This morning, I woke up to something very surprising in my inbox:
Mixed in with the standard “Someone’s getting placecards!” emails that I get pretty regularly was an email I had only ever seen before in testing.
Holy smokes, someone paid!
I just made my first $1 of SaaS revenue. Literally—like the cliche—as I was sleeping.
If you've read some of my other writing you’ll understand why I was surprised. Place Card Me, my printable place card site, had not generated a single sale until last night.
As this was a major milestone for me I thought it was a good time to take a deep dive into what it took it took to achieve it.
I’m hoping this will help others looking to start SaaS products get a sense of what they might go through.
That said, hopefully you’ll be smarter and more successful than I was. That probably won’t be too hard.
So what went into making $1?
Mostly, time.
How much time exactly?
As of this writing, just under 210 hours, or about 5 working weeks and a day, spread out over just about five months.
If you’re doing math at home that comes out to an hourly wage of just under half a cent per hour. It’s a good thing I’ve been enjoying this process! Not exactly something I’ll be able to give up my day job for at this rate.
Here’s how that time broke down week by week:
You can see a big ramp up after I validate the idea and build out the MVP. Then it drops for a few weeks while I ran some experiments with ads, ramps back up as I built out the ability to buy templates on the site and did a second marketing push, and then finally winds down into a pretty steady maintenance period where I’m spending an average of about 4 hours a week keeping the lights on and making little adjustments. I imagine this last phase will continue indefinitely.
Product versus Traction
Another interesting thing to look at is the split between product work — building the site and making it better — versus traction work — trying to get it out into the world.
I read in Traction that a typical business should be splitting its time about 50/50 between product and traction, and since then I’ve tried to keep that approximate ratio.
Here’s the current breakdown of those 210 hours:
We can also look at the efforts on these two things individually over time.
You can see things start with traction efforts during the idea validation phase, followed by a big product push as I build out the landing page and MVP, traction taking over as I try to market it, and again, finally landing on a pretty even 50/50 distribution in maintenance mode.
The 50/50 split in the maintenance phase has been pretty deliberate (and hard, sometimes, since it’s so much more fun to work on the product).
What about Money?
Of course the other input besides time is money.
Here’s what I’ve spent on this project so far. It’s actually quite simple:
The bad news is that I’ve still got quite a long way to go before I recoup my financial investment made. The good news is that most of that money was on ads used as validation tests, and I haven’t spent a single dollar on this project in the month leading up to my first sale.
And I’m now the proud owner of a brand new paper cutter! So there’s that.
You might be wondering where my server costs are, and I’ll admit that I’m cheating a bit on that one. I host all of my projects on the same server—one that I’ve been paying for for more than five years—so I’m not including that in the budget for this project specifically. In reality I should probably include a portion of those costs here.
SaaS Ain’t Easy
When I set out to try and make money by building something on the internet a lot of people warned me that it would be harder than I expected. Boy were they right.
If I knew then that I would go on to spend 200 hours on this project in order to lose $110, would I still do it?
Absolutely.
Let’s be clear—I’d probably pick a totally different product to work on. Hopefully one that had more of a chance of generating real revenue. I’d also probably target an industry that I understood better instead of weddings.
But I don’t think I would have truly been able to know those things without having gone through this effort. I’ve never been the type of person who learns well by being told things—much better to figure these things out for myself—and thankfully I had the time, skills, and support system to make that happen.
Now I know infinitely more about what it looks like to build a revenue-generating SaaS product from scratch (spoiler alert: it’s a lot of work!). And therefore I should be able to say with confidence that if I ever have to do this again I’ll be able to be much smarter about it, which hopefully also means more successful.
In theory I also now have a sustainable engine with Place Card Me that will—fingers crossed—generate more revenue with much less investment required on my part moving forwards, and may even one day turn profitable.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have 1/6th of a meatball sub to buy with my hard-earned SaaS cash. 💰💰💰
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This article was originally published on coryzue.com, where I write about solopreneurship, software, and life. Thanks for reading!
