Ask IH: unpopular opinions on starting successful SaaS

Get a normal job or try to land some consulting gigs, and build a sideproject, the romantic view of "he was jobless and built himself an empire" does rarely exist

one less popular opinion is that in fact you don't need to start a saas, but can ultimately save time and money by buying a saas with paying customers and use that as a starting point.

this is something that I thought that I had explored more, and have been perusing https://1kprojects.com/ as well, more just out of curiosity to see what's available.

i recently read nathan latka's book, "How To Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital" where he delves into this topic, and thought that it'd be a helpful book to add to the list you mentioned: http://book.nathanlatka.com/

I would recommend to start doing something. Actually start a project of your own. Watching people and interviewing is hard. Running into problems for yourself is easier. The challenge then is figuring out if the problems you encounter have already been solved, and if not are people willing to pay to have them solved.

Luck. You need a lot of luck — in addition to hard work.

Because of this, you need to have 2-3 ideas that are relatively quick to validate (ie. whether you can find someone — anyone — to pay you) so you can start iterating.

Build it...and they will come .

Seems to be very unpopular here on IH .

Many posts are about..niche markets....drilling down to find " the core users . "

And while I must say..this position has it's merits...it also has it drawbacks as well .

I have been in the maker game since the 1980s...before there even was an internet .

I am not in it to build what everyone else is building...The world surely has enough task managers , shopping apps and the like without me adding to the ocean of millions of unused software applications .

To me there seems to be an air of " lets play it safe "...because there are competitors in a market..so that somehow inherently validates the market... lets face it...

" it will save time & money "..validating the market...etc.. really is sensible...and so very safe....

However , when you follow that path...it was carved out by someone else.... even on the 'net....as in supermarkets the world over....there is only so much shelf space for products .

Where is the originality....the creativity...someone has to go 1st .

I've read a couple of books that say the same thing, of these books are: "The millionaire fast-lane", "Lean Start-up", "Zero to One", "Lean B2B" and "Makebook.io".

Wait, what? I think those are good books, especially the first three, but I don't think they say the same thing at all! Millionaire Fastlane is for indiehacking. Zero to One is for building a gigantic, VC-funded, world-changing business. It has an entire section devoted to critiquing the Lean Start-up. Makebook equates VC to a scam and takes a fairly different approach to indiehacking than Millionaire Fastlane...

I think it's important when considering different ideas for a new SaaS to not discount ideas purely because of how "small" you think the market may be. In fact, Peter Thiel recommends that startups start by dominating a small market then expanding upwards/outwards and I think this advice applies even moreso to IndieHackers. Oftentimes, markets may seem small from the outside, but once you've started building you may be able to identify gaps in the market to pivot/expand into.

Spend money on marketing & sales.

I frequently see posts along the lines that someone selling B2B SaaS did a test, spent $100 on AdWords, and then draws conclusions from that. I call BS, because $100 is not enough money to be a valid test for most B2B keywords.

Instead, I suggest founders design realistic budgets for their businesses. Would you spend 50% dev / 50% sales/marketing? Whatever it is, pick a ratio that makes sense. Then (this is important), put a $ figure on the time you spent (or will spend) developing the product. Use a competitive hourly contract rate for you, say $75/hr or $150/hr or whatever.

Example: I built my MVP over a sleepless weekend and shipped midnight Sunday (going into Monday). So I invested about 55 hours, or $5,500 at $100/hr. I now have IP I personally have invested $5,500 in creating.

Now, are you planning on spending that much on marketing and sales? (You can allocate some $ per hour figure to time you spend marketing.) If not, why not? If you build a site and don't put any traffic on it, the results are predictable.

Going back to the example -- I would plan to spend at least $1,000 and would prefer to be able to spend up to $10,000+ in time and money to test the idea.

"non of this advice worked for me."

Why? Have you actually put that advice into practice? What did you find?