Hi all, my name is Devan, and I am a solo developer living in Australia. I have spent a good part of my life (~30 years) as an accounting & ERP software consultant, but lately have decided to go down the web apps route and create a few SaaS apps to generate some recurring income for my business so that I can wind down the consulting side of things.
The main app I have developed is called HR Partner, and it is actually a rewrite of a Windows based HR system that we wrote about 10 years ago which did quite well. I decided to rewrite it from the ground up to be purely web based, rather than Win32.
We had a long beta period earlier in the year, and currently have around 200 user on the system who have signed up to the free tier. So far no paid subscribers, but I am looking to really push the marketing hard in order to get some income kick started.
Which is one of the main reasons for me joining up on here. Would love to talk to other bootstrappers to see how they takled the B2B marketing angle for a SaaS app. I thought that the development would be the hardest part and that the marketing would be the easier part, but I am finding the reverse is true.
I wrote every single one of the 22,000 lines of Ruby code in the app, as well as doing all the back end database management for the 80 odd tables in MySQL, and managing the DevOps infrastructure on AWS, maintaining the blog & online documentation site, status site etc.
Doesnât leave me much time for marketing, though I try and spend a lot of time on our Twitter and Facebook pages reposting interesting HR related articles that I come across.
Love to chat to some of you here and discuss tactics.
Cheers,
Devan (@dsabar)