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Failed SaaS post-mortem: validate your pricing model like I didn't

123 点作者 elliotbnvl大约 5 年前

22 条评论

cl42大约 5 年前
&gt; <i>I just spent about three weeks bootstrapping a SaaS as a solo founder. For context, you can read my description of it here, and I’ve talked about the inspiration behind it and motivations here and here.</i><p>... wow, that&#x27;s crazy fast. I&#x27;d argue you didn&#x27;t validate anything with that time frame. It takes months to build a reputation or awareness around a product to give people time to make a decision. As SaaStr says, give your product&#x2F;startup TWO YEARS.[1]<p>Three weeks isn&#x27;t enough time to even pretend you&#x27;re bootstrapping. That&#x27;s a vacation from work...<p>&gt; <i>The basic concept was solid: provide an insanely simple way for business intelligence consultants to manage project data.</i><p>... ESPECIALLY IN B2B.<p>---<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saastr.com&#x2F;if-youre-going-to-do-a-saas-start-up-you-have-to-give-it-24-months&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saastr.com&#x2F;if-youre-going-to-do-a-saas-start-up-...</a>
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optymizer大约 5 年前
I get the impression that you&#x27;re rushing - rushing to build it, rushing to get a customer, rushing to get to some MRR. Why?<p>Why the 90 hour weeks? Why make critical business decisions without any metrics after hearing some guy on the internet talk about $50&#x2F;user? Because he&#x27;s famous?<p>Most experienced people know to have patience: patience to find the right solution, patience to find the right users and patience to make the right connections. It all takes time and you only gave it 3 weeks?<p>Sorry but you sound like you want to make a quick buck and retire early, or maybe you need the money now. Nothing wrong with that, but it&#x27;s not really a &quot;SaaS post-mortem&quot;, it&#x27;s more of a &quot;I don&#x27;t have the time or patience to invest in this SaaS&quot;.<p>All I can say is, have more patience, don&#x27;t rush into things and don&#x27;t throw your hands up in the air and give up when it&#x27;s not going as well as you imagined in your mind. You have to persevere if you&#x27;re going to run a startup. Good luck!
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fourseventy大约 5 年前
You gave up after 3 weeks dude? You will never succeed at founding a startup with that attitude. I&#x27;ve been bootstrapping my startup for 2+ years and after several pivots we are just now finding our stride with ~$10k MRR.<p>I also completely disagree on the assumption that pricing had anything to do with your failure. Your startup didn&#x27;t fail because of the economics, it failed because your product didn&#x27;t provide enough value to customers.
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arthurofbabylon大约 5 年前
This is... bullshit. The insights are forced – the rules for new businesses aren&#x27;t so fixed that the advice from an internet persona and a brief questioning of the business model would kill a business.<p>And to call it a post-mortem? Forgive me, but post-mortem analyses are valuable when slow – these insights come too quick, without enough chewing going on.
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codegeek大约 5 年前
&quot; just spent about three weeks bootstrapping &quot;<p>Great share but please don&#x27;t call it &quot;Failed SAAS&quot;. I respect what you did but calling an experiment of 3 weeks a failed SAAS is unfair to real SAAS businesses that actually fail. 3 weeks is not enough. You can call it &quot;I tried an experiment for 3 weeks and moving on&quot;.
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nakodari大约 5 年前
As a fellow bootstrapped founder, you don&#x27;t have to worry about drowning in support requests. Simply offer two pricing models, a $10-20&#x2F;month without support (just work once on a good FAQ that answers the majority of questions), and a bigger $49-$69&#x2F;month plan that comes with email support. Just because you&#x27;re offering email support does not mean you&#x27;re going to get lots of emails, you will be surprised how much a good FAQ reduces support emails.
