HN Explorer

Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

752 points by phoenix24 ↗ HN
Hi HN,

Do you know any one man SaaS app that are profitable?

I'm asking this because I'm considering starting a SaaS app as a side project, and I'm looking for some inspiration.

Thanks!

Note: this is was previously on HN here[1], but it's been few years, and I'm sure a lot of one person startups are thriving than before.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11924009

375 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] thread
throw03172019
I am the only full time cofounder of a healthcare SaaS. My cofounder is the domain expert who kept his job. No employees. ~20k MRR
pplante
What sector of healthcare? Mind being more specific? My email is in my profile if you're interested in a conversation.

I have a side project that's targeting physicians being able to better track their activities.

throw03172019
Mainly plastic surgeons who operate their own practices.
tpkj
Are you able to share any info regarding the type of customer (B2B or B2C), the number of customers, and the method of customer acquisition? Depending on the nature of the product offering, healthcare can be seriously difficult market to enter.
throw03172019
It is B2B but their is usually only 1-5 decision makers in one practice (privately owned plastic surgery practice) but they move quite slow.

We got a lot of traction going to a few conferences and signed them up at the meeting. We have not done any online marketing.

tpkj
Ok, thanks; not as many barriers to entry I suppose compared with larger health institutions.
sergiomattei
I'm making https://getmakerlog.com, which is currently doing $200 MRR.
jkeuhlen
Just curious, did you go about setting up a formal corporation for the product? I'm thinking about setting up my own SaaS product and I'm not sure if I need to do anything on the legal/business side.
anandkulkarni
I wouldn't set up a corporation until you have either a reasonable amount of cash coming in or someone ready to give you a check. After that, I'd start with an LLC in your home state, unless you think there's a chance you'll take outside investment. If you do, conversion to a Delaware C-corp costs around $10K in legal fees.
stevenwoo
I thought that an LLC in California required a yearly fee that was close to a $1000 the last time I looked. Is that no longer true or not true at all? Related - isn't it much cheaper in other states?
benmanns
Yes, the franchise tax. You can't get out of it by incorporating in another state. CA residents pay CA taxes.
trazire
Yea, $850 franchise tax minimum. I personally think it's a bit excess even by Californian standards.

Also, you'd need to get an office in Delaware to not mandate a foreign registration in California which still involves the taxes. Getting an office in Delaware is pretty expensive but it's about $400 cheaper than California franchise tax. They assess their own but it still works out lower.

Edit: Nevermind, they still tax you on that. I don't condone tax evasion, but Wyoming doesn't track the owners of a corporation.

ed
+1 to this advice. Don't incorporate until you're already paying yourself a good salary. The wrong structure can easily cost you thousands per year in taxes and fees.
nicholas73
Would it be "piercing the corporate veil" to accept payments before incorporating, then moving everything to separate accounts afterwards?
ed
No you simply convert the sole proprietorship to an LLC (or corporation). You "sell" your intellectual property to the newly created corporation in exchange for your founder stock. A sole proprietorship is sort of like the default business structure, you don't really need to do anything to start it, everything just ends up on your personal tax return.

"Piercing the corporate veil" is different. Google will be helpful if you're interested, but basically if you run a company don't do shady shit -- don't commit fraud or gross negligence, and respect the separation between company and personal finances. Otherwise you may lose the protection of the corporation (the "limited liability" part of LLC) and become personally liable if things go bad.