This is why I love this community! We get to experience the journey of others on the same path, watch each other stumble as well as succeed. It also realistically shows the amount of work is required to make things happen online. Thanks for sharing and all the best with Place Card Me!
Hi!
Earning the first dollar is usually more difficult than the next one thousand. And this first dollar is therefore more valuable than all that will come next. I wish you success!
never heard that, but here's hoping! thanks for the well wishes! :)
Love this post! I'm in a very similar spot to you. Solo founder/developer/marketer/etc doing everything myself. I'm not yet charging for my product (https://www.letscommence.com) but will be soon. I honestly can't wait to see that first confirmation of order email in my inbox! Huge congrats for crossing that milestone! :-) my dev/marketing split is probably a bit more in favour of dev so far, but that's slowly but surely changing now the MVP is released and self sustaining.
Funnily enough, I'm 4 weeks out from my own wedding, and this weekend I will be sorting my own table place cards! I'll ping you an email with my thoughts on your service, given that I'm your target audience and always more than happy to help.
Have you considered display advertising on the big wedding forums? I'd also consider outreaching to venues themselves and perhaps white labelling your service to them for their customers. Also a free consumer sample could be a good means to acquire leads so long as shipping isn't cost prohibitive - i'd explore that as an option for sure (you could always make it 'for the first 25 people' and stop if you want).
Keep up the good work. $100 in revenue next! :-)
That's a hilarious coincidence you're making place cards this weekend! Definitely let me know how it goes and if you have feedback.
I'm in conversations with a couple wedding bloggers about display ads. Haven't contacted any forums yet. Unfortunately I just don't have high enough margins to do any advertising cost effectively so have been focused almost exclusively on SEO.
Outreaching to venues directly is a really good idea - I'll definitely put that on the list.
Best of luck on letscommence and good luck getting that first order!
Hello Cory, Thanks for sharing your story. The site looks great but I was a bit baffled to understand that I need to print the cards on my own. Wouldn't it be better to offer a "Will print it and send it to you overnight" option? It may be costly but profitable for you, as married couples are known to be in a spending mood and the cards are a tiny expense in their entire wedding.
This is a good idea and was part of my long term vision for the site, but I haven't gotten around to figuring out how to make that happen. Am definitely hoping to support that workflow sometime in the future and I agree with you that it could be a huge increase in potential revenue because people would be willing to pay a lot for that convenience in that moment.
Great post but I think you could generate more sales and earn more if you raised the price to $5 or even $9.99. Why? It might seem illogical but raising the price will make it seem more serious and more valuable. I don't want to go through the trouble of paying $1
Thanks! Funnily enough, prices were at $5-$10 for most of the last two months without any sales and I dropped them to $1 a couple weeks ago because I really just wanted that first dollar.
I had been thinking about this change mostly from a revenue perspective though your point about going through the trouble of paying $1 is pretty interesting. Am hoping to (eventually) raise prices down the road and will be interesting to see how it affects sales.
I agree with that. I would give the option of downloading the cards for free - but an option to print them for you + fast shipping for $XX that will create revenue.
Hey, thanks a bunch for sharing your experience!
I didn't know about the book you mentioned (Traction) and the idea of deliberately splitting the time 50/50 on things that will impulse the product and the product itself seems pretty good.
Keep going!
Thanks! Yeah I found that principle to be a really helpful forcing function to work on traction stuff because I always wanted to do like 90% product...
Great article! So cool when guys share such experience!👍
I'm a big fan of SaaS projects! Don't know if I'll ever want to work on something but SaaS
Do you know from which channel the paid customer discovered the product? How long were they using the product?
What's the plan to acquire next 10 customers?
All these great (and hard) questions!
I haven't deep dove into my analytics yet, but about 80% of the people who successfully make cards (excepting the recent bump from indie hackers :) ) come from organic search. The possible good news about that is as long as I don't mess anything up and keep trickling out SEO, maybe I can just wait for the next 10?
I'm pursuing other things as well. Am playing with listing the cards on Etsy, some promotions with wedding bloggers, and probably need to do some more cold outreach at some point...
Only spending a handful of hours a week on this project at this point so it takes some time to roll these things out!