If you’re not pushing code/changes the likelihood of incidents is significantly less. Also, not having a few enterprise contracts that make up most of the revenue, helps ease customer support load.
Do you know what a typical enterprise contract for a nice tool like this could go for? I have an open source saas tool in a different niche but so far the biggest contract I have is 500$ per month and that's for companies who need a lot of customisations, a very white glove service and a few days o work to morph the tool onto exactly what it is they want (typically via plugin so changes are easily manageable). One one hand it feels great to charge 500$ per month but then you sometime see numbers from companies like gitlab who are able to charge 100x that or even more, it's very hard to know how much to charge for something in the b2b sass space and I have that feeling that 1 large enterprise customer is the only thing you need in some spaces to sustain a company of 1 or even 2 that are not aiming for unicorn level
For any enterprise customer, I would recommend to increase their annual fees by two times the rate of inflation (or more if you like). Also: Ask yourself if you can afford to lose some customers during this process.
GitLabs pricing is hilariously, insanely, astronomically high. I'd love to move our org off BitBucket the GitLab, but it's just absolutely not possible, given their pricing.
One man army apps are generally dead simple to maintain and bug-fix. You write all the code, so when someone pings you with a problem you know exactly what caused it without any need to check for anything. I’ve maintained apps like that for years and have sometimes pushed a code change directly on the GitHub app on the phone and just checking if the site is fixed after.
Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete - thus you actually get fewer bugs. In my experience most issues in software come because the engineer misunderstood the requirements that someone else wrote anyway.
> Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete
This is so true. To me, finishing writing the code means releasable code. I have done the testing along the way.
How do you do to get alerted of your service going down when:
- you are in the wilderness, ouside or with little cell coverage
- drunk and dancing in a wedding with music at full blast
These are just 2 small examples out of many others. Also it means you need to stay connected when taking a plane, be able to stop and/or swap drivers if your are in a long driving trip so that you can fix your service in a rest area or while your partner is driving, etc.
I am pretty sure outages are very rare but if that happens the day your are out of cell coverage and unable to react, you might lose a lot of trust from your customers.
I am also suprised he relies on only one hosting service. I would have thought you might not want to have everything in the same basket.
Even Google has outages sometimes. The chances of an outage happening at that exact moment when you are "drunk and dancing at a wedding" are probably lower than "catastrophic deployment failure at FAANG, multi-hour outage", especially because you are certainly not deploying any changes at that time. And if the outage is due to a third-party dependency failing then you can blame it on them and there's not much you could do even if you were online anyway.
The most important part is understanding that downtimes are not a problem!
Cloudflare is again down and your service is not available for an hour? You cant do anything. And nobody unsubscribes.
Most downtimes are because another service is down and you cant do anything.
Sometimes its really your issue. Your service is down for an entire day? Some customers may be pissed at the moment. But in the end they dont care if you are not a critical service - like this one.
Learning: Downtimes are not an issue. When such a message pops up just ignore it and look at it when you have time. This is strange first as we try to be perfect. But the world will continue to turn.
Keep in mind that 95% downtime happens when you deploy things or change configuration settings.
If I am drunk dancing in the woods as a solo operator no one is doing config changes on my servers.
The remaining 5% downtime like internet connection to the server facility, solar flares, UFO taking over the world - I would not able to do anything about anyway, would have to wait until it goes away.
Yes, I agree entirely. The amount of times that I've thought a particular service I've made is "reliable" because of great uptime for 2-3 years (with no changes), that I do a small innocuous change and cause some issues really makes me remember this.
The most common issues I have with long term projects are small code/config changes (#1 by a ridiculous degree), then way below is drives filling up and then way below that is actual hardware failure.
Drives filling up are often the most annoying to fix as they cause very odd user facing problems. Just fixed this week an old wordpress site that I spent over 2 hours trying to fix, trying everything, before I realised the mySQL database was full. It turns out if a mysql db is full the provider revokes insert privs on the user and wp login will just go in a loop back to the login page if it can't write to the database. No errors on the UI :(.
Can attest to this. Having a mental model of the code in your head because you are both the architect and the builder makes maintenance way easier. Still not always easy, but at least way easier in comparison to not having this mental model. After some years of developing this way it still feels as a continuous head start.
Not OP, but it is something that I've had to deal with. I essentially need to be within X hours of my laptop and a solid internet connection, where X is the maximum acceptable downtime.