benmanns
Look up setting up a single-member LLC in your state. It's usually fairly simple and cheap (but state dependent).
srecio
Just use Stripe Atlas. I've been very happy with them.
ed
Stripe Atlas is awesome for C corps, which is great if you plan to raise outside capital. If you plan to bootstrap, you're better off creating an LLC in your home state. Atlas only offers LLC's in Delaware.
srecio
Why not set up a Delaware LLC? Makes sense if you're doing business online
ed
Unless you live and work in Delaware, you will foreign qualify in another state. You pay taxes to the states you operate in, so if you e.g. register in Delaware and operate in California, you'll be stuck paying both CA ($800) and DE ($400) taxes.
marktangotango
I think Delaware allows “anonymous” llc which not a lot of states do. That is the main draw iirc.
viv2020
Love the idea and a great product. But how are you monetizing this? I can't figure from the page.
sergiomattei
Gold subscriptions. I'll be working on making that clearer soon.
gortok
I am not at liberty to say who it is but I know a one person SaaS (well, now a 4 person SaaS) that does several million a year in revenue. They found a niche and wrote software for that niche. It is the tiniest of niches but is underserved.
throwaway13000
Atleast giving an idea of the general market would be great. Otherwise, your answer has no meaning
sveng
The last two sentences that comment are meaningful to me.
edmundsauto
Yes, please let me know an underserved market so I can compete with you!
[dead] _bxg1
Any user with "throwaway" right in the name automatically gets ignored by me.
benburleson
I hate that I'm responding here, but have to point out that your comment is obviously not true.
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_bxg1
Yes, yes. My point is that people create throwaways in order to knowingly post low-quality (toxic or otherwise) replies without having the downvotes affect their main accounts. If they thought their comment was going to make a positive contribution, they'd use their main account. So if they disvalue their own post, I'm certainly not going to value it.
tomhoward
Not always true. People have various reasons for using throwaway accounts, depending on the context.

HN's guidelines don't prohibit throwaways; they only discourage routine use of them:

Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create them routinely. On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to.

It may be right that the throwaway account you replied to was gratuitous, but it's not true that they're only ever used for low-quality comments.

gortok
Specific software for a specific use case for college departments.
mrfusion
I wish I could find a niche :-(
davidbanham
I run two SaaS products. Both are entirely my work and both are modestly profitable.

I split my time about 50/50 between the the SaaS side of my business and consulting. The consulting revenue stream is much larger than the SaaS one but it's growing.

https://takehome.io

And

https://clubman.app

_bxg1
Clubman is so specific. This seems to be a pattern of many small, honest, successful software businesses: instead of trying to make a platform that will eat the world, they find a tiny niche that they understand, and hand-craft a solution that's perfectly tailored to it and meets people's real needs. It's inspiring. When software is too generic it becomes boring (and impossible to compete with as an entrepreneur).
ackbar03
As one commenter said this is very specific, how do you go about finding and marketing to your clients?
davidbanham
First paid client is my own club. I've also had a few enquiries from people googling it and word of mouth. From there it's direct approaches to clubs and advertising through Google and industry associations.
pplante
I love the takehome product idea. Wish that was around when I was conducting loads of technical interviews a few years ago.
wayoverthecloud
Which is bringing in more profit? Clubman looks super niche. Unless you know ski clubs really well, looks hard to market.
davidbanham
Takehome brings in more revenue and takes less time to administer. Clubman has only just gone live with its first client, though. I think Clubman will outperform Takehome quite soon.

Takehome is in a pretty crowded market space. It has its own distinct niche but it can be quite difficult to communicate that difference to potential buyers.

Clubman, on the other hand, has few competitors. The clients are relatively homogeneous and their needs well articulated. They're a smaller total addressable market but with a higher percentage hit rate.

leozeba
We're a small team of 3 co-founders at @nazar_io currently doing $50k MRR.
lynnetye
Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.com) is a one-woman show (oh hi!). I started Key Values as a side project two years ago, but it quickly turned into my full-time passion and business. I'm doing ~$30k/month and it's almost all profit since I don't have an office or any employees. I recently talked to Courtland of Indie Hackers (already mentioned in the comments) about how I got here: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-va...

I would never have started Key Values w/o Indie Hackers, so I highly recommend you spend some time there. It's a bottomless treasure chest of inspiration.

PKop
Great interview on indie hackers podcast. Always motivating to hear from the perspectives of people not trying to grow at all cost, following SV conventional wisdom etc, aiming for more lifestyle type businesses.
mark-ruwt
God, that's a brilliant name/logo.
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damian2000
Agreed, although I thought it was a key value store as a service at first
np_tedious
Same, definitely thought of https://keyvalue.xyz/ which I haven't used myself, but once recommended (after searching it up) to a client dev for his hackathon project and he was happy with it
alphagrep12345
Really good website. However, I'm wondering as to why this is a full-time business. Is most of your time taken by marketing and sales?
csallen
A common belief on HN is that any SaaS/tech business is constrained by the complexity of its code and product. Famously, the top comment[0] on Dropbox's HN launch was about how it's not a valuable business because the commenter could build it for himself. There were similar comments here about Asana recently, too, and I'm sure many other startups.

