What I’ve learned in 5 years of running a SaaS

I absolutely agree on every item. Notes:<p>2.: Couldn&#x27;t agree more. I tried it a few times, could never make it, because something came up. So I don&#x27;t tell release dates. I hardly tell about new features. Nobody cares. Perfect.<p>5.: My PHP application without any fancy technology makes me close to 100K euro in revenue per year. It delivers, it keeps delivering, there are no problems.<p>I want to add one more thing:<p>6. You hear critics&#x27; voices the loudest, if you don&#x27;t do anything against it. I changed pricing once and about 50 people complained. I tried to justify myself (won&#x27;t do this again) and the 50 people became a mob with the respective mentality. No chance to say anything. I might have lost another 50 users because of the discussion. In my mind, I completely forgot about the other few thousand people who did not complain.<p>Happy people hardly contact you, only the critics and haters. Don&#x27;t let it sink in too deeply. Or use an easy mitigation strategy: If people reach a certain goal, ask them for feedback by writing a personal sounding email (that you send automatically, for sure). You&#x27;ll get mostly positive feedback. This is important from a psychological point of view: You see that people are happy with your product and you can handle the critics in a better way.<p>Most emails I get are like:&quot;There&#x27;s nothing to improve, thank you so much for this product&quot;. Nice :)

Number 5, &quot;don&#x27;t believe the hype,&quot; reminds me of this interview with the creator of Pinboard...<p>&gt; <i>The Pinboard about page says: &quot;There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!&quot;</i><p>&gt; <i>Can you explain why you think that&#x27;s a feature?</i><p>&gt; I believe that relying on very basic and well-understood technologies at the architectural level forces you to save all your cleverness and new ideas for the actual app, where it can make a difference to users.<p>&gt; I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new technology and are willing to burn a lot of time rigging it together just for the joy of tinkering. So nowadays we see a lot of fairly uninteresting web apps with very technically sweet implementations. In designing Pinboard, I tried to steer clear of this temptation by picking very familiar, vanilla tools wherever possible so I would have no excuse for architectural wank.<p><a href="http://readwrite.com/2011/02/10/pinboard-creator-maciej-ceglow" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;readwrite.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;10&#x2F;pinboard-creator-maciej-cegl...</a>

I just upgraded my laptop from a 4 years old mbp to a brand new one, got a 27&quot; second screen display, and i can tell you my productivity has been skyrocketing. Performance gains are obvious, but the psychological aspect is also a factor. After working for a year on the same project, new hardware can bring some new joy, and a new boost to your project.

My homegrown saas application grosses ~$225k USD per year and growing. I started it in 2003 with $0 capital. I don&#x27;t currently advertise, new business comes from seo and referrals. I am the sole developer&#x2F;designer. (I use those titles loosely.)<p>What I have learned:<p>- Try to think about&#x2F;plan for ten years out - Make your application easy&#x2F;pleasant&#x2F;fun to use for you <i>and</i> your customers - Limit third party dependencies at all junctures - Log everything, it makes support and monitoring easy and fast - Customers don&#x27;t care what language&#x2F;platform&#x2F;db you use - Have a support ticket system - Have a coding convention&#x2F;style and stick to it - Life work balance is important, take vacations - Run lots of backups - Keep it simple and thank yourself later!<p>Of course YMMV. Hope that&#x27;s helpful to someone starting out.

&gt; software that allows you to concentrate on developing your application’s features rather than configuring servers<p>If you are running a SaaS, how is system administration less important than coding?<p>Now if the author had written &quot;software that allows you to be more productive on both fronts&quot;, fine. But the notion that operations is somehow less important than development is exactly what fucks up so many SaaS companies in the long run.<p>Your users want your service to be 24&#x2F;7 available and responsive. That&#x27;s not a static goal (unless you fail to gain traction), and an essential and highly integrated part of what you deliver.<p>Maybe the author is lucky that his particular SaaS is easy to deploy and scale, but dismissing system administration as a distraction that can be solved with software is not universally applicably advice.

I especially agree with item #2. I have been involved with several web based projects that have &quot;failed&quot; only because someone loosely associated with the project put a release date and the dev team made the mistake of agreeing (it seemed like a sure thing at the time). However, this deadline took its toll on the team&#x27;s moral. As it became more and more evident that we would not meet the deadline we became more and more grumpy with each other and started shooting down great product ideas because the couldn&#x27;t be done NOW. It resulted in lots of bad blood and several resignations.<p>That being said - I do think there are certain situations where release dates will exist in a SaaS product. For instance, if you market tends to start and stop activities on a set calendar (ie: school year) or if there are a handful of trade shows that are critical to demonstrate new features at. I think it is about being insanely pessimistic about how much you can actually achieve. Figure out the minimum you need to demo at a date and work on that first, but never commit to a set of UI diagrams with features that are not insanely flashy for a demo.<p>my $0.02

As someone who runs a SaaS company, I agree with everything in this article. The importance of point #1 cannot be overstated!

&quot;2. Never promise dates for a feature launch&quot;<p>Reminded me of a sponsor who once offered me a bonus if I could put together a schedule with delivery dates for each and every product feature.<p>&quot;Hmm, no thanks. I prefer to leave it (the bonus) for when we go to market.&quot;

5. Don&#x27;t Believe the Hype - really good points there, too. &quot;Use technology that&#x27;s proven (to you).&quot;<p>I agree but also don&#x27;t ignore newer technologies just for the sake of familiarity. Especially if it has an active, supportive community.

Really agree with #3 with regards to software. I&#x27;ve been focused on getting a VPS and the flexibility but it&#x27;s lead me to not focus on my application&#x2F;service. The configuration and maintenance of the VPS is chewing up my time, time that I could have spent working on validtaing my idea. Maybe I&#x27;m just not focused enough but I&#x27;ll try to get something going on Heroku so my application&#x2F;service gets the attention it needs. Any thoughts?

&quot;It’s your job to make your customer more awesome. Every decision you make for your product and business should revolve around that.&quot;<p>Unless of course your customer requires knowing a date that a certain feature needs to be in place by. In which case, point them to Number 2. Which really means Number 2 should be Number 1 because Number 2 negates Number 1 if the two come in conflict.

&quot;Never promise dates for a feature launch&quot; - Gem of a point.

I like that there is a perspective of time. A six month sprint would not care so much about working hours, ignoring hype, and investing in productivity tools.

Post would benifit from examples or stories. Also genuinely curious how author can stay afloat in the rough and tumble world of note taking SaaS.

&gt; software that allows you to concentrate on developing your application’s features rather than configuring servers<p>I wonder if Amy and Thomas would use a PaaS like Heroku if they were doing a new product. Or would that be considered too expensive?

[3] ... software that allows you to concentrate on developing your application’s features rather than configuring servers.<p>Can somebody please explain what he means by this using some examples? Thanks!

Of course a SaaS is a &quot;make customers awesome&quot; company but you&#x27;ll need use technology to make it awesome. Sure, clients don&#x27;t care about the technology but that is not the same as &quot;You’re not a tech company&quot;.

Did you learn something about privacy of users?