I'd love to travel to a remote island, or do a 2 week hike out of cell service but it's difficult. The odds are incredibly low that downtime occurs in that window, but Murphy's Law and my anxiety won't allow it. The pros greatly outweigh the cons though. While I can't do those remote trips, I can still travel wherever else and just ignore things unless there's a downtime alert or an urgent support ticket.
- Extensive FAQs to let people help themselves first
- Vacation: take laptop along, check emails every couple days (but I haven’t tried remote vacation without internet ever)
Generally speaking: outsiders vastly overestimate the support burden of a one-man business. Maybe I’m lucky, but I only receive 2-3 emails per day with 25k active users.
People who don't have experience running servers imagine that you have to baby sit the servers like every 5 mins something happens.
In reality if you don't deploy new version or don't change config or don't post your product to HN server will be there simply running.
In big companies you might have bunch of people doing config changes all the time on different levels and you might never know when someone will break something you rely on.
That's the trade-off of going alone – laptop travels with me, and I cannot leave cell-phone coverage area for too long.
Also there have been times when monitoring alerts start blaring at 3AM, and there's no more sleep that night. Thankfully does not happen very often :-)
It really is that easy. The trade-offs are no less annoying then answering customers emails or calls. In some cases you don't even have any sort of "checking in" arrangements if you've demonstrated good profitability.
Like I'm not sure why you are so upset and sarcastic here. I get that the author doesn't care and thats fine. But there are already many scaling their existing revenues coming in and then tradeoff is small bit of your equity for 100x MRR which is common with SaaS where multiplies in its sales pipelines is very easy once you've identified where your customers are!
I think they're being sarcastic because reducing the tradeoff to "a small bit of your equity" in exchange for "100x MRR" is misleading, to the extent that it reads as sarcastic ignorance.
FWIW, I vouched your original comment because I think your comment represents an authentic view shared by other people on HN / in tech.
My question for you: how do you price the stress-potential of hiring, managing, and firing / being fired by (1) a board (2) employees (3) cofounders / other executives; each with their own set of competing incentives and accompanied principal-agent problems?
It's certainly not zero. For many people, it's more expensive than the hypothetical marginal increase in MRR.
All those things you listed are natural result of adding more minds to an organization and cannot be modelled.
But I will concede that you do give up some freedom as a result of having to police and regulate individuals in the best interest of the company. ex) James Damore
The author's end solution goes against all common HN wisdom (!)
This is the way things should work. There should be millions of email senders and receivers, not just 32 mafiosas (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, MailChimp, etc).
You need good IP and set all the certs and whatnot. But that is mostly do and forget, apart from refreshing certs once a year.
Never had an issue with it, emails get delivered fine.
The notes on self-hosting[1], from somebody making $14k/month relying on Maddy, says it pretty realistically. The author goes into a fair amount of detail covering what he did and it sounds pretty simple compared to what it was ten years ago.
I'm not sure zealotry is the best way to push back against conventional wisdom, but otoh the parent comment didn't sound zealous to me.
In fact the more I read about Maddy[2] the more it seems to simplify running a mail server compared to when I did it back in the day. I mean you still have to worry about landing an IP address with a bad reputation but it takes care of soooo much of the rest of it.
Wow, this reads almost as my story. Similar goals, similar time frames, even the hosting provider and the payment processor we use is the same. I have to contact my new-found twin!
Absolutely living the dream! Being a sustainable one man SaaS is what I'd ultimately love to be, but not only do I have no ideas about what to SaaS, I highly doubt I'd have the drive to follow through if I did.
Kudos to you, and to another 9 years!
Also I'm stealing the term Hobbit software, talk about comfy.
Inspired beyond belief. Personally I'd rather commit suicide than work for the slave drivers at apple and google who screwed my life over then gave me jobs proving their guilt.
Sure, but Narhem's comment read as if only self-employment and Big Tech exists. Most developers are employed at smaller firms and are living comfortable lives and don't feel overwhelmingly exploited.
Personally, I would love to be self-employed. But I am addicted to stability and am afraid of sales and sadly can't see myself in that role ever.
I really respect your choice to optimize for balance and enjoyment.
My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!"
Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day!
When I was a corporate engineer, I would get the sunday scaries every week and find any excuse to push back bedtime another hour. But now, I wake up excited and energized to work on a project I love... and maybe someday I'll give myself permission to do that less than 7 days a week.