If I had to guess, this is due to a combination of two factors. First, some kind of "visibility bias," where we all tend to overvalue things that are highly visible. And second, "man with a hammer" syndrome. We're programmers, so we tend to overvalue the importance of code.

But the reality is just as you guessed — marketing, sales, partnerships, content, customer service, etc all play a huge role in a business' success. They require a lot of time, too.

Not understanding this is one of the reasons many developer-founders make the mistake of taking on overly ambitious product ideas and not allocating enough time to the rest of their business.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

lynnetye
^^^ This.

Key Values is not valuable because of its code. In fact, it's a simple static site that I could rebuild in a couple of days if I wanted to.

I meet a lot of technical founders who love coding and avoid doing everything else. They run the risk of building a lot of fancy features that no one wants or needs.

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chii
> technical founders who love coding and avoid doing everything else.

the truth is that these tech co-founders are really looking for a playground to have fun with code/tech, the same way a kid wants to play lego.

Building a business is not fun at all. There are tonnes of mundane stuff, and these are fairly important. A technical co-founder is quite likely to have quit their previou job because they want to create an environment where they aren't restricted by the "business people" for doing technical exploration and play.

This is why i think finding a business partner who isn't technical is quite important. They can reign you back in.

yjftsjthsd-h
I once saw a line that went something like, "to a systems programmer, all users and applications serve merely to provide a test load". There are plenty of people who just want to build stuff, and oh by the way it would be handy if we had some users to test the technology:)
avinium
I've also noticed that a lot of successful solo projects seem to be network/directory platforms - i.e. building an audience through free content that you then monetize through commercial partnerships.

As you said, these require a lot more on the marketing/partnerships side, rather than the technical side (in fact, one of the great things is that MVPs can be built in a couple of days on something like Wordpress).

csallen
> I've also noticed that a lot of successful solo projects seem to be network/directory platforms - i.e. building an audience through free content that you then monetize through commercial partnerships.

Nailed it! What others have you noticed?

avinium
Startup directories like ProductHunt, BetaList, AngelList are all great examples.

Now that I think about it, that actually describes a lot of blogs/vlogs/podcasts too (create an audience with great content, monetize via advertising). Not quite SaaS, though, so slightly different from OPs original question.

Places like https://designacademy.io/ sit in the middle - content-first to create the audience, then use that audience to sell online courses in your given niche.

The takeaway - which applies to any business really - is that you need an audience and you need to be selling something that someone desperately needs (rather than something that someone "wants").

Recruiters need candidates. Advertisers need eyeballs. Companies need investor networks. Find the need, build the audience.

lynnetye
Yes, I spend a good amount of time doing marketing and sales, but I also spend a lot of time working w/ each engineering team, helping them to articulate and express their values. Culture is really hard to pinpoint. Companies (and especially eng teams) struggle to identify and convey what's actually unique about them, and many don't even realize they're different from other companies!

People sometimes ask me how I scrape content for each profile, but it's obvious to anyone who actually reads them that they're thoughtfully curated. A lot of time, care, and attention goes into each profile, which is what makes Key Values valuable.

_Nat_
If you're making 30 kUSD/month without any employees, it sounds like you could reasonably hire someone to take some of those responsibilities off your shoulders, freeing you up to do more stuff.

Have you considered hiring an employee or two to help with some of the basic responsibilities? Or do you feel that there may be some nuance to the work that you're hesitant to trust to someone else? Or, do you simply enjoy it too much to want to do something else?

lynnetye
You are spot on, my friend. These are the tough questions I've been asking myself every day for the last few weeks, and I'm still trying to answer them!

I've had two people/friends do a bit of contract work for me (a few hours a week), but I'm not sure if hiring someone full-time is the right move. Not only do I genuinely love what I do every day, but I also really want to soak up the freedom I currently have while I still can. Real talk, I'll probably enter mommyhood in 1-2 years, so not being beholden to employers, investors, or employees is something I want to cherish for a bit longer. But who knows! Only time will tell... :P

dosy
I guess for the companies you're interacting with you are part of your brand. If someone else was going to take over talking with them, it would probably feel different to them. In a way you're already a mommy of your business. It must be hard to change that status quo for yourself.
PKop
Listen to her indie hackers podcast, exactly this discussion is covered extensively.
lynnetye
(I know this is kind of "not allowed" on HN, but... <3)
ohaideredevs
I thought this was going to be a storage service for private keys.
tinktank
So how are you monetizing it? Is it ads or paid job advertisements or something else?
lynnetye
Companies pay a yearly subscription fee for content creation and listing their profile on Key Values. I never charge software engineers and I don't charge companies any placement fees for the engineers they hire through Key Values.

