I quit a 400K$ salary job, after 4 months, I release my own saas product
This is my little story , want to share it with the community and learn from each other.
I worked at a big company before as a product manager. After 4 years I understand that I need to do something on my own, not because I want to be an entrepreneur, the main reason is that I understand what is the most valuable thing to me. Which is to deliver happiness to users through my product. User satisfaction is the best feedback to me as a product designer.
So I decided to quit my job and started a little project. It's a very tough decision to make, but I am happy with what we achieved after 4 months of day and night work. The product is available for beta testing -> https://doodleboard.pro .
It's just a little milestone for me, There are still many problems need to be solved. Such as how to get beta users? How to validate PMF? How to grow? How to operate community? I truly understand these problems don't have standard solutions. But I believe more communication between founders can help each other. So I want to connect more founders at IndieHacker. So welcome to DM me and AMA, my links:
- My twitter: https://twitter.com/MarcChen6174
- My product: https://doodleboard.pro
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chen-xuejia-b7270a216/
Some clarifications:
- I was a senior frontend developer before last job. And keep a good coding habit these years.
- I have 2 long-term partners to cooperate with. (So not just me to do this work in 4 months) . Before I leave the job, I already done a lot of product design job.
I Built Check Analytic Because Privacy Turned Analytics into a Liability! 🔥
I Built Check Analytic Because Privacy Turned Analytics into a Liability! 🔥
Your post says you quit your job 4 months before. But, your last ProductHunt launch of another product says you have been working on it for 3 years with your team.
Also looks like the domain is registered in China? How does one make $400k in China as a PM!!!
https://whois.domaintools.com/doodleboard.pro
Or you are actually a genius, who left the company you started after working on it for 3 years, then got a job in a tech company as PM, started making $400k , left the job after a few months, moved to China and then launched another product by yourselves this time without your team in 3 months! Incredible given it took you 3 years to build innos with a team but only 4 months for building this as solo dev.
Yeah i'm sus on the quit $400K job to build a startup. Purely clickbait title, OP doesn't have anything to back this up. Not even linkedin or anything
Hey @truthteller, looks like you've do a lot of work.
For question 1: I worked at last company for 4+ years, the last 2 years at Innos. And I've said Innos will not gonna operation (This is why I quit the job)
For question 2: The company is tiktok, and I join the company at 2017 as pm lead, If you do more work, you can understand the salary is reasonable. (Plus: this is the average salary for leader in most top tech company in China. It's 2023 four days later :-] )
Innos is way more complicate than DoodleBoard. If you compare deeper of both products.
Can you be a bit more clear?
Hell yeah! Looks amazing. Gonna throw this your way in case you missed it: https://excalidraw.com/
Excalidraw + Obsidian = ❤❤❤
What would you say is the killer feature of Obsidian? I've tried it out and can't find enough activation energy to convert from Notion to Obsidian
well, there are several things I love in Obsidian:
have to say thogh, I have not converted my older notes from trello, onenote, notion and evernote to Obsidian ) And I don't think I'll ever have to - some are way too old to bother, some can still be accessed in their original place, so I move them to O only when am working with them
Yes, similar to Excalidraw, but more than Excalidraw , with more natural Doodle Styles. Many handcraft shapes, templates...
Liked this tool. It looks simpler and more natural than others
Why not just use Figma?
Try to create something like DoodleBoard with Figma. You will understand it.
Figma is a tool for UI design. Figjam would be closer to compare.
Doodleboard provides more doodle-style elements that other products don't. They make your whiteboard more funny and good-looking.
This is a very nice tool and I like the Ui
How that is a pretty big salary for a PM even in a big corporation... which markets you worked in before starting your own business?
Hey, after working in big tech for 4 years. What was the pivotal moment that made you switch?
I can control my own business, but can't control my job
Just checked doodleboard. I needed something like this for a long time;)
Thanks for sharing
Cool, thanks for the feedback
Hi Marc. Maybe you should remove those console logs for apollo query and it's results. Generally not best practice to have them in production.
Excelent product
cool product and design，I love the doodles and templates
Really love the design of the initial build out
It looks really beautiful.