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ryanwaggoner大约 5 年前
Amazing job on building something, but you&#x27;re giving up way too soon. With respect to Jason, there&#x27;s no guarantee that every SaaS charging less than $50 &#x2F; month is going to drown in support costs. Let&#x27;s do the math, shall we?<p>Suppose you want to make $10k MRR with this. You need 500 monthly users, right? Realistically, a good chunk of them aren&#x27;t going to even use the product very often, despite paying for it. This is even more true since it&#x27;s cheap. You could easily end up with fewer than 100 of the 500 logging in and using the product on any given day. Of those, maybe 5-10 are going to actually need support, and you could easily cover half of that with an FAQ, training videos, etc. So on any given day, you might get 2-5 emails from your 500 customers. Even if it&#x27;s 10x that, you could probably churn through 20-30 support emails in 1-2 hours just by yourself, or you could hire someone for $500 &#x2F; month to do it for you. And support requests are going to drop over time as you improve the product, fix bugs, etc.<p>For the record, none of this is theoretical. I&#x27;ve run multiple profitable saas &#x2F; recurring revenue projects and I&#x27;ve never had to deal with &quot;drowning&quot; in ongoing support requests. Supporting <i>free</i> users is a different question, and freemium can genuinely be challenging in terms of support requests, but even there it&#x27;s not <i>that</i> difficult to handle larger volumes of support requests with automated methods to cut down 90% of it. And if you have a handful of problematic customers who are a constant source of stress, you can fire them. They&#x27;re not worth your sanity, especially for $20 &#x2F; month.<p>A better question might be: why are you giving up so quickly? Is it really that you think it&#x27;s not possible? Or maybe something else going on here?
bckygldstn大约 5 年前
&gt; you needed to be charging at least $50, closer to $100, per month, per user, in order to make it as a bootstrapped solo SaaS founder<p>Here&#x27;s the lowest monthly price plan for the TinySeed 2020 batch companies currently on the front page [1]: 950, 250, 159, 149, 49, 49, 29, 27, 25, 10, 9<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23033623" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23033623</a>
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polote大约 5 年前
Hum, that&#x27;s not really why you failed in my opinion.<p>I feel like you think building a company is only about following the good rules. This is wrong, there is best rules to follow to create a successful company, you need to take risks and do new things. Following the &#x27;best practices&#x27; is the best way to no be successful.<p>Regarding your pricing, you are selling to individual developers, so, to people who never buy any professional products, and as other have said, after 3 weeks you can only say that you have not waited long enough to know if you are failing or not.<p>Also you are too sure about what you are doing. If things are that obvious for you, it means you are very likely missing something<p>My advice to you, forget about money, build something which satisfies your target users for free an when you will have several of them you will understand what they are willing to pay for. Startup life is long, you need to be patient and persistent, you have not failed, this is only the beginning ;), good luck
davidgh大约 5 年前
&gt; At that rate, I’d need to get between 500 and 1,000 users in order to reach an MRR that would let me go full-time. With that many users, as a solo bootstrapper, I’d be spending all of my time on support.<p>Sure, maybe initially as you work out the bugs and missing features. But you don’t go from zero users to a thousand overnight, so users 1-10 will probably have more support requests than 990-1000 because you’ve worked the kinks out as you go.<p>Also, if you’re able to find people that are willing to open their wallet <i>for any amount</i> then you have very engaged users. As they fully integrate your product into their workflows, you can find ways to increase the value you provide to them with upgraded, higher-priced plans, pushing your average monthly revenue per customer up.
rmason大约 5 年前
Your objective was to close a sale. If you closed a sale you could keep learning. If you close a sale it validates you&#x27;re solving a problem people are willing to pay to solve. At that point you&#x27;re already ahead of 30% of startups.<p>Jason Cohen&#x27;s essays are a major influence on me and I&#x27;ve been doing this SaaS stuff for over twenty years. But you can always raise your price, especially after doing a lot of learning with a handful of early customers. But it&#x27;s very difficult to lower your price after losing the sale the first time, I&#x27;ve got first hand experience here.<p>Three weeks is a ridiculous amount of time to judge success of a startup, you need to invest a minimum of two years and at times during that period it will be an absolute grind. That&#x27;s why you need to be absolutely in love with your idea or you won&#x27;t have the energy to continue.