Anyway, I digress.
I'm so happy to hear your SaaS is going strong after 9 years. Cheers! And here's to 9 more!
Useful and important certainly I agree, but it is not blocking you in your work if the SaaS provider goes down (unlike a payment provider, a hosting company, a CRM, etc…)
I'm absolutely convinced that burnout is a function of spending time on things you loathe to do. Not how much time you spend on something you love doing.
Most people I know that actually work all-the-time, not self-proclaimed "I work X hour weeks people that say it to sound 'cool'" people. Never have a burnout.
Most of those people also go on extended vacations of say 5-7 weeks. But still work 2-3 hours every day.
Burnout seems much more common in the average worker that only works a 9-5.
Can confirm, I work a 9-5 and have absolutely had projects where writing code felt like pulling teeth and I very much experienced burnout as a consequence of that.
Even now I have a project where I have to fix a bunch of hastily written code and while I’m making progress and it’ll eventually be fine, it’s quite unsatisfying.
The commonality of burnout in some form to full burnout seems to be roughly 75% for employees[1] and roughly 70% for executives[2] and 25% ~ 75% for entrepreneurs[3].
Yeah, I don't know. If I love playing guitar, doing it 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, is going to get old. At some point it becomes counterproductive. Sometimes I sit in front of a screen, and I WANT to do something, excited even, but my brain is just not sharp enough.
With coding, it's also a matter of quality of work. You need to step back so you can look at your work with a fresh perspective, and oh, there are ALWAYS horrors you will find, the ones you created when tired.
That's a match for my experience so far. Never could have worked this hard for someone else.
Having full creative control, uncapped upside potential, and truly enjoying the work make it a lot easier to do every day.
As a long-term goal, I would like to restore better work/life balance.
But first, I'm trying to make hay while the sun shines, to hit escape velocity from corporate work permanently. Now that I've tasted freedom, I really don't want to be dragged back...regardless of the outcome with my current business.
To me, burnout is putting large amounts of mental and emotional energy into an activity where you don't have much agency on how it is done, or the outcome. That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life. The actual amount of work leading to burnout is only a small component IMO.
Spot on. You don’t get burnout from boring tedious work. That’s a completely different form of exhaustion.
> That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life.
Yeah but it’s not at all limited to traditional work. A common source of burnout is family issues. People burn out taking care of others, especially someone with psychological or substance abuse problems. Or co-dependence, terminal illnesses. Those things can become worse by trying harder, and that’s a potent recipe for burnout.
That’s an important point. Stress is a key contributor to burnout. It’s very plausible that working 5 unstressed hours 7 days a week doesn’t lead to burnout, while the same amount of work that is stressful and leaves you think about work all day even “off the clock” does lead you to burn out.
Not an expert or anything, but when I looked into burnout it was predicted by lack of expected reward. So there's two things you can change. The expectation or the reward.
This matches siblings comments where employees experience burnout more probably because employees are rarely rewarded for their best work. But executives and entrepreneurs are.
I suppose even if the reward is intangible that protects from burnout.
Until they are not. The most promising entrepreneurial project can take an unexpected turn south, and if you’ve worked yourself past the burnout threshold at that point it can be hard to come back.
> If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!
A company, by definition, is a group of people. Of course it is possible to register company and never hire employees, but it is not relevant now. The point is when you say "the company stand still" it effectively meaning "I am standing still". Either normalize it for yourself, or hire someone)
That's a skill you can work on. You can also progressively structure your business so that you never need to be working at a given time.
It took a me few years of observing what brings my attention back you work and what controls my schedule the most, and many little practices to deal with that. Now the thing runs itself, and I can take much longer vacations. It was worth the effort.
Really intrigued by how he got into this: “I thought I could do it just as well and cheaper,” effectively trading product market fit issues for direct competition.
That's how essentially 99% of businesses get started. The obsession with PMF and being "unique" is a very strange affectation specific to software startups.
I really doubt "literally" every software you used or worked for has multiple competitors doing the "exact" same thing. VC money can temporarily prop up multiple competitors doing the same thing, but over time, winners definitely spring up.
A lot of software that on the surface does the "exact same thing" often has different nuances, either to the business or the product that makes them appeal to different niches in the market.
