I built and sold 2 small SaaS products and quit my job in the last two years — AMA

Good question! Usually* I'd reccomend hanging out in communities, like Slack, Discord, Telegram but als broader (topic-wise) forums like Reddit and see if you can spot a recurring pain point. Recurring pain = possibly recurring revenue.

If I'm actively looking for a new thing, I like to start with finding a sector or industry I have some kind of connection with — some people like to think of an "unfair advantage", I'd say a very serious interest or passion in a field is enough.
If the broader sector is clear I like to look for "watering holes" where the people of that sector hang out . I think Amy Hoy coined that term and it's quite briliant. Go where folks are talking about their problems in that sector and listen. Next could be a fast prototype and some interviews to validate a little more of my assumptions.

I think one of my personal advantages is being able to build prototypes fast, which means I can try different things in code early on. This seems to help when talking to potential customers early on, especially if the product is otherwise abstract,

*Big side note here: Ummm wasn't started that way. It was 100% scratching my own itch and I'm very pleased there are other people out there who like th concept :D
The end-goal with it isn't necessarily building a 10k/mo business.

Hmm I think I haven't 🤔
Probably the only reason i haven't experienced that though is that I always had a stable income, doing work I enjoy while searching for new things on the side. That means there was never the need to rush and find a new problem. I totally understand the urge to finally find a problem and start building but I'd say it's probably better to measure twice and cut once (saying that as somebody who's measured only once before).

Generally speaking I think it's essential to have a working system to take care of yourself (mentally, physically, financially) when approaching this journey. It's a balancing act at times but if you want to do this for a long time, it's crucial to also make it substainable for a long time.

After sunsetting previous projects I always liked to look at what I've learned and try applying that when looking for new projects. We kind of have to be over-enthusiastic and intentionally forgetful when it comes to failure.

Oh absolutely! Glad you're bringing it up, there are plenty.
I definitely tend to gravitate to ambitious ideas which collides with stying small and not raising money (which I'd prefer). There was one project I sunsetted very early on, because I didn't think about the monetization at all, plus it was b2c so I quickly felt like it would be too hard to grow it to substantial revenue. Just this year I started building out another project that I discontinued, because the scope was too big and the decision making buyers seemed a little too far out of reach to do it without funding and in a relaxed way (alone). I'd say finding a project with a good scope that aligns with your goals is pretty important.

I think the speed is mainly a result of working as a web developer. I've worked in agencies a ton before, which was very autonomous work, so the transition to building projects alone wasn't that big for me.

Tech stack can vary widely and I think the challenge should dictate the tech. I like using Laravel, Vue, React, Vanilla JS, Next and buth Ummm and Allround are based on Next.js. Depending on the project though, I'd say go with whatever works best fr you and fits the product long-term.

Oh that's a tough one for me!

I'm not very good at marketing and still learning a lot there, so my customer acquisition skills aren't great eaither. I think being a developer, it's so hard to grasp that we could use the same tech stack every time but the same is not true for marketing / pricing / customer care etc. on each project.

I generally like to attract customers instead of being very active about acquisition. Mainly because my products don't justify doing it, as the monthly price is rather low. That's why I'm deeply in love with SEO and enjoy building in public. Both are great strategies but also definitely not suitable for every project. That being said, the level of how "hands on" onboarding and acquisition will be, definitely plays into my thinking when choosing a project in the first place.

What's working right now for Ummm is building in public – Twitter is a big channel – and it recently made the top 10 on hackernews, which lead to a lot of backlinks, some articles being written about it, lists including it as a tool etc.

Allround is purely focussed on content, so the number one source of readers there is Google, followed by Bing and Twitter. However that makes sense, because it's really just content and not a real product (yet).

I'm currently working Wed-Fri and take the rest of the week off. I'm working with two bootstrapped founders during that time and it's pretty awesome! I initially proposed to have these fixed days and everybody liked the idea. Mainly because it makes planning and async work a lot easier, eg. if something needs to be reviewed, they know there's a week time before I need an answer.

Then for my own projects it's not that set in stone. I enjoy being able to shift things around as stuff comes up in my life. In general though, I try working Mo + Tue, when my partner is also out for work :)

Yep that's a tough one and it can vary widely based on sooo many factors! In fact I probably don't have "the right answer" to that.

If you're not trying to create a whole new category (you probably shouldn't try that) and there are competitors with clearly proven demand, I'd say it shouldn't take too long to get first customers. If your product is differentiated enough and has clear advantages, you should be able to grab a part of the market. I'd say double down on those first customers and make them happy, get to know them, ask questions etc. and improve the product together with them.

Often a lot of that also depends on your pre-existing audience and how well the product fits in with that. Another factor can be how long it takes to build the product to a usable stage (scope mentioned in some other comments). The longer you need to get to a good MVP, the longer you need to be prepared to wait for first customers.

I'd also say, if you're feeling very stuck and nothing seems to work, there needs to be a point where you decide to let go of a project. Maybe see if there's a different angle and if you can pivot, but if there isn't, it might be wise to move on.

"Don't fall in love with your project" 😅

Edit: Forgot to answer part of your question, haha.
I built one product with the intention of making money before Playgroup (the first one that made money). Playgroup however had a pivot pretty early on. I've also built countless small things that never saw the light of day before that.