Having a contingency model is definitely the more lucrative path, but I'm against it for two reasons: (1) I'm a dev, not a recruiter, and (2) I think placements fees are part of what's broken in recruiting. The incentives are misaligned among recruiters, candidates, and employers when recruiters only want to place someone just long enough to hit the 90-day mark.

luminati
^^The incentives are misaligned among recruiters, candidates, and employers when recruiters only want to place someone just long enough to hit the 90-day mark.

Precisely! That's why I think Triplebyte.com is such an overrated company. Behind all their new-age silicon valley spin, they are nothing but an old-school scheming recruiter, charging $10K++ per hire.

Think of about it - it's the ultimate rent-seeking industry out there. I feel that the $10K should go to the candidate who is actually going to do all the work and/or be re-invested into R&D (actually adding value to the world rather than paying fat recruiters).

enraged_camel
$10k per hire sounds like a lot, until you realize that engineers add hundreds of thousands of dollars in value to their companies per year, if not much more. And good hires are worth their weight in gold.

So clearly, Triplebyte’s success is at least to an extent the result of their delivering value to their clients.

mandeepj
I have seen fees up to $30k for each FT hire.
throw03172019
It’s usually a percentage of first year salary. 10-15%
luminati
you're attacking a straw man. I didn't deny the worth or value of a good engineer. "And good hires are worth their weight in gold." => So don't they deserve a chunk of the 10K triplebyte gets, considering triplebyte is just a middleman. Also wasn't the internet supposed to get rid of the middle man or drastically minimize the rent they seek?

I really like what key values does - I think it's a very sustainable way of doing it (both the incentive structure and the philosophy itself) and wish the very best.

I don't wish triplebyte, recruiters, and other rent-seeking middlemen well.

alpenbazi
I've seen contracts with hire fee of 25% of the mans salary. They were in pharma. 25%of100-200k per deal.

They both founders got money very fast

jdp23
Great point. Really impressed with how you've approached it!
nicholas73
How did you solve the chicken-egg problem, where the site isn't valuable until you get a lot of viewers/postings? Thanks, and great site!
ngrilly
Great question! I'm wondering the same.
mrfusion
Neat! Could you add a category for part time?

How do you enforce that the companies are being honest?

Also the filters seems to OR each other so the more I pick the more results I get. I think most people expect filters to be AND.

solipsism
Yeah, the filter really turns me off. The number of matches going up as I try to narrow things down is frustrating.
lynnetye
1. I think only ~1/150 companies I talk to are actively hiring part-time engineers, so it's unlikely I'll add this category any time soon... if ever. (Sorry!)

2. A lot of people don't trust employers, but in reality, hiring managers aren't trying to mislead people. Especially at small startups. It's extremely expensive (and heart-breaking!) to interview, hire, and onboard devs only to have them leave soon after. It's a competitive market and software engineers have their pick of the litter, so companies want to attract the right candidates, the ones who are truly aligned w/ their values and will stick around for the long haul.

3. Trust me, I don't want to use OR logic either! Once there are enough companies on Key Values for AND logic to provide a good user experience, I'll switch. For now, the results are sorted by number of matches and how highly companies rank those matches.

zrobotics
Consider that you may be turning people off the product: I had run into this service before (as a job-seeker) , but gave up simply because I couldn't actually drill down to anything meaningful-it didn't offer anything above browsing job boards. Even with a small # of offerings, AND logic allows people to filter down to what they are actually seeking. Providing a ranked list that grows the more specific I am being is, in my mind, negative value, since now I have to sort through a longer list of results that likely don't match at all. There's nothing wrong with providing a page that states "there are zero results for this query, but if you relaxed {X} then there are {y} employers avaliable.
KajMagnus
@lynnetye — what about drawing a horizontal line, between the companise that AND match all criteria, and the ones that only OR match? And there could be a sub title / explanation below the line, like, "The below companies match only some of your criteria:".

And maybe the match number could be instead of just a single number, a text like "X exact matches, 7 partial matches"?

