Thanks! I read something here on HN recently about how representation matters: essentially that it's important that people are aware of what others in similar circumstances are up to. I hope this post finds some other long-term side-project solo-founder parent SaaS bootstrappers and encourages them to keep going.
This is awesome. Congratulations and best of luck. I remember using it and we communicated (email), about your time in Iraq and how your built[1] Preceden. You upgraded my account while I was toying with few ideas and using it to plan timelines.
I still have our email exchange from back in 2016 - I hope you were able to successfully leverage the eCommerce boom in India that you mentioned. Thanks for saying hey!
Unfortunately, mine didn't work out but the team I led was able to help a well-known brand in India scale one of their ecommerce initiative. I took a 4-member team, and spent about 3 months to help them 3x (I think 4x) their sales powered by the frictionless and sub-minute checkout process, etc.
One of our team wrote few articles about it. Link below which includes a lot of dead links and I need to figure out how to log into Medium and change the details, the redirects etc.
unfortunately it won't work without the APIs because it needs to be part of our product and there the data is constantly being updated dynamically by different actors / processes .
Hey Matt, I can't develop cool looking apps like this. I'm envious.
What I can tell you is that sales people at big software companies never say 'No it can't do that' as an initial conversation. They would say something like, 'I'm sure it could do that. Let's set up a call to get your requirements straight'. He might only need a subset of your features, and the api needed could be trivial. He might have a $moneyisnoobject Corp waiting to pay.
I mean you are completely within your rights to push away non-core users if you want.... but you know when a saas price page has Free, Basic and Enterprise teirs, and the Enterprise one has 'please call' next to it? That is because the price for customization is too embarrassing for both parties to make public!
That's absolutely amazing to see you stick with it for such a long time to get to the point of being self supporting. Very nice, and heartfelt congratulations.
It would be great to see a write-up of the lessons learned over the years, especially those early ones that limited your growth and also of interest would be your views around the long term effect of eco-system and language choices.
> see a write-up of the lessons learned over the years
It would make for a long blog post and no doubt one I'd have to continue updating, hah. I will write it at some point though, thanks for suggesting it.
And thank you for all your thoughtful comments on HackerNews over its history as well as the posts on your blog. You're brilliant and this community is a better place because of your participation in it.
Looking forward to seeing that blog post and if you want a proofreader count me in, email in profile. For every fifty fly-by-night and gone again operations there is one of yours and those are much more valuable lessons than most.
I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask about this as I was very naive at that point in my journey. Launching Preceden was literally posting on HackerNews and hoping for the best.
I would encourage you to join Microconf Connect, a Slack community of software entrepreneurs, where topics like this are discussed often: https://microconf.com/connect. Many of the old Microconf conference presentations are also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicroConf
If I read it correctly, Microconf Connect is for _SaaS_ founders only.
This excludes all small software shops and single-man ops that do conventional desktop software. The community would easily grow 2x if the SaaS restriction is removed.
We wouldn’t “easily grow 2x” if we served every type of software entrepreneur.
We used to cater to all software: mobile apps, desktop, WordPress, etc. and we still have many folks in the community who are non-SaaS. But the focus on SaaS was a spark that dramatically increased growth as it allowed us to optimize everything we offer (content, community, masterminds) on the specific problems SaaS folks face.
We don’t restrict folks who can join based on the type of software, so “restriction” is not the right word to use there. It’s just a focus.
And it was a great choice, allowing us to be the best in the world at what we do (rather than serving a broader market, poorly).
>As the sole breadwinner in our household with 4 young kids, I was not comfortable going full time and merely being ramen profitable or anything close to it.
It takes a lot of balls and willpower to take this plunge. I wish you a lot of success and hope you make it. I'm also the sole breadwinner of my home and it's a lot of responsibility.
Not sure if you remember me but we talked about Lean Designs many years back (back then it was called jMockups). Excited to this next step for you! Congrats and good luck!
Congratulations to sticking to it for such a long time. Given sufficient time any startup can work. The more you know the more competitive you are the better the product.
You love to see it. Matt is a great example of someone who has bootstrapped and built a strong business while mitigating risk for his personal life. Much of the start up dogma tells you this isn't possible, but it is.
I'll write a lessons learned post in the future, thanks for suggesting it.
The decision to go full time now stemmed from a combination of factors: partly financial milestones, partly not having enough time in the day to focus on the things I want to work on, partly burnout (consulting + bootstrapping a SaaS takes a toll long term), partly just ready to enter a new season of my life, partly because I'm excited about the recent developments in AI want want more time to explore that space, partly because I think Preceden still has a ton of room for growth, just to name a few. For every person these factors will be different.
Didn’t downvote you, but i assume that yes, most people here are able to understand that human life is complex, and that we should congratulate people whenever they’re doing something good.
