Ask HN: Anyone here built successful SaaS/startup just for money?

I figure most people that have done it and are doing it are doing it 'just for money'

Or 'mostly or primarily for money'

So all the folks on the indie hackers podcast, for instance

In theory Yes. In fact, making money and more importantly: financial Freedom is one of the biggest motivations for starting your own business.

However, I personally am not sure if you can just do a business only for money. Because in practice, you would have to deal with customers, employees/contractors, product, sales, marketing, support tickets, servers going down and a lot of other things that comes as part of running a SAAS business. If you are not learning on a daily basis and investing in knowledge which requires some level of interest in things, you at some point would most likely crash and burn.

So my advice is to be very motivated by money. Nothing wrong with that. But be motivated with other things as well as building a successful business is a journey and a career and that requires a lot of other motivations. For example, building something that you really like. Solving problems that you can help your customers tremendously. Those things can add a lot more to your ability to make lot more money.

I run my own SAAS business and I am not just motivated by money even though it is probably the biggest factor for sure and I am not going to sugarcoat it. But if you look at it, I am running the business because other than financial freedom, I also wanted to create something of my own, put a few people together providing a good product to customers (it really excites me) and many other motivations. I don't know if I can wake up every day and just be excited that I am making money. At some point, you need other things to motivate you.

Yes. In particular because you’ll be more concerned with sales than engineering. And in the end all businesses are sales first.

Find your customers, then build whatever thing they want.

Also, this is sort of a contrived question. No one starts a business saying, “I don’t care about money, I just want to do X.” Because if that we’re true, just go be an employee. It’s much easier to do.

The reverse would be less common, not the question you’re asking.

For example someone had some exceptional product idea they really enjoyed working on, and they happened to stumble on the right people to fund it as a lifestyle business or something greater.

No one starts a business, files the paperwork, opens the bank accounts, purchases the insurance, finds the customers or clients, does the work, hires the laborers, and says, “I didn’t do this for the money.”

Anyone who says otherwise is trying to push “culture” or some other nonsense on you because they want to command your labor.

Wanted to get rid of other's money - I built https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor to get rid of knowledge accumulation due to web frameworks. Once I did it and shared, I thought more such tools will come.

Patiently watching the community - no real good tool is solving a real problem

If good money and just not breaking the law are two requirements, then looking into certain niches might not be a bad idea.

Google calls these niches "sensitive" https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3016445?hl=en.

Here's an example, an online poker statistics SaaS making $2.9M Gross/Yr https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/50471-saas-recurri...

I did, and it boosted my confidence 10x at my day job as a PM.

I still work full-time at another startup (again, I like making money) but now I have a good safety net to fall back on (if required) and I know my opinions can lead to successful outcomes.

Don't you know that you must be motivated by ANYTHING except money? For some reason, money is the only thing that people say that you're not supposed to be motivated by. (being sarcastic)

Yes, you can be motivated solely by money. This is not to say that you can't be motivated by other things, too.

As a matter of fact, besides the elite in a society, most people are motivated solely by money. Example: You live in some crappy little town in the midwest. You have a high school diploma and that's it. There's only one decent employer within 200 miles that has decent jobs and wages. Somehow, you find yourself as a general manager and make $120,000 per year. You have a family with 5 children, in a 5 bedroom home with 5 acres, and you can't move because your wife's parents live nearby and have Alzheimers, so wife needs to stay in that town. You hate your job, can't stand it. But you stay there, at that job, because of the money. And, what are you going to do, move to the Bay Area and pay the $500K you sold your house for and buy a 1 bedroom condo that all 7 family members and the parents are going to live in?

And that's people who are doing well in a situation like that. There's all kinds of people working at McDonalds and Walmart solely for the money. Probably most of the USA.

Being happy in your job and motivated by it and fulfilled by it: first world problems of the elite in the first world.

So, yes, it is ok to be motivated only by money.

And I tell you what. If you work in a business that is fulfilling and you make $25K per year, but start selling cookware, which is, eh, average in your opinion, but start making $10 million per year, somehow, most people are going to start liking cookware a lot more and really get into it. For some mysterious reason.

And remember, you never want to be the CEO of a company. No you do not. You might have to start off that way, but eventually you should always hire a CEO or general manager if it is a smaller company. You want to be the Chair of the Board. Like Warren Buffet. He's not at Geico every day answering the phones or doing the actuarial tables. He just owns the stocks. I know a LOT of business owners that only come in for an hour or two each week, and let their GM do the grind.

Probably 99% of non-tech professionals start business to make money. Do you think your plumber started his business thinking of making the world a better place? Highly unlikely except for HIS own world.

Yes, do it for the money.. it’s OK.

You need to differentiate between making an income and making a profit.

SaaS is a resource sharing problem. If you can share the resources between different customers effectively it would be possible to make a profit once you scale up efficiently.

The technical problem is to build the software to be hyper efficient and scalable. The business problem is to acquire enough repeat customers.

Most startups are focused on speed to market or investor driven growth. Neither of which really helps the core problems

I am the opposite. I left a profitable business despite the money. I wanted to do something that for myself, developing my skills and satisfying.

