Ask HN: Is it possible for a non-programmer to bootstrap a SaaS business alone?

It&#x27;s not possible unless you have enough money to pay a good developer salary. I&#x27;ve been a part of one once, and the only reason I dealt with the clueless founders was because they paid me better than a regular coding job.<p>So yeah, it&#x27;s possible, if you&#x27;re rich or can get funding before you&#x27;ve got a product.<p>I&#x27;ve also been approached by countless guys asking me to work on their startup for free or something like 10% equity. Bitch please. I&#x27;ve been a consultant and run all sides of a business, what could you possibly bring to the table besides a nebulous and nearly worthless idea?<p>To those guys I&#x27;ve started asking for 60% equity and they usually walk away as if it was an insult.<p>Let me be clear about it. You can run a business with engineers alone and write software. Even one single engineer can run his own software business. If was running a start-up that makes software with two founders do I want one of them to make 0% of the product?

Absolutely.<p>I contracted for a person who built a small but very profitable SaaS app using contractors.<p>There are some caveats though. The person has a smattering of technical knowledge which prevented him from being completely taken advantage of by contractors. And he was an effective manager (a rarity to be sure). And he knew exactly what he wanted and stayed on top of details of how it was implemented. Although not a necessarily a &quot;programmer&quot; he also knew enough about using Git to review&#x2F;merge changes. And perhaps most importantly he had the financial backing to complete the project.<p>I&#x27;ve also worked for other people who didn&#x27;t have these qualities but figured they&#x27;d just hire some people to build some stuff without keeping on top of it or in many cases having a clear vision of what they wanted. Predictably these projects didn&#x27;t turn out well for them.<p>But yes, it is possible. I&#x27;ve seen it.

I&#x27;m in the process of bootstrapping a SaaS. I&#x27;ll say it&#x27;s absolutely possible, or more precisely, it has equal chance as the programmer going it alone has. The simple reason being that the product is only a tiny piece of the puzzle.<p>I find the opposite question equally as valid. Why is it assumed that a programmer can bootstrap a successful SaaS alone?<p>To build an application, you need someone who can identify an opportunity (product market fit.... and that&#x27;s harder than most would assume). Of course even if you have something customers want, you still often need to help them want it... so you need a marketing&#x2F;sales guy.<p>Implementation is the last piece of the puzzle. I think these are completely different skill sets, and a successful company 90% of the time needs 2 or more people to pull it off.

It is freakishly hard to build a successful SAAS if you have funding and a solid team. Doing it alone as a solo non-programmer has got to feel like trying to drink the ocean.<p>I&#x27;ve never been able to figure out how non-programmers can sift through mounds of freelancers to find a good developer. And, even if they find good developers, I have no idea how they manage to motivate and retain them.<p>I&#x27;d love to read some stories from successful solo non-programmers. If anyone has some links, please share...

Just learn to program, every minute that you spend futzing around trying to find developers who&#x27;ll do it for free or little money is one minute further away from you have the development skills to write your own product.

After reading the comments, no one asked about &quot;which&quot;SaaS business model. Yes it is <i>extremely</i> possible to bootstrap a SaaS business alone depending on which model. Example: help a reporter out that peter shankman grew into a Monster of a SaaS business.<p>Another example? GroupOn. Was a email newsletter first.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a group of guys go sign up for Wordpress and were generating $2,000&#x2F;month themselves for a kickstarter-like concept by using plugins. Not all SaaS businesses require a programmer, especially these days.<p>Will certain models require a programmer at some point? Maybe. Maybe someone just wants to build 10 SaaS newsletter sites that all generate $1,000&#x2F;month each... $10kMRR in total with no need to hire a programmer.

It depends entirely on the SAAS. A non-programmer friend of mine paid peanuts to an off-shore programmer to build an über simple slack-clone with Firebase + Angular + Phonegap. He has two paying customers so far. Will this scale? Probably not but if he reaches 20 customers he&#x27;ll have the money for the rockstars.<p>This friend is a sales ninja, the tech is not an obstacle for him.

I always tell non-tech people that if you have an idea, and expect a developer to code it for equity, you NEED to bring purchase orders to the table first.<p>[0] Obviously there are exceptions for instance if you have deep industry experience and contacts(with buying authority) but these people usually also have the money to pay a developer to implement their idea.

If the guy has to &#x27;hire freelancers&#x27; to implement the actual product, then 99 out of a 100 cases of this, he is not actually doing it alone. He is just discounting the contributions of core members of his team that are being poorly compensated.<p>If it were the case that this was normally a group of freelancers making a killing, charging high consulting rates, it would be different. But almost in all cases they are using &#x27;freelance developers&#x27; because they cannot afford to pay market rates in the US and can&#x27;t afford benefits. Even in those other countries, there is a global economy. Those developers might be doing OK, but they are not getting wealthy.<p>If you try to do it as if the developers are separate and not a core part of the team, that can&#x27;t work either. Either you acknowledge how critical they are to your business or you just take advantage of them and hope they don&#x27;t find something better and your business doesn&#x27;t fall apart.

Perhaps by possible, but probably not advisable. Consider the obvious alternatives:<p>(1) having a technical cofounder, or<p>(2) raising money instead of bootstrapping.<p>Either of these alternatives will take time — to find the cofounder or the funders — but this is nothing compared with how much slower you&#x27;ll move if you&#x27;re bootstrapping and don&#x27;t have a pot of cash to fund development with.<p>And the better your idea is, the easier it will be to find suitable cofounders or funders. So if you find these two tasks to be difficult, this tends to indicate that the underlying idea is not as strong.<p>My background: I am a non-technical founder of a software startup that has been mostly bootstrapped and mostly solo. My path was made possible&#x2F;easier by the fact that I have savings from having been a corporate lawyer, and by my wife&#x27;s stable&#x2F;good job. Without both of these things, launching a startup would have been even harder.

