A Theory on The Best Types of Businesses for Solo Founders
Having launched a few solo SaaS companies in the past, I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s a dangerous path that can lead to overworking. Many people are ok with that, but I think there are a niche group of indie hackers that want more of a lifestyle business. And even more niche are the indie hackers that want to keep their apps on the side.
For those niches, I wonder if SaaS is the wrong model. SaaS apps require 24/7 monitoring. There is a question on Hacker News that highlights this really well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203074
So what’s the alternative? It could potentially be to sell lifetime memberships for products or fixed price desktop and mobile software. The fixed price approach is how software was sold for decades, but it has lost steam, I think, because it’s less lucrative and most users want to be able to do everything in their browsers. Mobile apps are less attractive because they are really hard to sell and make money from without loading them up with ads.
I don’t have a real solution here, but my theory, if I haven’t made it clear enough, is that some solo founders may find one-off software more mentally appeasing than running a SaaS company.
For what it’s worth, this isn’t advice and if it was I’m not following it. I just launched a private alpha of my new SaaS, Perligo.
Good thoughts Justin and very good topic that not everyone think of.
Because of the sheer amount of services available you can use as your foundation, I would say quite the opposite, it's never been a better time to build a SaaS and still maintain your lifestyle. :)
I would say for SaaS, that this is not a problem anymore with serverless and no-code services, and other managed services you might build on top. The point of these services is that the infrastructure's uptime will be taken care of and it will scale as you need. If they fail, there is not much you can do anyway. :) Then your job is to keep the code in a good shape, so it does not fail and if it does, the customer knows what to expect. E.g. if the service has a problem when you are not working, tell the customer when you are likely to look into this. It does not mean that when the phone rings (server down alert) you have to wake up, you want to make everything possible that you won't get alerted at all. :)
As a solo maker trying to build a SaaS side project, I am trying to delegate as much as I can and focus on the core. E.g. Stripe for payments, DB for FaunaDB, Hosting for Netlify, etc. Making sure I do what I can to ensure the app is stable (good code, tests,...). Mistakes can happen, servers can go down, even something can happen to me anytime.
FYI 99% uptime = ~8 hours of downtime throughout the month. :)
This is a fantastic reply! I think serverless is really the right choice for solo SaaS providers. Database management has been iffy for me, but I've found Digital Ocean's managed offering reasonably priced and really well maintained.
What provider do you use for serverless functions? I was just looking into Cloudflare's workers, but I've used AWS Lambda in the past and at one point Auth0 had a platform called Webtask I had used.
I went with Netlify functions since I am leveraging Netlify's identity. This is all new to me and went with the easiest (tutorials available). :)
I have just few functions right now, for logging in/signup/stripe/db comms.
Just looked up your product. Looks awesome!
Ah, Inline Manual is not that one, IM is a full blown behemoth on roughly 100 servers within Google Cloud Platform and a 24/7 monitoring team behind it.
On my side project (still in stealth mode) I am using Netlify. :)
Oh nice! Looking forward to seeing your side project when it’s out.