Let my product be your Saas infrastructure so you can focus on your product
I have been working on a Proof of Concept for what started off as an 'Engineering Department As a Service' since about March. That is still the grand vision but as the months have passed the concept and target market have been refined slowly but surely to something that feels achievable in a bootstrap manner and then scaled into the grander vision.
The core concept is that the advent of distributed version control, containerization and distributed version control have resulted in thousands of companies paying thousands of specialists to independently design and implement what is fundamentally the same Software Development Deployment Pipeline.
Tangentially, in my current job I was responsible for a team of 30 Software Engineers when the company acquired 3 other Saas companies and merged the teams. I was responsible for on boarding these 3 new geographically separated engineering teams and during that phase we would describe what our Devops guru, lets call him Newton, had put in place for our engineers and without fail each companies engineering team said 'we wish we had a Newton here'
So I bought newton.dev and my thesis is that I can create a product which will give indie hackers, startups, small to medium sized Saas companies and Software Development shops, a state of the art infrastructure, deployment pipeline, monitoring and alerting, communication and planning tools, set up and running on the cloud of their choice, monitored by newton 24/7, in about a day without ever having to invest in hiring their own Infrastructure or Devops specialists.
Your Saas Infrastructure defined, deployed and managed in about a day.
Besides hammering away creating this POC / MVP what else should I be doing and thinking about?
Distribution. How do you plan on reaching those users? It looks like your product is targeted towards bigger companies which are generally harder to reach than smaller-sized companies. According to my research (see Nathan Latka's interviews, a lot of the companies he interviews target bigger companies), doing sales (outreach) works as an acquisition channel for these companies.
Yes absolutely, good question!
So earlier on in the year that was exactly my thinking, I have to target funded startups or profitable software businesses to get started. The sales effort of this market seemed very intimidating to me although I did have some interest from my limited network.
While those are still the target in the medium term I have come to believe there might be a stepping stone market to help me get some revenue without losing focus on the larger vision.
One part of that stepping stone would certainly be the Indie Hacker market, pre launch pre funding Saas and maybe even what I might call 'enthusiasts'.
I think I can create somewhat of a Platform as a Service specifically geared towards these people and their goals ie zero thought cycles wasted thinking about how to deploy a proof of concept to show to potential investors or to win that first customer, zero effort wasted thinking about DNS, networking and firewall rules etc plus 1 click spin up and spin down of your POC / Dev Environment so you can save all the pennies you need to and finally one click migration from one cloud to another so that you can avail of all the startup free credits each offers.
I am wondering if achieving the above, launching to this smaller market(maybe trying to get on appsumo) with a consumer pricing model, say $30-50/month but being open that the goal is grow the product to serve the established revenue generating companies (they can grow with us) and offering a lifetime subscription for say $499 might be a path to revenue that will let me work on this full time while avoiding the intimidating prospect of pitching CTOs and VPE's as a solo part time bootstrapper.
Mark, can we chat? Add me on LinkedIn. I work for Tachus.