Persnoally, getting both an AND count, and an OR count, and this combined AND + OR match list, seems nice. I'd probably be interested in an OR match company, if it matched say 5 out of 7 criteria.

jarofgreen
> 1. I think only ~1/150 companies I talk to are actively hiring part-time engineers, so it's unlikely I'll add this category any time soon... if ever. (Sorry!)

Is that not a chicken and egg thing tho? With your visibility, encouraging the values you want to see can be a good thing?

I run an event listing site, and years ago I added a totally optional "Code of Conduct" field. I know that prompted at least one local group to officially add one!

Also, if you do, make it so companies can select both full time and part time. We just closed an job advert where we would accept both, and the number of places that only let me pick one was frustrating.

dkersten
> 1. I think only ~1/150 companies I talk to are actively hiring part-time engineers, so it's unlikely I'll add this category any time soon... if ever. (Sorry!)

That’s sad to hear. I’m currently working part time (I value my free time much more than the money I would make) and it took quite a bit of effort to find a place.

mac01021
What place did you find? (Or how did you find it, if you would rather not divulge names)

I will be looking to go from full time to part time in s couple of years.

dkersten
I spoke to employers of friends who were open to the idea. Small (but post-startup, I guess) tech companies that I found through my personal network. I also talked to a recruiter I know, but he didn’t have much luck finding anything for me.
lozenge
I think you need some % match indicator or a floor (eg chose at least 8 values? Match more than 1). At the moment it isn't clear when I would want to stop scrolling or improve my search criteria.

Perhaps use a soft floor? I.e. a little header "matched one value" at the right point in results. If people want to scroll past that they can, if not they'll know where to stop. You could also exclude them from the result count. In which case it would say "We also found these companies which matched one of your values".

caprese
your A/B tests can also be lying to you.

just because a test is giving you a result of doubling down on a particular feature, it doesn't mean you should.

now of course, if you just need the clicks so that you sell to the greater fool, by all means boost that engagement sister!

irq-1
Maybe you could get people to enter values for companies. Sort of a glassdoor for values.
dominotw
would love to have an 'interview' section. This has some info. https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
lynnetye
Every company summarizes their engineering interview process in their profile. You’ll find it in the right-hand side panel.
dominotw
ah ok. I wanted to filter out white board interviewers before applying other filters :D
lynnetye
I was just talking to the team at Airtable this morning about whiteboard interviews... and how they aren't binary. Companies use whiteboards in their interviews to varying degrees, and it's not always to answer algorithms or questions about data structures.

I also wrote about this exact topic last year: https://www.keyvalues.com/blog/engineering-whiteboard-interv...

dominotw
> it's not always to answer algorithms or questions about data structures.

Oh yea from the github link

> "Whiteboards" is used as a metaphor, and is a symbol for the kinds of CS trivia questions that are associated with bad interview practices.

Sorry should've been clear in my first comment.

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cypherpunks01
I was interested in knowing how you got the idea for this, and reading your about page confirmed my suspicion that this is an amazingly simple example of the whole "make a product that solves a problem in your own life" sentiment. Kudos!
aluminussoma
Thanks for responding. That's really inspirational.
DevX101
Your indie hackers episode was just recommended to me this week. Will have to check it out!
rjzzleep
How did you end up managing 150 people a couple of months after dropping out of grad school?
dahdum
Heads up I can’t seem to get half the tags (self-funded for example) to filter. I select and then hit select values and nothing happens. On an iPad / Safari.
yoube
Just an FYI, the site is blocked under Sophos.
nodesocket
> I'm doing ~$30k/month and it's almost all profit since I don't have an office or any employees.

Awesome job. I am really surprised with that kind of revenue you don't spring for an office or dedicated office space at WeWork. You might as well spend money on your business, either that or you paying taxes to uncle sam (assuming you based out of the US). I try and buy a new MacBook Pro each year, might as well get a high end asset I use daily and the deduction.

Swalden123
I’m not sure how the US tax system works, it seems doubtful that if you spend money on an asset you can deduct the full amount from the tax you pay? In Australia you would basically deduct the purchase price of a MacBook Pro off the total profit you calculate tax on so it ends up being around a 30% discount on the MacBook Pro. If it’s similar in the US at all spending profit pointlessly would just be throwing money away?
bryanrasmussen
surely that depends on the type of company you have? If you have a personal company then I expect it is like that, if on the other hand you are incorporated the full purchase should be deductible, the reasoning of course is that a product you buy for a personal company is also used for you.
jjeaff
No matter the type of company, deducting 100% of something does not reduce your tax burden by that amount. Multiply your tax rate times the amount of the deduction to see you tax savings. If you deduct 100% of a laptop and you or your company pays 30% tax rate, then you save about $300 because you were able to deduct.