Understanding the nuances and exploiting the market niche is your only goal when starting a business. It's not something you ever do or think about when working on software, but people who strike it out on their own quickly realize that simply building is not enough, you MUST give people a good reason to use your software. Just because you don't see or understand the nuances, does not mean they are not there.
I can’t think of a single software that does not have fierce competition. Just today, YouTube, slack, chrome, Claude, burpsuite, interm, obsidian, nest, outlook, Zillow, AWS, cloudflare,GitHub, Roborock, jetbrains.
They could all be replaced and do 90% of the job immediately and a week later figure out the last 10%.
As as for work, coinbase is not the only exchange, square is one of many, meta is another social media site.
> You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper.
I don't think you have to have a unique selling point all the times. You can make an exact product as the market leader and layer on top a distribution that you own or you sell the product to a underserved groups. It will work too. In fact, this way of doing business happens a lot to non software products.
> Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately.
In theory? Maybe.
In reality? Your scale and delivery depend on the competence of your devs and your processes and there's a very good chance you could do it better than all the big companies from your garage as a solo dev if it has a relatively small feature set.
Being unique is important if you actually want to dominate the market. A product like his has captured a piece of the pie, but someone with equal distribution can easily eat into that since he has no moat.
His moat is his price. And it absolutely is a moat because most bigger competitors would not bother competing in the segment with even lower prices, as there’d be no upside
His moat is a combination of pricing + cost structure + time spent to cumulate the customer base.
If someone were to enter the market and try to take his business, they will have to consider if their conditions can result in the same offerings. I don't think it's easy to match the same offerings.
Indie hackers frequently think they can build tools like this in a month (hence the "I could build that in a weekend" trope). But making something that actually works well takes time (that this founder has taken).
What if he doesn't actually want to dominate the market?
The idea of an "economic moat" comes from Warren Buffett[1] and it was/is part of his investing philosophy to look for companies with some sort of unique feature which allows them to dominate markets and create effective monopolies on their particular niche. It makes sense in that context but it doesn't necessarily apply everywhere.
What if you're just trying to create a business that gives you a good lifestyle and you're not looking to dominate? Maybe the market is big enough that if you just take a piece of it that's plenty. There are plenty of businesses out there that are offering a product that is one of a range but the market is large enough to sustain multiple offerings.
Not everyone needs a moat because not everyone is trying to build a castle.
[1] I believe he first used it here in his shareholder letter where he describes GEICO's low costs as creating a moat that competitors couldn't cross. May have been earlier but most people credit the invention of the term to him anyway https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2016ltr.pdf
>What if he doesn't actually want to dominate the market?
Agreed.
>What if you're just trying to create a business that gives you a good lifestyle and you're not looking to dominate? Maybe the market is big enough that if you just take a piece of it that's plenty. There are plenty of businesses out there that are offering a product that is one of a range but the market is large enough to sustain multiple offerings.
Yes. In fact, the majority of businesses in the world are probably this way.
>Not everyone needs a moat because not everyone is trying to build a castle.
That's a brilliant line and metaphor. Gonna steal and share it whenever and wherever I can. Thanks.
It depends a lot on if you have any competitors that do want to dominate the market and could undercut you on price or overclass you with features. It's fine not to want a castle but you should have a plan for when the enemy army comes by.
I thought it was Benjamin Graham, who's most famous pupil was Warren Buffet. I'll have to look it up when I get back. Right now I'm in the woods, drunk, in a tent in a rainstorm with nothing to do but HN and without a care if my SaaS is up or not (change freeze since 2 weeks ago).
It's not "strange" nor an "affectation". Most software startups are consciously trying to innovate, create a new product that didn't exist before. That's a perfectly valid thing to try and do.
The fact that it's not what most new businesses try to do is true, but doesn't mean anything. 99% of people who go to university don't do it to create new science, but 1% eventually go the academic route and do create new science (hopefully). That's not an affectation, it's just a different goal.
Although I don’t disagree, the conception of the company was he found an industry and decided to undercut it. Raising prices might be a risk here, since his customers are (presumably) more price conscious
Small businesses that actually find a market and turn a profit live or die on reputation. I have a feeling that 2x the price (even incrementally over time) would burn a lot of goodwill.
But there is a middle ground. As long as your operating costs don't rise precipitously for whatever reason, you can keep your existing customers on their current pricing and give new customers your new higher price.
> Increasing your pricing is the #1 way to grow revenue and weed out customers who abuse customer support.