Thanks @dejicranium
Congratulations! I wish you all the best with your product. Can you post us your LinkedIn profile here? With a 400k job you definitely have one.
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Thanks @Primer. In China most of us don't have Linkedin account. I do have one but never used it before. https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-chen-b7270a216/
Congratulations for your new condition
Thank you @7seo
congrats! Looking forward to seeing your progress
Thanks @myriem
Congrat! I planning to do the same in 2023, just transitioning my CTO job & start hacking :)
Cool, just do it :-)
Your idea for waiting list & comming Premium tier is so unique, learnt from that.
Guess, look like my MVP, are you working on payment gateway integration, right?
Yes, working on the payment integration with stripe on the next iteration.
On beside of Stripe, please try Paddle.com - as it provided toolsets for SaaS. I do both. I'm stuck with their holiday reason, everything seems super slow these days :((
Get it, I will check it out.
This is extremely impressive!
Mind if I add this to the running list of ~3k tools I've compiled and offer to people for free through Gumroad?
https://mchap.gumroad.com/l/toolsly
That will also be helpful for me
Cool. Just added. Good luck!
Love this. It's like a simplified Lucid Chart. I've always found Lucid clunky and hard to work with. This is more approachable and easier to use.
Thanks, very happy to hear that
Interesting story!
I'm curious about what problems doodleboard solves though. There's plenty of other options like Canva or Lucid chart.
Anyways, followed you on twitter and curious to see your story, especially for someone of your caliber who has skills in product management.
If you're interested, I'm on twitter as well: https://twitter.com/TheRealEtch
But my startup is in the AI space (we offer AI as a service by hosting AI models on the cloud and offering them to developers via API).
Your biz model is 2B, you got a big team? AI model as a service is hot. I think it will very tough to compete big guys. So very curious about why you choose this direction.
Def hard to compete, biggest one right now is OpenAI, but there doesn't seem to be any other ones specializing in AI as a service.
Are you aware of any other big guys other than OpenAI?
I'd also like to clarify we do NOT develop any AIs ourselves like OpenAI lol. That would definitely be an undertaking!
We just find open source AI models that ppl can't run locally due to RAM requirements and host them on the cloud for API use. This is much simpler, so our 3 person team should be able to manage.
Our main advantage to OpenAI would be the variety of AIs we'll offer (there's lots of different open source models) + less restrictive use (open source models are usually very loose their restrictions).
The first API we plan to release is for stable diffusion. OpenAI does have DALLE, but it's much more expensive and has a strict content filter.
You can check out our site here btw: https://evoke-app.com/
Still WIP, but launching soon!
I will try the product if you launched let me know :-)
Thanks! I see you've followed me on twitter so you can stay tuned there. But I'll definitely post here as well.
From your description, I think https://huggingface.co/ is very close, and it already have 11.5M MAU (from similar web).
Yep, I am aware of huggingface. However, huggingface's API is much more expensive and their AIs are geared more towards a ML technical audience, whereas we plan to be more user friendly to programmers without knowledge in AI.
Overall, HF is much broader and their focus is less their API and moreso having others privately host their own models and run them, which takes much more effort to deploy vs just using an API.
Understood. Price model and more niche area.
In my point of view, whiteboard is a more horizontal product. (very simple, easy to understand value. ) It's just like an excel 20 years ago. Yes, there are already many product. But I think the niche I found is doodle, I believe doodle is essential for whiteboard but not solved well. This is my hypo.
Oh, I see, so ease of use + whiteboard? Just feels like Canva already has that down.
But I would say it's all in the execution. If you can differentiate yourselves more in the future despite starting out kinda similar, it can definitely be different from canva.
Checkout the template of DoodleBoard and compare to Miro, you will find every detail is different.
And yes, execution is also very important.
Checked it out, and there's definitely a different UI!
Super cool! Want to find a job with 400K$ salary.
Dude, you've found a better job.
Good luck!
Thanks @bohdan_v
congratulations 👍
Thanks @netoff
The product looks great.
