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!
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.
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.
That's a skill you can work on. You can also progressively structure your business so that you never need to be working at a given time.
It took a me few years of observing what brings my attention back you work and what controls my schedule the most, and many little practices to deal with that. Now the thing runs itself, and I can take much longer vacations. It was worth the effort.
> If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!
A company, by definition, is a group of people. Of course it is possible to register company and never hire employees, but it is not relevant now. The point is when you say "the company stand still" it effectively meaning "I am standing still". Either normalize it for yourself, or hire someone)
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"
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.
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.
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++.
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.
I am running another "hobbit software" (just discovered the term) for the past 12 years, and I 100% agree with Pēteri and everything he said in this blog post!
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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.
One of my products makes well over that amount, and it’s an identical clone of one of about 500 identical products in the same (large) niche.
If all you want is $1000/mo, you don’t necessarily have to solve a new problem, you can solve a problem that already has solutions (ideally doing it slightly better, but this isn’t required).
If your product is identical to the competitors, then you can carve out a small percentage of the market just be being the first solution the user tries, e.g via paid ads putting you at the top of the search.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
> 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
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.
- 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.
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
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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!
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.
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.
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.
It is so difficult to find such niches, so congrats for the success!
It took a me few years of observing what brings my attention back you work and what controls my schedule the most, and many little practices to deal with that. Now the thing runs itself, and I can take much longer vacations. It was worth the effort.
A company, by definition, is a group of people. Of course it is possible to register company and never hire employees, but it is not relevant now. The point is when you say "the company stand still" it effectively meaning "I am standing still". Either normalize it for yourself, or hire someone)
https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/112766460393943288
What is the connection between the two?
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.
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++.
They just aren’t chattering away about it.
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.
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.
Edit: another question: do you advertise on your website the possibility to use Azure billing?
Thanks for sharing!
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
If all you want is $1000/mo, you don’t necessarily have to solve a new problem, you can solve a problem that already has solutions (ideally doing it slightly better, but this isn’t required).
If your product is identical to the competitors, then you can carve out a small percentage of the market just be being the first solution the user tries, e.g via paid ads putting you at the top of the search.
Best of luck!
Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.
- 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
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.
A service routine monitor doesn't need to be updated every month to function, so why would anyone pay every month to use it?
Kudos to you, and to another 9 years!
Also I'm stealing the term Hobbit software, talk about comfy.
Deleted Comment
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?)
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.
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.
This is so true. To me, finishing writing the code means releasable code. I have done the testing along the way.
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.
- 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.
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.
They probably set up a HealthChecks.io alert.
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.
Then just remote into systems, and fix issues. He’s pretty much “on call” 24/7/365
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 :-)
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.
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.