Most people are, fortunately, also able to distinguish between a soldier, his army policy, and the regime ruling over that army at a given time.
I’m not high roading anyone, I’m merely saying I prefer products not built by war criminals. I certainly don’t reap any benefits from what Matt and his fellow soldiers did in Iraq during their illegal war, and even if I did - does that mean I can’t talk about it?
Soldiers sent to war are not automatically war criminals, whether or not the war was legitimate. Your blanket statement suggests that a mechanic, chef, or nurse who was sent to Iraq was a war criminal. You are just wrong.
I think you calling someone a war criminal is way outside of what is legitimate on this forum.
So he can absolutely criticize or even boycott soldiers that invaded iraq, because they have 0 to do with pax americana, and did nothing to protect the 1A and the constitution anyways. I don't get how your comment makes sense otherwise
I don't think blaming the individual soldier is ever a fair choice. Most folks in the army aren't there by first or even second choice. the amount of pro military military people is shockingly low.
to say it another way:
veterans should never be ashamed they are veterans, the government and voters should be ashamed they're creating veterans.
I didn't downvote you but I think equating the Russian attack on Ukraine with the American war on Iraq is probably what earned you the downvotes. Especially because you seem to equate the too based on the extent and number of war crimes. Committing war crimes seems to be the norm, even an expectation in the Russian army. These also seem being denied and never investigated while they are pretty well documented. This doesn't seem to be the case with the US army. (Yes, they did happen, but they seem to happen at a much lower rate, more isolated cases and some of them actually get investigated officially and the perpetrators get sentenced.)
And then let's not forget that the American war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) has been ironically labelled as "democracy export" for a reason. Yes, it didn't work, yes it was probably a bad idea from the start, but at least it wasn't "autocracy export". Which the war on Ukraine is. The goal of the Russian leadership (read: Putin) has been to remove the democratically elected Ukrainian leadership and install a puppet government. This is a bit harder to support than the US narrative of toppling a dictatorship and help the people to start a democracy. (Again, even if the latter was doomed to fail.)
Sure, the Russian soldiers and society were also sold a nice (horror) story about the Ukrainian leadership (or maybe Ukrainians in general) being 'nazi'. You can hear in some captured phone calls from the early days of the war that the soldiers try to explain to their relatives that there are no 'nazis' there just normal people.
On I side note, I would use a product built by a Russian soldier who participated in the war if he made it clear that he didn't want to participate and didn't commit (or maybe even opposed/prevented committing) war crimes.
Matt, this is simply an awesome story. It’s surprisingly common that people take years to get to the point where they can go full-time.
I find your story far more relatable than the “I started a SaaS and reached tons of revenue in one year - and you can too!” stories we are plagued with.
It sounds a lot like many (most?) small/medium companies that take a decade of work to find their footing. You typically don't see them on the front page of HN though.
Thanks for saying so! And yes, for every bootstrapped startup that sees a rocket ship trajectory and makes headlines, there are probably 100 that are struggling to grow. Would love to read more about those journeys.
Honestly I totally agree. Matt, your determination in seeing this through, and the dedication for 13 (!!) years is wildly inspiring in this, and it gives me hope for some of my SaaS dreams.
I love this story and I wish you all the best. It goes to show that everybody has their own pace and journey.
I feel like a lot of people are happy in their work even without a side gig, but it's kind of not cool to say.
I'm totally happy with my role and couldn't be happier and more committed to my current job.
The beautiful thing is that I have my own pace as well on a side gig. After 10 years of thinking and planning I just started on one faithful day with a HN comment 23 weeks ago.
Today my weekly newsletter for remote working parents has 23 newsletter sends and over 100 subscribers (muscle)
LeanDomainSearch has found me so many good product/domain names over the years. Thank you so much for creating it, and best of luck to you with going full time!
This looks like a very nicely polished marketing website and SaaS product. If the creator would be open to sharing, I'd be curious to hear more about whether he's engaged contractors or firms to help with specific types of design over the years. Any lessons learned on that front?
I know there are many services that claim they'll sell you a "custom" logo for $100 or whatever... but assembling a nicely polished marketing site and product that look good together usually isn't as simple as that.
My design skills are alright (see the 2019 screenshot in the post), but it took hiring a designer a few years ago to take it to the next level (see the site today). I found him on Tailwind Discord and have been very fortunate to work with him.
In retrospect I should have found someone much sooner given how important aesthetics are for a visualization tool like Preceden.
Makes sense. Would you be able to share a bit more about how you started off with the designer?
(Background: I'm asking because our SaaS business is at a point where we know it's ready for more polish for both marketing site and web app, but are unclear how much we should budget and whether we should go "all in" by hiring a designer who takes everything as far as CSS, or start with a couple targeted improvements that would be lower risk/budget first.)
