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Ask HN: How to start SaaS or software business?

19 points by chaBha ↗ HN
It looks like there is SaaS for everything you can think of AND something that other consumers or business would pay for. Time management, project management, education courses, ads, no-code dev. You name it and you will find it.

I am good at execution and getting things done. But, I am not sure what to build or where to invest time and money such that it pays off in 6-12 months. I have been involved in backend work and have good knowledge of "how to use" cloud like AWS.

It is said that you scratch your own itch. But, I don't know if that will pay or not to create successful business.

Thoughts on gathering or finding profitable ideas that can scale up to 1-10 MM revenue in 5 years?

21 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 56.3 ms ] thread
verdverm
Surely thinking about how quickly you can make money will distract from building something people love. Not that it will prevent you from making FU money, but I personally think this the wrong way to approach building a company.
HeyLaughingBoy
I have a different philosophy: before you can build something that people love, you need to build something that pays the bills.

Most software isn't loved; it's not even liked. But if it does the job, you can sell it and they will buy it.

HeyLaughingBoy
Sales Safari?

Talk to people outside your field about their problems? There was a guy on a professional machinist's forum where I hang out who simply asked "How can I help you with an IT problem?" and IIRC, the resulting thread is over 20 pages long. He's probably gotten tons of business by simply offering free IT help over the internet.

Go places where programmers aren't!

leon_sbt
Got a link to that thread? A few of my buddies are machine shop owners, and I would love to see what they said.
HeyLaughingBoy
Found it just as I was about to give up

https://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/shop-management-and-ow...

leon_sbt
Thanks for digging that up! I actually remember reading that thread a while back. Most of that thread is "my computer is broken", but their are a couple nuggets of gold in there.
mattmanser
That really is a fantastic thread, thanks for taking the time in digging it up. Guy really knows his stuff and has great customer focus, i.e. patience of a saint :)
achempion
Since you're asking for some sort of advice, take any idea you come up with and validate it.

The only way of validation is getting paid. Don't write any line of code before getting payment.

You can accomplish very much with current available tooling.

If your project requires some sort of implementation, don't spent more than two weeks on it. You could create landing and forms using services as typeform and others. Then gather several hundreds of signups and talk to this people.

The failing rate is high and last thing you want is to spend 2 years on validating your idea.

As a technical founder it'll be hard to avoid hacking right away but the coding skill is required only if you get after validation stage.

Try to come up with idea per day, then at the end of the month pick most promising and validate it.

tinyattackcat
> Don't write any line of code before getting payment. Are you suggesting you ask for pre-payments on your landing page/forms? Is that a thing?
iordachej
Are you an investor? I am curently working on proving a concept for a SaaS that can scale at MM within couple of years.
iordachej
And yet I got -2 points for this. The world is full of envious ppl.
saluki
Just keep your eyes open, an idea will come. Usually it's a pain point for you that you could automate with a web app that provides you value. Most likely it will provide value to others as well.

Build a small version just for you to start, then validate with others being willing to pay for it and it providing them value. Then build it out in to a SaaS.

Check out StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com Podcast

It's a great podcast that answers a lot of your questions.

You can follow Rob Walling along going from Drop Shipping, Job Boards, Invoicing Software, an SEO Tool, then building and existing Drip to forming Tiny Seed.

Lots of great SaaS related content over the years.

For inspiration check out @DHH Startup School Talk from 2008, still relevant today, and entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

You might also like the Build Your SaaS podcast.

02020202
i have been dealing with this for about 15 years now.

all i can say is avoid cloud like a plague and look for stupid-simple-things. even if it does not excite you, those ideas usually work the best. don't try to outsmart people, you will fail. look for simple opportunities. and if you cannot make MVP within 3 months, forget the idea and move on.

pknerd
Can you elaborate _stupid things_ part?
02020202
cool thing - stripe is shit, lets make a better one.

stupid thing - write a shopping list app that will notify me when i am on my way home and near a grocery store

cool thing - lets make a database that does it all, schema is irrelevant

stupid thing - i just want a cheap theme for my wordpress blog that doesn't require me to know programming

cool thing - kafka it too complex, lets make a faster, simpler and better one

stupid thing - did i miss my bus or is it just late?

....just incredibly boring things that won't interest any programmer but ordinary people find useful.

yrrep
Why would you say to avoid cloud like the plague? I was thinking about trying to start something in that domain.
02020202
it brings massive overhead, complexity and time investment in designing and maintaining the infrastructure and the entire build pipeline. instead of working on your business logic/product, you will spend a ton of time on cloud stuff(I wasted an ENTIRE year on this once). it will steer you into wrong direction, technologically. keep in mind that sales and PR people push cloud on you most of the time, not real devs and successful people. not to mention that it is crazy expensive + expenses cannot be precisely known in advance. it's a guessing game. bare metal is king and the argument of maintaining it yourself falls apart when you calculate some basic pricing and find out that after 4 months in cloud you get to own the hardware itself and the money yo usave can pay for multiple sysadmins if you want to.
02020202
ps: you can run monolith or monolith with microsevices just fine, but avoid SoA like cancer. people take soa = microservices, which is just not true. view microservices like cloud functions or cloud run, not as vps a instance.
boghy8823
I subscribed to this weekly newsletter for the past three months https://www.softwareideas.io/

Every week, he finds VC-backed or profitable, upmarket companies that bootstrappers can compete with.

It addresses your question of what to build by looking at big players in different industries and coming up with downmarket opportunities.