You aren't getting the laptop for free.

bryanrasmussen
If a company buys a laptop for a 1000 that is an operating expense of that company, if it is a personal company that is to say you are the sole owner and it is not incorporated then you can deduct part of the cost of that laptop which I thought I already indicated. If on the other hand the company is incorporated in some way - and because I am not referring to any particular country I just mean in some way the money spent on that laptop will not be counted in the company's profits and not be taxable.

on edit: unless of course this is different in the country under discussion but in the countries I'm familiar with it works that way, also note I have not discussed depreciation which would definitely apply to a laptop.

lgregg
I have photography equipment that I used while working a media consultant. It was a 100% deductible business expense back then, I get a tax break every year as they continue to "depreciate". It's been a few years, I still do some photography on the side mostly portraits or headshots.
jjeaff
I don't think deduction means what you think it means. If you deduct 100%, you aren't deducting it from the total tax owed. You are deducting from your total taxable income.

So if your tax rate is 30% and you spent $1,000 on a camera, you will save $300 on taxes. So the camera is not free. But you do get it for effectively $700.

Additionally, you can't deduct the value of a purchase AND depreciate it every year. You do one or the other. And which one you do is dictated by tax law.

Double dipping is tax fraud.

jakobegger
> Additionally, you can't deduct the value of a purchase AND depreciate it every year.

In Austria we have an "investment bonus" that allows you to do exactly that (with a limit). If you are in the highest tax bracket (50%), this means you can get around 5000€ of equipment effectively for free every year.

nodesocket
You are right, of course it's not 100% deductible. I am not advocating spending wildly on things you don't need for the business. If you have lots of revenue and not a lot of expenses, it makes sense to splurge on physical assets you can use and then expense and in the future sell. I.E. computers, networking equipment, storage, monitors, etc. Furthermore, it also make sense to spend on things that can help you grow the business like advertising, marketing, office space, employees. Again, better to spend and get the tax deduction, and have the resources that grow the business.
jjeaff
If you deduct the expense, and then sell it later, your going to have to claim the sale as income. And pay tax on it.
airbreather
Depending on the depreciation schedule, esp for tech, it could well be viewed as close to worthless by the tax office after some years.
jjeaff
You don't get to expense the purchase AND depreciate the asset.
airbreather
Try 50% if you are earning 30k a month, top tax rate kicks in at 180k per year in Oz.
nottorp
Umm... if you spend money on tax deductible stuff that you don't need, I don't think you end up with more money than if you pocket the cash and pay taxes on it...
ttty
A suggestion would be to make that select values button to work or do something.
Aeolun
It may just be that all companies select the same values, but even deselecting basically everything I still get +/- 80 results.
Tepix
I think in the beginning nothing is selected. For example selecting „work life balance“ gives me 7 results.
noisy_boy
I have a feedback for you - would be great if you can add filters (separate from the value filters) e.g. I selected my priority values and then wanted to filter the results with only remote jobs but no such option was available. Similarly one might want to filter the results by location etc.
tixocloud
Really great idea! How do you measure the softer criteria like “Eats lunch together”?
dandare
Could I ask how much time you send on sales and marketing compared to development/engineering?
amelius
Nice idea, but I miss society related values here (which are increasingly important for many people). For example, what if I don't want to work for a company that trades user data? Also negative externalities of a company are not clearly shown.
dorfsmay
Where do you get revenue from? Ads?
bggy00
I call BS on some of these, like EQ > IQ at Github, lol.
bggy00
A lot of these are manager-dependent, like 'fosters psychological safety'. My impression is that these are snapshots of how the companies would like to be seen, which is what they are paying for. They aren't paying for an 'audit' of what their true value are, or for insight from employees (like Glassdoor).
bitcoinmoney
Love the name! What’s the business model? Not very obvious from the website
akash7
Is there a way to AND the filters, instead of OR?
jdwyah
This is great. In a mildly amusing side-note, in order to fill out my companies profile, my (barely profitable) side project is a perfect fit: https://forcerank.it lets you have your team rank all the values so you can see what the team actually thinks your values are.
bigboris
Sweet mother...this is awesome. As a very technical engineer currently lost in a sea of bean counters and project managers, it has been a real challenge wading through idiotic recruiters and endless repeated garbage job postings. Thank you for Key Values...this is gold.
pawurb
I am running https://abot.app currently at $1500 MRR and growing. Still at full-time job apart from that.
pplante
I understand the context, but that logo doesn't give me a lot of warm feelings. I would likely skip the product just on that regardless of how awesome it might be.
wheelerwj
partially agree, the guy fawkes max needs to go, but its a cool concept.
hliyan
Agreed. I too would like to try this with the team, but please consider a different logo...
pawurb
Can you elaborate on why ?
Veen
1) It's associated with hacktivist groups bordering on actually criminal. 2) As a British person, it's associated with Guy Fawkes, who was a terrorist.
mark-ruwt
I founded Are You Watching This?! (https://ruwt.tv) in 2006 and have been profitable since 2013. It's a Sports Excitement Analytics firm, licensing real-time data about the excitement of games by analyzing pitch-by-pitch and shot-by-shot data, to sports properties and cable companies.