Hope you all the best
Thank you @kiennt2288
Thanks for sharing
Cool product Marc!
All the best on your journey :)
Hey Marc, I'm Naufal the founder of magicboard.io and aldarion.io
You built the product from scratch? or you have someone built for you
and what's the tech stack if you dont mind?
He is bluffing. No way he built this alone in a span of 3 months. See my comment in main thread.
Actually I started the project earlier than I quit the job. But most of the work is done in last 4 months.
The Tech Stack:
Thanks for sharing, have you watched this video by Ycombinator, its very useful for an MVP phase. I've been using the strats for both of my startups
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1iF1c8w5Lg&t=907s&ab_channel=YCombinator
and you can read cold start problem also by Andrew chen
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Hey Marc,
I'm Faruk, the founder of MonitUp.com.
I hope you get where you want in your product.
I looked at your product a little bit, it's an interesting product, congratulations.
I learned a lot from this community, I would like to help you as much as I can.
We founders have the following problems, respectively:
1- Creating the MVP.
2- Someone's use and feedback.
3- Product and Market fit.
4- Reaching the right target audience with low cost.
I see you passed item number one.
For item number four, I suggest you start on the one hand because it takes some time. Create a blog page on your website and find your keywords then start blogging on the topic. The earlier you start working on SEO, the better. SEO will provide you with the most accurate target audience at a cost of $0. Even with advertising, sometimes you can't reach this audience:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-happens-if-you-advertise-your-startup-for-600-in-2-days-eb01656bd1
for the second trick I can suggest you AppSumo:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-have-i-learned-so-far-from-my-appsumo-launch-caedec7d7f
Then maybe you have problems like this:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/daily-visitors-are-700-but-interaction-is-0-fd88f09cfa
The third number will already be in time.
Don't forget to let us know to celebrate this post after a long war :) https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-finally-got-my-first-paying-subscription-customer-d4612172f0
Super super thanks @Faruk_durak, these links help a lot. I will check them out one by one.
Great idea Marc!
Good luck on your new journey.
Thx @ozenc
Looks incredible, all the best for upcoming journey.
Yep, looking forward and keep move on
Wow, bold move!
The Doodle board looks incredible, I hope it works out for you!
Thx @mav
Looks slick! Thanks for sharing with the community 👍
Happy to hear that. Thanks.
Looks amazing! I'm a sucker for illustration-based front-end development and this is just... wow 😁
Sent over a follow on Twitter! Can't wait to see this grow
Thanks HarryChoi, so you are also making a graphic-based app?
Looks great!
You might want to remove the semicolon in your twitter URL as it returns 404 :)
Thank you @excentio, fixed it
Hey, your website looks great, and the niche picking and the awareness of the need to validate this hypothesis is awesome.
Good luck!
Thx Akd :-)
That’s so inspiring!
Congratulations with the brave decision and the product looks cool!
How do you plan to compete with the large competitor’s like Miro, Figma etc?
Asking out of curiosity, since me and my friend are working on a Micro-SaaS and that is a question we ask ourself.
Thanks for the reply. DoodleBoard pick a very small need(Which I think is critical) as an entry point. I notice many tech guys like handwritten style diagrams. (shown in articles, twitters, books) . I ask many people, they all like these styles.
I think maybe some diagrams should naturally be rough style. Miro, Figma can't create such diagrams in a usual way.
So I think DoodleBoard has unique product value, enable people easily to express information in a more natural way(handy style).
Awesome! Sounds great!
If you need early adopters, let me know. I work as a Design Lead (Focused on UX/UI), so i know How much value it brings to receive feedback.
I can test it for my own Micro-SaaS idea and let you know what worked for me and maybe some ideas to how it potentially could be improved.
Of course, only if you are interested 💪
Best thing I've heard today, it will be so great to get your further feedbacks.
I’m glad to head that! Can we connect somewhere? I’m fairly new to this site, but would be awesome to network, give feedback and share ideas 💪
How about Twitter DM?
Sure thing!
@Brandt_Concept
As a micro-saas, it's important to have such unique value. For now, I still need to validate this hypothesis.
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