Keeping my Web Agency VS going SaaS ?
Hi all, I rely on your experience. I am getting tired handling clients and I feel like this is getting very stressful. If I am here in IH, it's because I want to drop my web agency which is doing well in Morocco (15 employees and +$120k profit in 2019 ). After 2 years now, the company is getting bigger and I have a feeling that this is not the way I should be taking. I have no time left for myself, no time for my friends, no time for my family and my life became very stressful as dealing with dev employees is very difficult.
I wanted to ask you, if you guys think that I should stop working on demand for companies, and go instead for building micro SaaS solutions as this is less stressful and that I could still make a living out of it ? I have a feeling that I should go indie now, and that this can be the best the decision I could make in my life knowing that I am still not married.
Mates, I want to start building SaaS myself. But I don't know what's the best option to go for with my web agency. Tell me please, based on your experience, if it is better to drop it all, to lower the pace and work only with 2 or 3 employees or maybe just keep it growing ? Idk but I have a feeling that it is very difficult to have a side project SaaS when you have a web agency.
This means a lot to me, and obviously to many other half indies who are struggling.
The stress with SaaS won’t be lower but different. As @volkandkaya said, increase the price, decrease the number of clients. You can delegate more, find one of the employees who you trust and give them COO or similar responsibility, and let them deal with the clients day by day. You can also try to sell the agency. Do not go full time to your SaaS until it can sustain your current lifestyle or a bit less. But your feeling is right; it is difficult but not impossible to build SaaS while you run an agency. It requires proper planning, reorg, years of work.
Thanks @szferi !! Very Handful.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
Do you an idea for a SaaS? Have you validated it?
If not I would focus on your agency, "fire your worst customers" and increase prices. That will reduce stress a lot. After that start looking into SaaS and use profits from the agency to run it.
From what I have read best to split the teams completely and have one work on agency work and the other on SaaS.
Keep us updated :)
Thanks @volkandkaya this is what I will be doing in 2020.
The saas market is only going to become more crowded imo. I think the value of service is only going to go higher as a result. Because it doesn't scale well. Too many wanna be millionaire are jumping on the saas vagon. What is left is customers left by themselves to do the heavy lifting. I suggest increasing your price and work with decent clients.
@jeandelarue2002 Looking at it the same way when you say that many people are leaving the web agency business. I am going to follow what @szferi and @volkandkaya said, 2 separate teams and the one for clients is going to scale to higher pricing lists.
I am in the same situation. My dev agency is a bit smaller but I feel the same as you. It’s nice, you learn a lot. But the problem of an agency is that in order to scale you need to hire more people, which is not so easy in de dev space as there is a lot of competitive employers.
My strategy right now is to partner up with people I trust and have a complementary skill set and knowledge in a specific industry. And start building small solutions. I split the cost with the person who wants to partner up, so they have to be committed as well. And usually they are very motivated because it’s an opportunity for them as well to create their company. It also allows you to still focus on your agency, as it’s just another project you deal with.
My main focus is to keep running the agency, delegate more and invest the money I earn, to build solutions. In the next year I want to see which works best and then invest more time in those projects.
I would not recommend to stop completely, as it’s a working business which brings you cash that you can use to build new businesses.
Hey @edge90 I am just worried we'd be leaving money on the table when it comes to SaaS you know. But again, yepp partnership is a good way to go if the partner is a good project manager.
Any micro-saas ideas to help him keep up with his agency? I'm sure there is something here.
@yaroslawbagriy I really hope there is one !!!!
I run a small agency which is about the same size or a bit larger (we’re primarily technical marketing) and I share your exhaustion that revolves around client work.
However I’m going to suggest that it will be difficult to see as much revenue as you get now from a SaaS. That’s the entire reason I’m sticking with it. I know we couldn’t make a SaaS good enough to sustain this sort of income.
Have you considered selling your agency? That might net you enough money to live for a long time (especially in Morocco).
@gilgildner I don't believe it is mature enough to be sold. Although, I think I am going to go for 2 separated teams, one dedicated to SaaS and the other one to clients. Thanks man for trying to brainstorm with us. Clients can only be so frustrating.
Hey Youssef,
I'm having a very similar situation, but my company is a little bigger.
Software development as a service is a very competitive industry and I'm glad to learn that you did really well in 2019 (having a larger company we had less pure profit in 2019). For me it seems like you are trying to take on too much. What I did is hired more people to delegate my obligations as CEO so my company is able to run w/o me at all (seems like that's why my company had less profit in 2019). This way I managed to free up to 30 hours/week of my own time to work on my ideas.
If your company brings you money, why drop it? Keep it but try to get out of it, seems like you have resources for that. I wouldn't want to close my company just because I gathered 25 talented and experienced individuals under one roof, they are a huge intellectual resource that I can use building my own products as soon as I validate them.
I was asking the same question as you do for 2 years. I run a web & mobile dev company but I wanted to do my own product for the whole time. I tried everything...I focused on the clients' projects for a while trying to save some money and then turn to own product or spending 50% time for clients and the rest on the product. Neither of these options works for me. Maybe, because I am a solo founder and I was not able to focus on 2 things at the same time. When I focused more on the product the dev agency part of the company started to crumble.
In the end, I decided to sell the dev agency and going all-in on my own product. It was a very hard decision but I felt it is the only way for me. So here I am, starting from scratch again, looking forward to the 2020 startup journey to begin.
Thats EXACTLY where I am at... Solo Founder, ran an agency for around 8 years. Few years been struggling with the same decision and I finally decided to go all in on the product just couple of weeks ago. Very very hard decision but a fresh new beginning.
[Just joined Indiehackers to reply to this comment as it related so much]
Thank you :) btw we just launched a new private community of founders where we help each other and push our project forward. You can join here.
Hey @ctw do you recommend giving bounties for on time project delivery success ? Like double the salaries of month spent on the projects. I don’t want to be handling many poeple as this will tend to become risky.
@yamakrane No. It won't work in the long term. I would suggest rewarding based on some special achievements. However, on-time project delivery should be a standard, not something extraordinary.
You can also say you will share x% of the company profit with employees yearly/quadruply.
Anyway, you should probably focus on outsourcing everything you can from project management through sales to development. If you will be successful in that and the company stays cashflow positive, you can move on. That's what I tried to do too but I was unable to find the right people willing to take the responsibility.
@ctw I just followed you man ! Best feedback mate ! Thanks a lot for sharing. I am sure you will be making more money building SaaS yourself. Managing employees or maybe developers is just a nightmare !!!
Ask yourself: "What's stressing me out about running the Web Agency?"
If you can understand the problems that cause this stress then discover or create solutions. You may be able to develop software to help with the stress or even get rid of it entirely this would be a good gateway into SaaS!
@ordinaryoliver that simple ! Sometimes you think things are really difficult to solve when they may be very simple actually. You are right. I think I stress out because I don't spend more money on HR.
Awesome so Human Resources is stressing you out - how can we fix that?
Are there other aspects that stress you out? Or things that could be optimized like managaing clients or workload?
Is the quality that you expect higher than that of your clients?
Could you increase production by having premade templates or find the main bottlenecks and work on fixing them.
If you can't keep developers use that to your advantage - have a program where developers with little to no experiance work under the wing of experienced devs for cheap
Look into(if you haven't already) Asana, Monday or even sales force project management software might be a good alternative to a project manager
Thank you so much for helping out @ordinaryoliver
Yes