I'm happy with where I'm at, but there's a lot I would've done differently. Holler if you'd like to chat about it at all: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markphillip/

marketgod
Way cool. I remember when this site had scores for games posted and it would show you what channel each game is on depending on your location/provider. Great work!
davej
I'm close with ToDesktop (https://www.todesktop.com/), I've launched quite recently so expect to be there in the next month or two.
_bxg1
Nifty! Elegant pricing model too.
throw03172019
Was really impressed with the flow but I hate being so tied to this. For example, what happens if you go out of business? Now we have 10,000 users on an app we can’t update, etc.
davej
That's actually one of the great things about being bootstrapped and profitable. I can grow naturally and I don't need to scale rapidly and hit huge customer numbers to keep VCs happy.

I'm in this for the long run. Even if 90% of my customers left me tomorrow then I would keep this going as a side gig.

I'm also able to facilitate customers that want to move off the ToDesktop platform to their own (i.e. built in-house) desktop app. Just send me on your binaries and I'll push an auto-update to your customers that gets them onto your new desktop app and your new auto-update platform. I charge $200 once-off for this currently and this feature will never be priced to force people to stay on the platform. The only reason for the charge right now is that it's a manual process so I charge consultancy rates.

throw03172019
Thanks for the response. This definitely helps us think deeper!
Meph504
Do you have a bus factor plan in place?

I. E. If. You are hit by a bus, what happens?

Axsuul
I'm building a SaaS app (getting close to ramen profitable): Trunk @ https://www.trunkinventory.com which helps online sellers sync their inventory in real-time across their different sales channels (i.e. Etsy, Faire, Shopify, Amazon, eBay, etc)
srecio
I built out Pipefile (https://pipefile.com) as a one man operation. Bundle your PGP key into file upload forms to receive end-to-end encrypted files. Embed the upload forms into any html page to receive files without setting up any backend infrastructure.

You can try sending me something at https://pipefile.com/steve

colinbartlett
StatusGator is the status page monitoring service I built. It’s been profitable since about 2016.

Though I very recently took on a partner to try and grow it because I believe it can be more than just “profitable” but perhaps actually a sole income source one day. It’s great to have a “one person” company but I feel it’s even better to have a partner to help inspire and motivate you, especially when it’s a side project and not a full time job.

albydarned
I co-founded Pigeon SMS (https://pigeonsms.com) with my dad just a couple of years ago and we reached profitability just a few months after founding.

We provide business texting services to businesses of all sizes. Some of our customers include a city, vet clinic, glass shop, screen printing firm, boutique retailers, and on and on. Really any business can benefit from adding texting to their communications.