I was lucky to find someone who can both design well and implement the changes in the codebase (using Tailwind CSS which I'd highly recommend). You can obviously have two separate people (one to design, one to implement), but if you can find someone who can do both it will simplify things.
For Preceden, we kind of just went page by page converting the old design over to Tailwind, making improvements along the way, and gradually ripping out all of the old CSS that had accumulated over a decade of me working on it. As I built out new features he would help with the design, but he spent the majority of his time improving the existing design.
It sounds like selecting Tailwind helped to make clear the specific skills you were looking to hire for and at what level you'd be working together. Good to know. Thanks for sharing.
The Precedent’s designer here. When I wrote my “for hire” ads, my bullet points were these:
· Typography-based design system with Figma
· Robust CSS with Tailwind CSS
· Straightforward JavaScript with Alpine.js or Stimulus
I also noted that my preferred back-end language and framework were Ruby and Rails (on which Preceden is built).
So being clear, specific, and knowing some solid technologies and design/code tactics helped me find someone like Matt, who has been a very good collaborator these past few years.
It was posted on Haker News (Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?), Reddit (r/forhire
r/DesignJobs r/freelance_forhire), and Tailwind Discord.
I am curious to hear how you start with new clients like this. Do you identify one task to do together with a very well defined scope and a fixed cost? Do you just get started on an hourly basis and whether it's working well together?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadThis is awesome. Congratulations and best of luck. I remember using it and we communicated (email), about your time in Iraq and how your built[1] Preceden. You upgraded my account while I was toying with few ideas and using it to plan timelines.
Nice stumbling on it again there.
1. https://mattmazur.com/2016/01/04/building-a-startup-in-45-mi...
One of our team wrote few articles about it. Link below which includes a lot of dead links and I need to figure out how to log into Medium and change the details, the redirects etc.
https://medium.com/alaris-prime/e-commerce-case-study-buildi...
But it needs to be programmatically accessible in react (js lib) and of course it needs to function very smoothly with large number of events.
Good luck going full time I see a need in this exact space !
Here's the relevant post on Preceden's public roadmap if you care to give it an upvote: https://roadmap.preceden.com/b/y0ge5xve/feature-ideas/api
Hope it winds up being a good fit even without an API.
unfortunately it won't work without the APIs because it needs to be part of our product and there the data is constantly being updated dynamically by different actors / processes .
What I can tell you is that sales people at big software companies never say 'No it can't do that' as an initial conversation. They would say something like, 'I'm sure it could do that. Let's set up a call to get your requirements straight'. He might only need a subset of your features, and the api needed could be trivial. He might have a $moneyisnoobject Corp waiting to pay.
I mean you are completely within your rights to push away non-core users if you want.... but you know when a saas price page has Free, Basic and Enterprise teirs, and the Enterprise one has 'please call' next to it? That is because the price for customization is too embarrassing for both parties to make public!
It would be great to see a write-up of the lessons learned over the years, especially those early ones that limited your growth and also of interest would be your views around the long term effect of eco-system and language choices.
It would make for a long blog post and no doubt one I'd have to continue updating, hah. I will write it at some point though, thanks for suggesting it.
And thank you for all your thoughtful comments on HackerNews over its history as well as the posts on your blog. You're brilliant and this community is a better place because of your participation in it.
Looking forward to seeing that blog post and if you want a proofreader count me in, email in profile. For every fifty fly-by-night and gone again operations there is one of yours and those are much more valuable lessons than most.
I would encourage you to join Microconf Connect, a Slack community of software entrepreneurs, where topics like this are discussed often: https://microconf.com/connect. Many of the old Microconf conference presentations are also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicroConf
This excludes all small software shops and single-man ops that do conventional desktop software. The community would easily grow 2x if the SaaS restriction is removed.
We used to cater to all software: mobile apps, desktop, WordPress, etc. and we still have many folks in the community who are non-SaaS. But the focus on SaaS was a spark that dramatically increased growth as it allowed us to optimize everything we offer (content, community, masterminds) on the specific problems SaaS folks face.
We don’t restrict folks who can join based on the type of software, so “restriction” is not the right word to use there. It’s just a focus.
And it was a great choice, allowing us to be the best in the world at what we do (rather than serving a broader market, poorly).
It takes a lot of balls and willpower to take this plunge. I wish you a lot of success and hope you make it. I'm also the sole breadwinner of my home and it's a lot of responsibility.
Not sure if you remember me but we talked about Lean Designs many years back (back then it was called jMockups). Excited to this next step for you! Congrats and good luck!
More about that tool and other lessons learned for anyone interested: https://mattmazur.com/2016/07/08/a-long-overdue-lean-designs...
Is your primary reason to go full-time based on reaching a financial target or is it because you have more ideas for future now?