ricardobeat大约 5 年前
My opinion is that you don&#x27;t really have a product here, hence it can&#x27;t have failed. Your site doesn&#x27;t even have a landing page explaining what the product is, why you&#x27;d use it, how much it costs, or user accounts (it&#x27;s free access?). It barely qualifies as an MVP. That means you didn&#x27;t even had a chance to capture any leads, which in turn means you can&#x27;t take any conclusions about <i>anything</i>, especially pricing.<p>&gt; you won’t find many BI developers who are keen on trying to expense a monthly $75 bill<p>You really won&#x27;t, because $75 is way too low to bother with the expense process in any medium sized business. Maybe start at $750 instead? If you don&#x27;t feel like you could charge that, is the product really offering value?
brainflake大约 5 年前
Good post - pricing is so very critical (although I do agree with others here that three weeks is such a _very_ short timeframe). It&#x27;s interesting to think about pricing from a &quot;what&#x27;s my per-user cost so I can reasonably bootstrap this myself&quot;, but it&#x27;s usually more reasonable (and profitable) to think about it the other way around - &quot;what value am i providing to my user?&quot;.<p>The book &quot;The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing&quot; was a real eye opener for me as I don&#x27;t come from a business background. The crux is that don&#x27;t think about it in terms of costs, but how much value (e.g., time saved, leads generated, etc) you are providing and if the price is worth it from the user&#x27;s perspective.
soneca大约 5 年前
&gt; <i>&quot;I just spent about three weeks bootstrapping a SaaS as a solo founder&quot;</i><p>&gt; <i>&quot;Plus, my goal is to hit $2k MRR in the next two months&quot;</i><p>Why that fast? Is that the right pace?<p>I wonder what&#x27;s the right balance between validating things fast and persisting until you make it work.<p>I am more inclined to the position that he should&#x2F;I would have worked to make his $20&#x2F;month product grows into the value of a $100&#x2F;month product.<p>People are never keen to spend $75 a month, unless is an investment in something that will make them, for example, earn $500 more a month.<p>At the same time, there were signs that it could be an idea that he would keep trying for an year and a half, and end up in the same place (I&#x27;ve been there).<p>How to make this decision?
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pier25大约 5 年前
I&#x27;m working on my SaaS solo and I expect to work on it at least 1 year before releasing a beta. And after that I don&#x27;t expect making some profit for at least another year, probably two.<p>Working 3 weeks on something and expecting it to have some value is totally unrealistic. Yeah, maybe someone somewhere pulled that off, but it&#x27;s one in a million chance and the lowest hanging fruit has already been taken years ago.
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throw20200501大约 5 年前
I am a solo founder with over 900 customers, and I get bored because they have very few issues or support requests.<p>You should at least give it a try...<p>I have a public slack where people help each others most of the time, and I also handle all support requests on the chat.
manishsharan大约 5 年前
As a solo founder, what if I were to flip the pricing model on its head.<p>Let us assume I need $100 per month to survive, my Google adwords budget is $40, my AWS &#x2F;bill is expected to be $45, my overheads are $50 -- how do I price my product ?
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corkill大约 5 年前
Do they pay for other software to solve this problem?<p>What are the painful problems of the people with purchasing power in that market?<p>At the initial stage I would be looking for them to pay you anything or agree to pay and optimize the pricing model later.
blobbers大约 5 年前
It seems like maybe you gave up a little early.<p>Also, 150 users seems like a ridiculously small number for any type of company doing custom software (non F500).<p>...but perhaps I&#x27;m just not very learned?
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PaulWaldman大约 5 年前
It&#x27;s challenging to develop a product without having first-hand domain knowledge. Kudos for taking on the challenge.
bronson大约 5 年前
&gt; My goal is to hit $2k MRR in the next two months, before my first child is born in July.<p>You&#x27;re about to go through a crazy experience. Instead of choosing startup life, consider making your wife and child the most important things in your life right now. You can spend 90 hours prototyping a startup idea any time but you only get one chance at this.
elliotbnvl大约 5 年前
tl;dr: I didn&#x27;t run the numbers to understand how to price my bootstrapped SaaS as a solo founder, and after building an awesome tool, I had to throw it out.<p>Key learnings:<p>- You need to include pricing as a critical failure point from the very beginning when vetting your startup ideas.<p>- You should be charging somewhere between $50 to $100&#x2F;mo per user as a bootstrapped startup founder.<p>- Don&#x27;t bother trying to bootstrap &#x2F; self-fund enterprise software.
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