Unlikely with businesses like this. This business model is to offer a budget alternative to the big name services that doesn’t have the same level of support and reliability (it admits not having failover, for example) to customers who are okay with that in exchange for the lower price.
Once you start raising prices significantly, it no longer becomes the budget option. Customers may not churn right away, but growth would slow substantially as people started comparing to the full-featured mainstream services at similar price points.
The common startup wisdom is that raising prices dramatically is a magic wand to improve your customer base and grow your revenue, but that doesn’t work in the budget domain.
For customers who outgrow the 1000 check limit I do offer custom plans where the price and the limits grow proportionally - 2000 checks for $160/mo etc.
Why does he need to grow revenue if it's already supporting him and growing slowly but surely enough to where he can spend time of stuff that really matters instead of just making more money.
> Web servers upgraded to Hetzner’s AX42 (AMD 8700GE, 8 cores). On the old machines, saw a few nonsensical Python exceptions. A kernel update and a reboot didn’t fix it. Rather than messing with hardware troubleshooting, I upgraded to newer, faster, and more efficient machines.
> Database servers upgraded to Hetzner’s EX101 (Intel 13900, 8+16 cores). I was setting up new database replicas after an outage and failover event and took the opportunity to upgrade hardware.
Does anybody know if this setup is containerized? I have to say, I love that this is running on dedicated servers. I don't know how many times I burned myself out trying to setup infrastructure in AWS for personal projects only to accumulate a significant monthly bill and nothing substantial to show for it.
> Main values: Simple is good. Efficient is good. Less is more.
> The core infrastructure runs on Hetzner bare metal machines. Hetzner offers amazing value for money and is a big part of the reason why Healthchecks.io can offer its current pricing.
> No containers, no auto-scaling, no “serverless”. Plain old servers, each dedicated to a single role: “load balancer”, “application server” and “database server”.
> The machines are closer to “pets” than “cattle”: I have provisioning scripts to set up new ones relatively quickly, but in practice the working set of machines changes rarely. For example, the primary database server currently has an uptime of 375 days.
fwiw that's what most of the big companies do on their product that actually make money. All the "kubernetes revolution" is pretty new, as are contianers, and companies move very slowly. The core products only move if they really see an advantage
If you're using Go, Rust, OCaml etc. then you can deploy a static binary and have a systemd-service or similar take care of keeping it running with nginx as a reverse-proxy. I do that with NixOS which enables me to also have my infra as code.
Static binaries make things easier, but even without them things can be quite manageable depending on what you need.
I suppose it sits halfway in between as you do need the java runtime, but with fat jars you can also quite reliably and easily run on bare metal managed through systemd.
There are a few things to consider outside of that, though those are also fairly easy to manage.
Log rotation and clean up is something a lot of cloud native people will not be familiar with.
Do you do marketing as well? I'd assume not based on the no JS-analytics so I'm curious what your customer acquisition methods are, as in how they find out about your business?
Author here, I think most new signups are through traffic from search engines and through word of mouth, Healthchecks.io gets regular mentions in Reddit /r/selfhosted. I've dabbled with paid ads (Google search, Reddit, Twitter, EthicalAds) but without analytics it was shooting in the dark.
I'm making progress as I am also acting as a fractional CTO for a few start ups where I only took equity and only used my platform. All the companies are going to migrate off at some point, but they found market fit and are staffing up full engineering teams.
Over the next few years, I'm going to continue just having fun building. However, I have a few verticals that I plan to launch in and start figuring out marketing for that is... reasonable.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadHow do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations?
(In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)
Then just remote into systems, and fix issues. He’s pretty much “on call” 24/7/365
They probably set up a HealthChecks.io alert.
Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete - thus you actually get fewer bugs. In my experience most issues in software come because the engineer misunderstood the requirements that someone else wrote anyway.
This is so true. To me, finishing writing the code means releasable code. I have done the testing along the way.
How do you do to get alerted of your service going down when:
- you are in the wilderness, ouside or with little cell coverage
- drunk and dancing in a wedding with music at full blast
These are just 2 small examples out of many others. Also it means you need to stay connected when taking a plane, be able to stop and/or swap drivers if your are in a long driving trip so that you can fix your service in a rest area or while your partner is driving, etc.
I am pretty sure outages are very rare but if that happens the day your are out of cell coverage and unable to react, you might lose a lot of trust from your customers.
I am also suprised he relies on only one hosting service. I would have thought you might not want to have everything in the same basket.