The decision to go full time now stemmed from a combination of factors: partly financial milestones, partly not having enough time in the day to focus on the things I want to work on, partly burnout (consulting + bootstrapping a SaaS takes a toll long term), partly just ready to enter a new season of my life, partly because I'm excited about the recent developments in AI want want more time to explore that space, partly because I think Preceden still has a ton of room for growth, just to name a few. For every person these factors will be different.
Question for other HN users - would you use a product built by an officer of the Russian army who was part of the war in Ukraine?
Edit: Those downvoting me, did I say anything that is not true?
Most people are, fortunately, also able to distinguish between a soldier, his army policy, and the regime ruling over that army at a given time.
Would you blindly congratulate a participant in the Bucha massacre on the launch of their new app?
Would you congratulate a former ISIS member?
Surely even the most amoral person on HN would draw the line somewhere?
I mean, neither was her choice? Soldiers go where they are sent.
Or do you think people shouldn't join the armed forces of a country in case a future regime deploys them in a way they disagree with?
It's easy to highroad everyone when you sit back reaping the benefits of what others have done.
But yes, you certainly can talk about your misguided views! And people can call out your misguided views as well!
All because of the 1A which is protected from outside forces with the strength of the US military.
Soldiers have little to do with policies such as the endless Middle East wars.
Your moral crusade should be aimed at the defense contractors and their congress buddies.
It's not the soldiers choosing proxy wars in Ukraine or the Middle East, it's congress.
I think you calling someone a war criminal is way outside of what is legitimate on this forum.
If you do want to see my response about the endless wars:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34249354
But comment you replied to is about the 1A and the military that makes that possible.
to say it another way:
veterans should never be ashamed they are veterans, the government and voters should be ashamed they're creating veterans.
And then let's not forget that the American war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) has been ironically labelled as "democracy export" for a reason. Yes, it didn't work, yes it was probably a bad idea from the start, but at least it wasn't "autocracy export". Which the war on Ukraine is. The goal of the Russian leadership (read: Putin) has been to remove the democratically elected Ukrainian leadership and install a puppet government. This is a bit harder to support than the US narrative of toppling a dictatorship and help the people to start a democracy. (Again, even if the latter was doomed to fail.)
Sure, the Russian soldiers and society were also sold a nice (horror) story about the Ukrainian leadership (or maybe Ukrainians in general) being 'nazi'. You can hear in some captured phone calls from the early days of the war that the soldiers try to explain to their relatives that there are no 'nazis' there just normal people.
On I side note, I would use a product built by a Russian soldier who participated in the war if he made it clear that he didn't want to participate and didn't commit (or maybe even opposed/prevented committing) war crimes.
I find your story far more relatable than the “I started a SaaS and reached tons of revenue in one year - and you can too!” stories we are plagued with.
I feel like a lot of people are happy in their work even without a side gig, but it's kind of not cool to say.
I'm totally happy with my role and couldn't be happier and more committed to my current job.
The beautiful thing is that I have my own pace as well on a side gig. After 10 years of thinking and planning I just started on one faithful day with a HN comment 23 weeks ago.
Today my weekly newsletter for remote working parents has 23 newsletter sends and over 100 subscribers (muscle)
Here's a link to his site for anyone interested: https://thursdaydigest.com/
I know there are many services that claim they'll sell you a "custom" logo for $100 or whatever... but assembling a nicely polished marketing site and product that look good together usually isn't as simple as that.
In retrospect I should have found someone much sooner given how important aesthetics are for a visualization tool like Preceden.
(Background: I'm asking because our SaaS business is at a point where we know it's ready for more polish for both marketing site and web app, but are unclear how much we should budget and whether we should go "all in" by hiring a designer who takes everything as far as CSS, or start with a couple targeted improvements that would be lower risk/budget first.)
For Preceden, we kind of just went page by page converting the old design over to Tailwind, making improvements along the way, and gradually ripping out all of the old CSS that had accumulated over a decade of me working on it. As I built out new features he would help with the design, but he spent the majority of his time improving the existing design.
· Typography-based design system with Figma · Robust CSS with Tailwind CSS · Straightforward JavaScript with Alpine.js or Stimulus
I also noted that my preferred back-end language and framework were Ruby and Rails (on which Preceden is built).
So being clear, specific, and knowing some solid technologies and design/code tactics helped me find someone like Matt, who has been a very good collaborator these past few years.
It was posted on Haker News (Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?), Reddit (r/forhire r/DesignJobs r/freelance_forhire), and Tailwind Discord.
I am curious to hear how you start with new clients like this. Do you identify one task to do together with a very well defined scope and a fixed cost? Do you just get started on an hourly basis and whether it's working well together?
Preceden has been sitting at the top of page 2 for "timeline maker" and related terms on Google for about a decade which is... fun.