The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch - By Yourself

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#1

I thought this would be helpful/useful/entertaining to most everyone here (yes, I’m the author): The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch - By Yourself

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#2

+100 internets for

If You Love Writing Code, You’re Going to Hate Running a SaaS Business

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#3

Great info, way to keep it engaging. As a solo indie dev who has done, and still continues to do, stuff like this:

Do not make the mistake of coding something for five to six months, putting it out there, and then finding out that no one will give you money for it.

a lot of it was very uncomfortable to read… which was good.

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#4

This is a great read and personally causing a lot of introspection right now, hindsight. The whole series will be getting shared with anyone who comes to me with a grand idea.

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#5

When they claim they got 100,000 email signups in a week (and make it look as easy as microwaving popcorn) — they’re playing you.

Very well said sir.

Building a mailing list with real people interested in whatever half-baked thing you promise to put out, and clicking on your emails when you send them, and talks to you about what is working and what isn’t - that takes sweat and blood. It also takes a lot of unsubscribes to weed out people who’re attracted to the new and shiny, but are not the audience to whom your business would provide value to.

You may have heard some “lean startup” gurus running around telling you to create a page that looks exactly like a finished marketing site, complete with screenshots, etc. and that you should “trick” people into signing up for your service to test if they’d pay for the finished product.

That’s it. Bookmarked, recommended, and followed. Please keep writing.

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#6

OMG - this just hit the front page of Hacker News!

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#7

Congrats man, #6 and rising!

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#8

Thanks! This is CRAZY!!!

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#9

A another golden nugget

building a SaaS startup is mostly a marketing optimization problem — not something that you can just code your way out of.

Remember the old BoS had an FAQ section with links to some great resources - maybe could do the same on here and add these 3 posts to it, especially useful for some new people.

#10

Congrats! I hope you withstood the storm of Hacker News visitors.

#11

Thanks!!! It’s 18 hours since the post hit. IT’S STILL GOING - it’s NUTS. Everything’s holding up so far so good though.

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#12

Any stats on how much traffic HN brought yesterday to both your medium articles, and Tamboo? The submission was in the top ten for most the afternoon.

I had a site break the HN top ten a couple years ago, brought in ~5K unique visitors.

Feel free to ignore if you’d rather not share.

#13

I’m actually working on writing something up about the whole experience complete with stats and screenshots of the traffic, social shares, number of signups, etc.

This is one of those mythical unicorns I’ve only heard of and now that I’ve gotten to fully experience it I want to show everyone else what it was like :slight_smile:

I’ll post here for all of you guys when I get it done so you can see all the details. At least to me, this was a venerable TSUNAMI of traffic.

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#14

Interested to see how that traffic affected Tamboo sign ups. I was just reading about how some content marketing strategies only result in traffic, not sign ups. Not that traffic in itself is a bad thing.

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#15

I’ve had 2 separate blogs reach top 3 on HN, and top 2 of Reddit /r/programming.

Both can bring ~25k visitors a day.

All of which are useless, as none of them are sticky. From 25k visitors, I got maybe 100 sign ups for my email.

Getting to top of HN / Reddit is pretty much a waste of time, unless it’s in a special subreddit, like /r/python (then you get fewer but more sticky visitors).

#16

Getting to top of HN / Reddit is pretty much a waste of time

I think that’s subjective. In my case, I was launching a new service, and HN was the only place the announcement got any traction. The traffic spike took my unique visitor count from 0 to 50 per day average for the next couple of months (and traffic slowly increased later, but that was mostly due to improving the service and promoting elsewhere).

I agree that the most of the traffic from getting to the top of HN/reddit isn’t sticky, but definitely not useless.

#17

My app got over $15k in purchases and a very long “tail” of word of mouth by getting 400+ points on HN.

In comparison ProductHunt front page brought about $3k. Without the HN love the launch would be quite sad.

1 Like