Cloudflare is again down and your service is not available for an hour? You cant do anything. And nobody unsubscribes.
Most downtimes are because another service is down and you cant do anything.
Sometimes its really your issue. Your service is down for an entire day? Some customers may be pissed at the moment. But in the end they dont care if you are not a critical service - like this one.
Learning: Downtimes are not an issue. When such a message pops up just ignore it and look at it when you have time. This is strange first as we try to be perfect. But the world will continue to turn.
If I am drunk dancing in the woods as a solo operator no one is doing config changes on my servers.
The remaining 5% downtime like internet connection to the server facility, solar flares, UFO taking over the world - I would not able to do anything about anyway, would have to wait until it goes away.
The most common issues I have with long term projects are small code/config changes (#1 by a ridiculous degree), then way below is drives filling up and then way below that is actual hardware failure.
Drives filling up are often the most annoying to fix as they cause very odd user facing problems. Just fixed this week an old wordpress site that I spent over 2 hours trying to fix, trying everything, before I realised the mySQL database was full. It turns out if a mysql db is full the provider revokes insert privs on the user and wp login will just go in a loop back to the login page if it can't write to the database. No errors on the UI :(.
It runs on namecheap shared hosting.
If it goes down, I trust namecheap to fix it asap. If it goes down and someone called me, I don't really know what I would do anyway....
In 6 years it has never been a problem.
PHP and jQuery. I use phpmyadmin via cpanel to manage the database.
I'd love to travel to a remote island, or do a 2 week hike out of cell service but it's difficult. The odds are incredibly low that downtime occurs in that window, but Murphy's Law and my anxiety won't allow it. The pros greatly outweigh the cons though. While I can't do those remote trips, I can still travel wherever else and just ignore things unless there's a downtime alert or an urgent support ticket.
- No phone number for support
- Extensive FAQs to let people help themselves first
- Vacation: take laptop along, check emails every couple days (but I haven’t tried remote vacation without internet ever)
Generally speaking: outsiders vastly overestimate the support burden of a one-man business. Maybe I’m lucky, but I only receive 2-3 emails per day with 25k active users.
In reality if you don't deploy new version or don't change config or don't post your product to HN server will be there simply running.
In big companies you might have bunch of people doing config changes all the time on different levels and you might never know when someone will break something you rely on.
Also there have been times when monitoring alerts start blaring at 3AM, and there's no more sleep that night. Thankfully does not happen very often :-)
> I do not want to manage or be managed. A cofounder or employee would mean regular meetings [...]
Like I'm not sure why you are so upset and sarcastic here. I get that the author doesn't care and thats fine. But there are already many scaling their existing revenues coming in and then tradeoff is small bit of your equity for 100x MRR which is common with SaaS where multiplies in its sales pipelines is very easy once you've identified where your customers are!
FWIW, I vouched your original comment because I think your comment represents an authentic view shared by other people on HN / in tech.
My question for you: how do you price the stress-potential of hiring, managing, and firing / being fired by (1) a board (2) employees (3) cofounders / other executives; each with their own set of competing incentives and accompanied principal-agent problems?
It's certainly not zero. For many people, it's more expensive than the hypothetical marginal increase in MRR.
But I will concede that you do give up some freedom as a result of having to police and regulate individuals in the best interest of the company. ex) James Damore
https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr...
The author's end solution goes against all common HN wisdom (!)
This is the way things should work. There should be millions of email senders and receivers, not just 32 mafiosas (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, MailChimp, etc).
There are endless counter-examples on HN advocating against hosting something as simple as email yourself, see: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=self-host+email
You could at least be realistic instead of blatantly sounding like a zealot.
I'm not sure zealotry is the best way to push back against conventional wisdom, but otoh the parent comment didn't sound zealous to me.
In fact the more I read about Maddy[2] the more it seems to simplify running a mail server compared to when I did it back in the day. I mean you still have to worry about landing an IP address with a bad reputation but it takes care of soooo much of the rest of it.
[1] https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr...
[2] https://maddy.email/faq/
Kudos to you, and to another 9 years!
Also I'm stealing the term Hobbit software, talk about comfy.
It's unbearable to have to work for someone imo.
I wish to be in charge of my life as much as possible.
Personally, I would love to be self-employed. But I am addicted to stability and am afraid of sales and sadly can't see myself in that role ever.
