much “on call” 24/7/365
They probably set up a HealthChecks.io alert.
Not OP, but it is something that I've had to deal with. I essentially need to be within X hours of my laptop and a solid internet connection, where X is the maximum acceptable downtime.
I'd love to travel to a remote island, or do a 2 week hike out of cell service but it's difficult. The odds are incredibly low that downtime occurs in that window, but Murphy's Law and my anxiety won't allow it. The pros greatly outweigh the cons though. While I can't do those remote trips, I can still travel wherever else and just ignore things unless there's a downtime alert or an urgent support ticket.
That's the trade-off of going alone – laptop travels with me, and I cannot leave cell-phone coverage area for too long.
Also there have been times when monitoring alerts start blaring at 3AM, and there's no more sleep that night. Thankfully does not happen very often :-)