My advice: Pick something that will keep you interested and motivated to come back to when life gets busy.

wayoverthecloud
How do you market to local businesses? Aren't they the least technical people? Congratulations though!
albydarned
It can be difficult for sure. Trial and error mostly.
bhudman
Congrats on the launch. Would you be able to recommend off-net sms providers that you have had good luck with?
albydarned
It really depends on use case. They all have their pros and cons.
therealdrag0
I have a friend who works for ZipWhip which seems like the same sort of space. And they just raised $51 mil, so I guess there's need for this sort of product!
jivings
Two-person but close enough - We're building Leave Me Alone (https://leavemealone.xyz), an app that helps you unsubscribe from spammy mailing lists. Currently at ~$500/month (full stats are public here https://leavemealone.xyz/open)
ksahin
I used your service 2 months ago, thank you sooooo much!
spekulatius2410
awesome you are actually sharing numbers - love it!
dinkydani
Yup we share all of our numbers and we also build in the open and include our users in every step and decision possible :)
idlewords
I run Pinboard by myself and make about $250K/year in revenue, with 97K expenses.
pw
Do you still also run the bed bug registry site?
idlewords
Yeah, I'm working on fixing it right now. The Google maps API pricing change means I have to redo most of it.
pw
Oh, cool. Does it still make you money?
Improvotter
Wow I'm impressed by the revenue for such a site. Congratulations!
frenchie4111
Where does 97k expenses come from, if you don’t mind me asking
wyclif
I expect much of it is co-location, hosting, and dedicated hardware.
idlewords
The two biggest expenses year over year are colocation ($25K/year) and PayPal/ Stripe fees ($11K/year). I pulled the $97K figure from the year I bought Delicious, so it includes a lot of one-time hardware purchases.
danielecook
I’m a Big fan of pin board and it’s simplicity.
bentossell
This may not qualify as SaaS but I built makerpad.co to show people how to build products/businesses without code. Currently $27k over the last month. One person, not my full time gig.

Wtf am I talking about?! I’m basically showing people the power of not needing to code to build something. I built an Airbnb “clone” by linking webflo, Airtable and zapier. Basically trying to show people they can build their first version without the classic “needing a technical cofounder” or “learning to code”. Tools out there right now are insane and can help you get to a place you couldn’t previously.

Okay Lynne is a recent friend and been huge in helping me the last couple weeks.

I did the normal shit of b2c (and still do) but the power of b2b is huge. I flipped my strategy and went from ~10k one month to now 30k (yes got 3.5k more since my initial comment).

lynnetye
I didn't realize you already did $27k this month! That is tremendous and you're only just getting started! GO BEN.
ed
B2B, meaning the deals section? Are those numbers recurring? Awesome business, if so
bentossell
No actually not the deals. Working with companies right now to get the best content hosted on makerpad to show off their platforms and how non technical makers can use those tools to power up their ideas/businesses. Nothing is fully released yet!
rosegarden0
Super interesting! What’s the pricing to have content hosted? Do you make the content?
schappim
How did you market to businesses ?
sauravt
ProductHunt influence ;)
bentossell
I’ve built up an audience around no code building and think I’m one of the first people others think of in this space. I understand the audience as I’m a non technical maker too.
faitswulff
I just looked around. Great content! But how do you monetize a site like this?
mbrameld
Affiliate marketing. Referall kickbacks from the recommended products.
bentossell
No I don’t actually make my money from this
bentossell
I’ve had like 3 referral kickbacks at around 12 dollars each just to be totally transparent ha
bentossell
Companies paying to be listed and collab on some content (not yet released)
owenwil
I run a one-person ‘SaaS’ that delivers morning tech briefings each day for industry insight, without ads, that I wanted to see, called recharged: https://char.gd/recharged. I both write the newsletters + develop the platform behind the scenes that enables seamless community access involved, and our MRR is approximately $2,500/month for about 18 months.

I’ll admit it’s a struggle to properly grow at this point, but I’m trying to figure it out... but it’s been a fun ride so far. Now I’m moving to build the tools I already made for myself that make it easy to build paid content + communities without the developer skills I had to learn to get here... hopefully going into beta soon.

_justirma
I follow your work! If you need a hand on Recharged I'd love to help and keep it live and up.
owenwil
<3 thank you! I'm working out a plan for our next iteration at the moment, but I'll totally let you know if I need help or feedback.
beesmum
I've run a music education site for 10 years (https://www.tonictutor.com). It's been only a very modest success, but it's provided a small amount of revenue that's been relatively steady. I haven't really marketed it much, but I'm planning on putting some time and resources into that once I've finish converting all of the old Flash versions of the games (which is nearly finished!).
mfrye0
BigPicture (https://bigpicture.io) is a solo founder operation. I was the only person for the first couple years before I grew it enough to start hiring.

I don't recommend anyone follow this path now having been through it myself. Being a solo founder is absolutely brutal.