I think it&#x27;s theoretically possible, if you have enough money or are persuasive enough, to bootstrap a SaaS company using some combination of contractors, friends, cofounders and employees. However it&#x27;s really them that&#x27;s bootstrapping the company, not you. However, the more likely outcome, and hopefully the one that the author is headed for, is that by building your company you cease to be a non-programmer and become a programmer. The author already seems far enough down that path that I think he&#x27;s kind of shortchanging himself with the moniker.<p>There&#x27;s really no hidden secret here, just build if you don&#x27;t know how learn. It&#x27;s the best way to learn and the only way to build. No one knows how to build something before they do it.

I (developer) chatted with a water quality consultant during a plane flight. Consultant mentioned the CRM for his niche business sucked. He asked if I&#x27;d be interested in building a CRM for no money upfront, instead making money later (a percentage of his business I could sell, a license fee, profit sharing, whatever). I realized in that moment once the app was built, I wouldn&#x27;t need him at all, and that I could sell it (let&#x27;s assume it&#x27;d be a valuable product) to all of his competitors. Either he wins, or I win, but there wasn&#x27;t​ a scenario I could imagine where we both won. I explained that to him, and he was no longer interested in having me build the software for him.

This is a timely topic, because I&#x27;m currently studying the process the founder of ConvertKit (designer) took to get his SaaS off the ground with just his own $5k.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;businesses&#x2F;convertkit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;businesses&#x2F;convertkit</a> ... follow the link to his blog about the &quot;Web app challenge&quot; and he blogs about the entire process as it happened<p>Wildly successful too ... $600k MRR in just a few years <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;convertkit.baremetrics.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;convertkit.baremetrics.com&#x2F;</a>

I think Nathan Barry (ConvertKit founder) is originally a designer? He might still know how to code. I&#x27;m not sure. But his business seems successful enough. There are probably dozens of less well-known examples.<p>Edit: recent article by GrooveHQ (non-technical) founder that may be relevant: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.groovehq.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;non-technical-founder" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.groovehq.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;non-technical-founder</a>

Developers are more than code monkeys to order around, they can tell you how feasible your ideas are. If you hire efficiently, they also come with market-relevant experience.<p>So while you probably could do this in your bedroom, alone-alone, chances are you&#x27;ll end up with an insecure, unstable, broken hacky mutant that costs too much to run and includes things people don&#x27;t actually want.<p>But I would say that. I&#x27;m the guy you should hire :)

While possible, it doesn&#x27;t seem advisable. If you could bootstrap a successful SaaS as a solo nonprogrammer, you probably didn&#x27;t need to.

Sure if you have enough money to pay people to do the work. Architects don&#x27;t build houses by themselves most of the time :)<p>This is optimal if your goal is to focus entirely on sales and raising, as this effectively lets you sell while building the product, which is really hard to do when bootstrapping everything yourself.<p>Good luck!

No, that&#x27;s idiotic. You will hardly understand what you&#x27;re selling. Learn what you&#x27;re doing.

Hey Rob, it is certainly possible for you to bootstrap a successful SaaS. Without money to pay a developer, though, your best bet would be to learn to code yourself enough to put out a product to test the waters. Once that gains some traction, partnerships and funding would be easier to come by. That path would probably eat up 3-9 months given the bulk of your spare time and energy.<p>Why do you think you want to build a SaaS product though? It seems to me like you&#x27;re already putting out content pretty regularly. I would recommend moving it off medium to a domain you control and start getting some emails for your list. You can still publish there, but link back to your own site. With an email list, your readers can turn into your customers. As a designer, you can then start building products like books, courses, podcasts, guides you name it which will let you take advantage of the skills you have already. Check out Design for Hackers, for example. Why not use the edge you built up instead of starting at a disadvantage?

As a founder of 6 figure MRR SaaS, it is possible if you can hire <i></i>good<i></i> developers overseas for less. That said it is really useful if you know a little code or have someone who can vet good coders for you. Take your time with hiring.

Of course it is. If you know the problem space very well and are able to conceive and sell a good solution, the code behind it matters very little.

Sure its possible, but coworking spaces are full of people trying it and I cannot think of a single example where it has worked.

Analogy; Can a non-programmer manage programmers?

No

Anything is possible if you just dollow your freams!

I&#x27;m a developer and have helped bootstrap a couple of SaaS. The problem is that in most partnerships like this, the other person can usually only offer ideas or something very minimal with regards to the success of the business.<p>I usually end up just doing everything myself. Unless you offer something besides just the idea (money, contacts, industry experience). The partnership will not work.<p>I&#x27;ve had to quit a few startups over the years myself because my co-founder ended up only offering some ideas. This starts to become a perceived manager-&gt;employee relationship (since as the developer, you are doing the majority of the work) and because the idea is their only contribution, it&#x27;s a problem when it needs to be changed.<p>This also smacks of someone that loves the romanticized idea of running a startup, but isn&#x27;t willing to actually put the work into it.<p>Now, I will only go into business with other people that have at least a couple of years of business experience.

Zuckeberg did it right? Atleast till it was viable? JUST DO IT.

F those people that tell you it&#x27;s not possible. I barely knew how to code and I started a SaaS business. I worked my ass off to become an adequate coder and sell the product to customers. It&#x27;s been three hard years and now it&#x27;s starting to pay off. If you have a solution to a problem, one that people will pay for. You have a business. Keep pushing. You can do anything if you&#x27;re willing to work hard for it. Take help when you can get it. Learn everything you can. Enjoy the journey.