Who went from a side-project to a full-time activity?
Who among you has gone from a side-project to a full-time, successful and profitable business in SaaS?
I'd like to know what were your best practices to stop an activity in order to develop another one (like a side-project one)
- What were the triggers?
- How much risk did you take and measure?
- Could this be a hindrance for investors & VCs? If so, why?
We've developed our Cards micro-learning SaaS platform between 2018 and 2019. The market wasn't yet ready for. Most companies were looking for mobile-learning app & e-learning LMS.
Today we see the opposite effect: companies are no longer looking for a training administration and management platform, but rather an effective and accessible training experience & solution.
In 2018, our SaaS was perceived as a side-project of our business and not as a solution related to the effectiveness of training (memorization, engagement, freedom of access,...)
Market's CAGR and actuals customers show us that we were right to continue developing our SaaS platform. It also showed us the value of not jumping too early into a non-rewarding side-project when the market was not fully ready and that the education of our leads and customers still needed to be deepened on the vast subject of micro-learning.
If you have any advice/feedback or similar experiences to share, I'm interested and curious to see how everyone is doing?
I went from side-project to full-time to side-project to nothing. Twice. I built an API product (analytics product) for a large-scale social platform, and flying along with the hype of it all, things took off incredibly fast. At some point it became clear that if I would focus full-time on this, the upside potential would be huge. I did make more than at my corporate jobs (MSFT), but it didn't last all too long. About a year in, things turned sour with the API and developer relations, it became harder and harder to provide a service on top of a service that didn't want my product (and that of others) there anymore. I couldn't have scaled as fast as I did then without going full-time, but I also needed another two years for the next product to take up speed again. Luckily I was able to save money from that project and continue with one-off projects for various clients to push myself forward until the next opportunity started to become a realistic source of income again.
It can be tough, and except for the very tip of that short cycle, I always had a slight envy of those who would be paid just for showing up at work, regardless if they had a good or bad day (grass is always greener). During that tip of the cycle, however, life was pretty great.
Thanks a lot for sharing that whole story Roman! The full-time scalabity and ROI is what we seems to be all looking for, but IRL the Maslow pyramid quickly brings us back to earth.
Indeed the grass is always greener, but I find there is nothing more rewarding/relevant than working on your own ideas, projects and resources.
Thanks for sharing that!
About 8 months ago I decided to quit my job to focus 100% in bootstrapping my projects. So far I was only able to reach the 100 euros MRR. Is not an easy journey, I have been documenting my progress in my own podcast in case you are interested in learning more.
Thanks for sharing your podcast and the docs of your hard journey... I'll listen to it as soon as p.