Epic Guide To Bootstrapping a Saas Business

I love this post! Here are my thoughts:

When they claim they got 100,000 email signups in a week (and make it look as easy as microwaving popcorn) — they’re playing you. They’re creating an idealized result that you will never attain.

He's right that we shouldn't think that extraordinary results are the norm, but I think it's important to analyze and find out just why things worked out so well in those cases. Often there's some really powerful combination of factors pushing in the same direction, and it's helpful to understand those so maybe you can utilize them, too, in the future.

For example, when Jason launched SubmitHub, a lot of people complained that it only worked out because he had an audience from Indie Shuffle, and that they could never do the same. Well, the smarter takeaway would be, "Maybe I could build an audience by writing about something I love, and then launch a product to them later?"

As it turns out, many many people have followed this path. It's easier to go from 0 --> 0.5 --> 1 than straight from 0 --> 1.

If You Love Writing Code, You’re Going to Hate Running a SaaS Business

So true, I miss coding! 😭

I think people get stuck in the mindset of, "I have to build my product," which is subtly different than, "I have to solve a problem." If you're focused on the latter, then you will naturally start doing things like trying to understand your customers and the nature of the problem itself.

So really, your SaaS business idea is just a guess.

One of the best lines in the article, because everything else flows from this fact!

Go and brainstorm 20 different and specific places you can find the kinds of people that would want to give you money for the value statement you’re offering.… If you can’t come up with 20 good places, chance are you don’t know who your customer actually is… Either educate yourself or pick a customer you understand better.

Nothing's worse than building a product for a customer you don't understand and don't know how to market to. (Finding customers is half of marketing, the other half is getting them interested.) Then you end up in this sunk cost situation where 6 months later you've built this semi-useless product that you have no idea how to market, but you don't want to abandon it because you've spent so much time on it!

Yes. If you’re good at math, you just realized that we’re going to be going after 200 people. I kid you not.

Amy Hoy gives similar advice about doing copious amounts of research from the get-go. But I really like his prescribed format for sending these emails and getting the type of feedback you need before launching.

It's interesting, because it almost mirrors what I unintentionally did with Indie Hackers. I sent 120+ emails to people talking about what I was doing, and the replies I got really encouraged me to keep going and also shaped the idea somewhat. I've also interviewed lots of people who got their start by doing hundreds of cold calls/emails like that, too.

Just remember: If you can’t sell your SaaS one-on-one, you probably aren’t going to be able to market it. At all.

Cool point. Marketing is like mass sales.

That being said, what exactly do you put on your landing page?… No screenshots. No mockups. Just text… Your first landing page should not have any product screenshots or mockups. None. Zero.

I really like his advice here! His landing pages for Tamboo are super compelling, and not including screenshots saves you lots of time.

Btw, the Indie Hackers forum used to look like this back in August: http://imgur.com/a/XWVgG 😝

So. Like it or not, you need to test for mobile. I repeat: YOU NEED TO TEST FOR MOBILE.

Yep. Tons of my HN traffic comes from mobile, upwards of 30% sometimes. I didn't realize this at first, and the site sucked on mobile. It's still not perfect, but much better than it used to be!

If you are getting traffic but no signups, there’s a couple things to consider… Second, maybe you need to tweak your landing page. Try different variations to see if you get a different response. Try different messaging. Ask the 20 people you got Heck Yeses from to give you feedback.

I would probably start by asking those 20 people for their feedback. Twenty people is a lot of quality feedback, especially if you can get them on the phone (or in person) where they'll share much more than they would over email or chat.

I want you to understand first hand that building a SaaS startup is mostly a marketing optimization problem — not something that you can just code your way out of… If you remember from Part 1 and Part 2, you need to have a market. No market, no money… What you build for your MVP is entirely dependent on the market you are targeting… So which features do you go after? The ones that the target market you’re going after cares about most!… Just in case I’m not clear enough: TARGET MARKET IS EVERYTHING.

I think ignoring the target market is the #1 problem I've had in the past, the #1 problem people I've interviewed have had, and the #1 problem that people asking for feedback on the forum have had.

It's just so easy to get sucked into coding, and designing, and building features, and it's fun, too! But it's such a waste of time at the beginning before you know exactly who you're building it for and what they care about the most.

I typically recommend that you take no more than one month to build AND release the first version of your SaaS application… “But! But! But!”… It’s rather simple, actually. You do things manually. They send you emails when they need something.

David Hauser (who grew Grasshopper to $30M/year) had to write SQL queries to look up customer information every time someone called, because they had no dashboard. And my interview process at IH is still mostly manual, because I've been tweaking it this whole time and it would've been a waste of time to try to automate it initially.

For reference, the average project on Indie Hackers took 3 weeks to build. Indie Hackers itself took 3 weeks to build, too. In the future I think I'd limit myself to 2 weeks for product launches, and absolutely no more than a month no matter what. There are great ideas that would take longer than that to build, sure, but I would personally say no to all of them.

That project never got off the ground, and now I make $0.00 a year from having learned Scala. So I spent three months learning something with absolutely no ROI to show for it. Pure idiocy.
…
Stop chasing shiny red balls. Dogs chase shiny red balls because they don’t have the mental faculty to choose otherwise. Are you a fucking dog?

Hahaha so harsh, but true.

Just understand — it’s harder now than ever to build a successful SaaS business.

I'm not so sure I agree. The tech your business relies on is more available, more powerful, and cheaper than ever. Yes, people's expectations are higher, but they're easier to satisfy.

If you suck at design, there are a million cheap resources today where you can get a decent design for your product, your landing pages, your emails, etc. You can use powerful frameworks to build slick single page apps in a jiffy. You can automate just about anything with Zapier. Hell, just a few years ago, people were spending months rigging up their payment systems by hand, but you can have Stripe up and running almost instantly.

The internet is also more ubiquitous than ever, which means you have more customers, which means niches that previously weren't online or were too small to target are now viable. It doesn't even matter how much competition there is, because there are hundreds of markets that aren't winner-take-all. How many productivity tools do people pay for? Form builders? Analytics tools? Analytics for Intercom, analytics for actions, analytics for traffic, analytics for Stripe, analytics for analytics…

Finally, there are more resources available today than ever before. You can see examples on Indie Hackers, buy all sorts of eye-opening books, and read amazing blog posts like this 3-part Epic Guide to Bootstrapping.

Wow such a great post!
Thank you very much for sharing it.

IH is giving us the opportunity to see other people living out of their products/services income, and that's awesome. But this post is giving us the opportunity to smell the time you must invest before earning a dime.

I'm also thinking about writing a diary explaining how hard is starting from 0 and how much effort you must do. I will share it here in case I start doing it.

The original weblink expired. Here is the article on archive.org - https://web.archive.org/web/20180829113158/https://blog.gettamboo.com/the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-a-saas-startup-from-scratch-by-yourself-part-1-4d834e1df8c1