Sure thing! One of them was Playgroup (playgroup.community) a modern take on forum software. It was definitely a more ambitious project, but still not crazy in scope. However there were certain challenges because of the amount of people and content that are associated with a single forum. This can obviosuly get you into scaling troubles rather quickly.

The other one was called Tinylog, a mix of blog and newsletter, all static pages. The goal was to help with distribution, simliar to how Medium works. That was a pretty good scope imo. because you can build it in stages.

I think regardless of what the project is about, it's a good idea to have certain milestones, where a v1 can work without all the features being there. For Tinylog that was first building out the blogging functionality and immediately onboarding people. Then building out the newsletter functionality while first users started using it.

Now with Ummm, the scope is pretty ideal. It's almost too small – do one thing and do it well – and I'm trying to really nail the functionality that is already there before extending it much further.

Whew, that's not an easy question.
Depending on your skillset (if your a dev) I'd say start by finding a group of people (niche) you'd like to build for, find a problem worth solving among that group and get to building. While building, try getting in touch with many people of that group and try setting up demos or win them over as beta testers.

If you're not technical I probably don't have any good answers 😅
I can however recommend a couple of books that will help either way.
Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl is a very good book to get started, I liked Start Small Stay Small by Rob Walling and The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

While all of them are worth reading, I'd say it's a good idea to have a strong bias for action and not get caught in a cycle of purely theoretical learning. Get your hands dirty. Accept that your first attempt might not be the great business you want, but teach you more than you'd think.

Yeah it was prett cool, being able to do that :)
When it comes to distribution, I've had a lot of luck with building in public and being active in communities on Slack or Telegram etc. Also sharing on Reddit and other suitable platforms often led to the products being picked up by thrid parties in articles and such. I'd say big one time spikes on Hackernews or Producthunt can also help start a little flywheel and generate more backlinks and a steady flow of inbound traffic, which hopefully leads to conversions.

I was lucky enough to be able to reduce hours at my day-job over th years. First I asked to work one day less and after a year I was able to get a second day off, basically taking less payments during that time, while also ramping up the freelance work in year two. That allowed me to keep sane and move at my own pace. I'd also say don't go crazy and try pushing out a product at all cost, we all have lives to live :)

I'm a fast builder, so Tinlog, allround and Ummm all took me around 2 months to get to a usable state. That's also when I started onboarding dirst customers, usually building up a waitlist during that time. Playgroup took six to eight months, because the scope was bigger and I had a little pivot in between. It was definitely harder to get off the ground.

Love the question. I usually try to imagine what the product will look like three years after the first line of code. Some considerations might be whether it needs to store giant amounts of data, read/write heavy or how much I'll need to iterate on the UI front, so I might want to be able to move quickly there.

Those considerations usually help decide which DB or UI library to choose and can help me land on a stack in the wider sense. On the other hand I think it's smart to stick with tech you know and not learn (too much) new stuff while building out the product. We usually underestimate how far "boring / old tech" can get us and that nothing is really set in stone. Even if we hit points where something breaks, we can usually switch over to another DB or hosting provider etc. with less work than we think.

As far as integral parts of an application are concerned, like billing or transactional emails, I'd say always rely on something battle-tested. It's almost never worth building those on your own and they're usually mission critical, so I don't want to worry about them :)

Both of the ones mentioned here have grown pretty organically. My biggest channel was Twitter and I was lucky enough to have some early customers through Slack communities I am a part of. I definitely think having an audience anywhere can help with starting a product, as long as it aligns thematically with that audience.

Can't disclose the actual number, as we agreed not to. I can say it was five figures and covers around a year of my living expenses :)

Great question!
Definitely not easy to come up with a number, also because it depends on so many things. There were a bunch of factors that we took into account, like already having paying customers, a niche that seemed (seems) very promising and growing, the attention the project had already gotten from outside sources and also the dev time I spent on it.

My experience is that SaaS valuation in general have gone up quite a bit, even for products that generate 'only' 500-1k MRR. Definitely checing out Microacquire if you haven't yet.

Send me a DM on Twitter with what you have in mind? :)

Oh you know I do :D
But I can't say more about that just yet. In general though, I'm pretty curious about the whole space – I enjoy the enthusiasm and advancement in technology. It's definitely still a bit like the wild west for web3 right now but it's moving insanely fast 🚀

The process was probably pretty unorthodox. I just tweeted that I'm thinking about selling them and was approached by a couple people in my DMs 😄

The sale was very quick overall and the buyer had all the docs ready, so I just needed to review them once we had settled on a price. I talked about the price finding a little further up here in the comments :)

I think Playgroup was somewhere in the middle, targeting creators initially with the option to reach out to companies at a later point. Creators are a funny category as they're usually a mix of business and consumer :)

As mentioned above, I don't think the low price points of my products justify huge outreach campaigns, ads or similar costly endeavours early on, so my efforts were mostly on increasing traffic and inbound.

Building in public has helped a lot with everything I've built. Even if you're not able to reach the target customers because they don't overlap with your audience, it helps amplify the product, so it might get listed in relevant places where your actual customers are looking.