I've built several successful SaaS/DaaS startups since I quit my last job back in 2005; mostly just for freedom. (money too I guess)

Might be worth stepping back and thinking about why you want to make money. Money is a store of opportunity but useless in itself. If you were to be shipwrecked with no hope of rescue would you rather be washed up with a cargo container of dollar bills or camping gear?

So what is it you really want? What are you hoping the money will buy you?

If you start something but are unlikely to make good money, and your only motivator is to make money, then it will be though. Start your sales/marketing at day one, eg. try to sell your SaaS before you start developing, have at least two customers at day one, don't have to be paying customers (unless you are more of a consult), but they should at least be committed to beta testing. I spent 3 years making a product, which turned out to be impossible to sell...

It depends on your personality. Some people can live without a calling. I can’t.

What helps me a lot is to review the Ikigai attributed framework regularly and to think which of the dimensions is important for me and who I do currently along them:

1. What are you good at?

2. What do you enjoy doing?

3. What is paid money for?

4. What is good for the planet?

My focus is on 1-3.

if you could cure disease just for the money I don't think anyone would hold it against you.

Most of the time if it work you are making something people want, thus money is a proxy for usefulness to someone.

I think that money is often a poor motivator past some point, it’s like food, once you are satiated food loose it’s interest. But making something useful stay and keep on growing.

Paul Graham said in an interview the reason he built his first startup was for money.

Honestly though, as someone who focused on money the first ten years of their career, your best bet is to grind leetcode and get into FAANG or become an excellent sales person. You’ll make more money in 90% of cases then starting your own business.

I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with focusing on money. I’m at the point in my life where I care more about time than money, but saving up 7 years worth of California adtech money then moving to a low cost of living country gave me a different perspective.

My question to you….. did you START with passion drive enthusiasm and a sense of inherent drive? Has that now been replaced with the desire to succeed primarily for money?

If yes than that’s fine.

Maybe it’s even good, or better than your previous motivations.

You’re on the right path. The thing about “making the world better” is that it isn’t getting better, no matter what we do. However, you can still make your own world better, and an important part of that is money. Not just for yourself, but for your descendants as well.

Money is the end goal, but status[1], pleasure and upgrading my skills are necessary side goals. “From a million dollars, everything is your passion” (Joel on Software).

[1] Moderate status, I have humor telling everyone “I’m a CEO” (like Zuckerberg), given I only have 2 employees and had none for long.

I abhorre companies who pretend their IT will change humanity. Participating to the economy is already a great satisfaction for me, because the sum of our work built a civilization. In fact, I have ads in my office with the stupid phrases of competitors: “We advance humanity”, “Building the future since 125 years” etc.

I’ve built a product on the Atlassian Marketplace and it was a great place to innovate. Perhaps it still is, but Atlassian deprecates frameworks as soon as your stack is up, and their new Forge thingy is too locked down to build any smart app.

I decided to leave my job as a CEO of a midsized company to build my own business. Although I always wanted to create my own innovative product, I decided to swim with the wales - big software vendors - to add (and catch) some value there. The reason: quick profits. That plan worked out quite well. However, money is like pure water. You need it to be alive and if you're having none you want all of it. But if you're having a steady inflow that's big enough, one day you won't want to go the extra mile for another glass. You want Pepsi instead! Okay, just kidding, you want Coke most likely... However, you'll be better of working on something that fascinates you instead of just going for the money. Maybe you're good in starting things up but you hate to keep them going. Why not concentrate on the first part then? Build & sell. Maybe you hate customer development and just want to get a high income managing stuff and doing politics. Apply for a job at an enterprise then. Do it like a scientist: formulate a hypothesis about what really makes you happy and what system you have in place to realize that happiness. Collect evidence, optimize the system. Maybe read "Business Model You" and "Design The Life That You Love". At least I'm doing that now to figure out what the next years of my life should be about. Not just money I guess. Money often comes at the intersection of chance and excellence. And excellence often comes from something aligned to your talents & interests.

Yes, of course. Money is the goal of the business because the business isn't the goal of life.

I've always approached work as a way to maximize my free time, meaning I want to extract the maximum value from as little work as possible. The goal being to spend the rest of the time doing the fun stuff.

SaaS is a great way to deal with this because once the product is built you can ramp down your involvement in it to nearly zero. Other gigs I've had, when I stop doing work, they stop sending me money. SaaS doesn't have that problem. I can answer a few emails in the morning then if the sun is shining I can head off and do whatever I like with the day. Problem solved.

So yes, the business is all about extracting the most money for the least effort. Because I have more important things to do.

Money is a good motivator but can’t be the only one, in my opinion. Because you need something to keep you going even when there is no money coming in yet, or it stops flowing (e.g. you lose a large client).

Something not in the comments yet - many people who are motivated by money build businesses around money, the finance sector.

It's a way to stick to what you're interested in, and makes it fairly easy to 'keep score' if your goals are measured in $€¥£. I get the impression too that being close to flows of money often gives good opportunities to make a cut.

There’s nothing wrong about that, but if you crunch the numbers - or look at the results of people who did - you’ll see that from a purely cashflow perspective, founding a startup is probably not a good idea compared to a traditional career in existing enterprises.