Recently wrote up a similar review post about the fears, failures and successes I experienced over the past year:
https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...
I love Healthchecks.
It's open source and easy to set up if you'd like to go that route.
His free tier is more than enough for my self hosting shenanigans and it's been one of the most reliable parts of my setup.
My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!"
Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day!
When I was a corporate engineer, I would get the sunday scaries every week and find any excuse to push back bedtime another hour. But now, I wake up excited and energized to work on a project I love... and maybe someday I'll give myself permission to do that less than 7 days a week.
Anyway, I digress.
I'm so happy to hear your SaaS is going strong after 9 years. Cheers! And here's to 9 more!
It is so difficult to find such niches, so congrats for the success!
IMHO you're risking a burnout and working on your company 0 day a week.
It would be better to be reasonable now than to kill your company in a few years because you can't stand it anymore.
Take this next week-end off and go do something totally "useless" like walking in nature ;) It will recharge you.
Most people I know that actually work all-the-time, not self-proclaimed "I work X hour weeks people that say it to sound 'cool'" people. Never have a burnout.
Most of those people also go on extended vacations of say 5-7 weeks. But still work 2-3 hours every day.
Burnout seems much more common in the average worker that only works a 9-5.
Even now I have a project where I have to fix a bunch of hastily written code and while I’m making progress and it’ll eventually be fine, it’s quite unsatisfying.
The commonality of burnout in some form to full burnout seems to be roughly 75% for employees[1] and roughly 70% for executives[2] and 25% ~ 75% for entrepreneurs[3].
My experience is based mostly on the latter.
[1]: https://www.gallup.com/topic/burnout.aspx / https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/flexjobs-mha-mental-healt... [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2023/01/23... [3]: https://wifitalents.com/statistic/entrepreneur-burnout/
The statistics on this vary wildly, so I'd take all these statistics with a giant grain of salt.
With coding, it's also a matter of quality of work. You need to step back so you can look at your work with a fresh perspective, and oh, there are ALWAYS horrors you will find, the ones you created when tired.
Having full creative control, uncapped upside potential, and truly enjoying the work make it a lot easier to do every day.
As a long-term goal, I would like to restore better work/life balance.
But first, I'm trying to make hay while the sun shines, to hit escape velocity from corporate work permanently. Now that I've tasted freedom, I really don't want to be dragged back...regardless of the outcome with my current business.
> That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life.
Yeah but it’s not at all limited to traditional work. A common source of burnout is family issues. People burn out taking care of others, especially someone with psychological or substance abuse problems. Or co-dependence, terminal illnesses. Those things can become worse by trying harder, and that’s a potent recipe for burnout.
Yep, that's a different thing called bore-out.
The guy is clearly passionate about his app, probably too passionate.
This matches siblings comments where employees experience burnout more probably because employees are rarely rewarded for their best work. But executives and entrepreneurs are.
I suppose even if the reward is intangible that protects from burnout.
Until they are not. The most promising entrepreneurial project can take an unexpected turn south, and if you’ve worked yourself past the burnout threshold at that point it can be hard to come back.
A company, by definition, is a group of people. Of course it is possible to register company and never hire employees, but it is not relevant now. The point is when you say "the company stand still" it effectively meaning "I am standing still". Either normalize it for yourself, or hire someone)
It took a me few years of observing what brings my attention back you work and what controls my schedule the most, and many little practices to deal with that. Now the thing runs itself, and I can take much longer vacations. It was worth the effort.
Same with me. On my one year mark as a one person saas with 123x.dev . Helping Monday and Atlassian customers with custom apps.
You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper. Otherwise, your competitors are just a click away.
I'd argue the author HAS found PMF, just not the kind that gets you to $1b.
A lot of software that on the surface does the "exact same thing" often has different nuances, either to the business or the product that makes them appeal to different niches in the market.
Understanding the nuances and exploiting the market niche is your only goal when starting a business. It's not something you ever do or think about when working on software, but people who strike it out on their own quickly realize that simply building is not enough, you MUST give people a good reason to use your software. Just because you don't see or understand the nuances, does not mean they are not there.
They could all be replaced and do 90% of the job immediately and a week later figure out the last 10%.
As as for work, coinbase is not the only exchange, square is one of many, meta is another social media site.
I don't think you have to have a unique selling point all the times. You can make an exact product as the market leader and layer on top a distribution that you own or you sell the product to a underserved groups. It will work too. In fact, this way of doing business happens a lot to non software products.
