My SaaS is a 1:1 meeting note-taking web app: <a href="https://www.oneononemeeting.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.oneononemeeting.com</a><p>My first paying customer came from a launch post on Reddit (after ~8 months of building it). Talking to her, I realized that her use case was not what I imagined (manage 1:1 meetings notes with their team) but to document the tasks of a particular employee that she wanted to fire. She complimented my app a lot and requested relevant and interesting features. But, unsurprisingly, canceled her subscription after 3 months, after having fired said employee.<p>My second paying customer was a colleague from my day-job employer (the SaaS is a side-project). I offered an unlimited free trial for all my colleagues here, expecting to sell an enterprise plan to the company. Other 3 managers in the company use it. But he insisted that he wanted to pay to be able to act as a real customer, demand features, etc.<p>He loves the product and still uses it a lot, but I redesigned the free plan to be even more generous and start feeling bad that he was paying it. The new free plan allows up to 3 managers per company with unlimited features. So I canceled his subscriptions and refunded the last month (he still uses the product). Now I have a meeting with the company's VP of HR to try to sell the enterprise plan.
We are not a SaaS product but a productized service - <a href="http://draftss.com" rel="nofollow">http://draftss.com</a> where we crossed $50,000+ in revenue till date.<p>We started 11 months ago as a side project and validated if there was a requirement for such a service. We got our initial customers by launching ourselves on different communities. We launched ourselves on Reddit, IH, HackerNews where we got our first 10 customers. Some of these initial customers wanted to try a smaller package before moving on with the superior ones. Till date we are still retaining some of these customers.<p>Initially, we assumed it was the price point that let the customers subscribe for our product. But after speaking to our customers, we came to an understanding that most of our customers were founders who did not have the resources to hire a full-time graphic designer. The best part they liked about our service was designing on the go and video conferencing discussions.
My friend owns a cosmetic clinic and he needed an easy way to manage his signage. I built a small web platform over the weekend so he could do that. He started paying right away ($7/month). There are other businesses using it right now, not a big business but completely automated!
I worked in a startup that made HR and recruitment software as SaaS. We really had to prove that our product really was on par or better than what people already had, sometimes going through great lengths offering 6months free trial periods, rushing new features just to keep one customer etc. It was hell, but in the end it turned out okay when we got some brand names and government contracts. The product price was based on amount of users, jobpostings etc and was free for the absolute lowest tier.