In theory? Maybe.
In reality? Your scale and delivery depend on the competence of your devs and your processes and there's a very good chance you could do it better than all the big companies from your garage as a solo dev if it has a relatively small feature set.
His moat is a combination of pricing + cost structure + time spent to cumulate the customer base.
If someone were to enter the market and try to take his business, they will have to consider if their conditions can result in the same offerings. I don't think it's easy to match the same offerings.
The idea of an "economic moat" comes from Warren Buffett[1] and it was/is part of his investing philosophy to look for companies with some sort of unique feature which allows them to dominate markets and create effective monopolies on their particular niche. It makes sense in that context but it doesn't necessarily apply everywhere.
What if you're just trying to create a business that gives you a good lifestyle and you're not looking to dominate? Maybe the market is big enough that if you just take a piece of it that's plenty. There are plenty of businesses out there that are offering a product that is one of a range but the market is large enough to sustain multiple offerings.
Not everyone needs a moat because not everyone is trying to build a castle.
[1] I believe he first used it here in his shareholder letter where he describes GEICO's low costs as creating a moat that competitors couldn't cross. May have been earlier but most people credit the invention of the term to him anyway https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2016ltr.pdf
Agreed.
>What if you're just trying to create a business that gives you a good lifestyle and you're not looking to dominate? Maybe the market is big enough that if you just take a piece of it that's plenty. There are plenty of businesses out there that are offering a product that is one of a range but the market is large enough to sustain multiple offerings.
Yes. In fact, the majority of businesses in the world are probably this way.
>Not everyone needs a moat because not everyone is trying to build a castle.
That's a brilliant line and metaphor. Gonna steal and share it whenever and wherever I can. Thanks.
The fact that it's not what most new businesses try to do is true, but doesn't mean anything. 99% of people who go to university don't do it to create new science, but 1% eventually go the academic route and do create new science (hopefully). That's not an affectation, it's just a different goal.
Increasing your pricing is the #1 way to grow revenue and weed out customers who abuse customer support.
https://healthchecks.io/pricing/
With that being said, he clearly knows what he’s doing - don’t take advice from strangers :)
Small businesses that actually find a market and turn a profit live or die on reputation. I have a feeling that 2x the price (even incrementally over time) would burn a lot of goodwill.
But there is a middle ground. As long as your operating costs don't rise precipitously for whatever reason, you can keep your existing customers on their current pricing and give new customers your new higher price.
It works in web hosting, anyway. (Usually.)
Unlikely with businesses like this. This business model is to offer a budget alternative to the big name services that doesn’t have the same level of support and reliability (it admits not having failover, for example) to customers who are okay with that in exchange for the lower price.
Once you start raising prices significantly, it no longer becomes the budget option. Customers may not churn right away, but growth would slow substantially as people started comparing to the full-featured mainstream services at similar price points.
The common startup wisdom is that raising prices dramatically is a magic wand to improve your customer base and grow your revenue, but that doesn’t work in the budget domain.
Who’s the “big name service” in this space?
https://www.pingdom.com/pricing/
https://healthchecks.io/pricing/
The primary difference is that HealthCheck caps their pricing at $80/mo whereas Pingdom let's it still linearly scale upwards.
And that's kind of my point. Why artificially cap their "Enterprise" plan at so cheap, when Pingdom let's it scale to $10s of thousands per month.
"Continuously growing revenue" is the trap.
> Database servers upgraded to Hetzner’s EX101 (Intel 13900, 8+16 cores). I was setting up new database replicas after an outage and failover event and took the opportunity to upgrade hardware.
Does anybody know if this setup is containerized? I have to say, I love that this is running on dedicated servers. I don't know how many times I burned myself out trying to setup infrastructure in AWS for personal projects only to accumulate a significant monthly bill and nothing substantial to show for it.
> Main values: Simple is good. Efficient is good. Less is more.
> The core infrastructure runs on Hetzner bare metal machines. Hetzner offers amazing value for money and is a big part of the reason why Healthchecks.io can offer its current pricing.
> No containers, no auto-scaling, no “serverless”. Plain old servers, each dedicated to a single role: “load balancer”, “application server” and “database server”.
> The machines are closer to “pets” than “cattle”: I have provisioning scripts to set up new ones relatively quickly, but in practice the working set of machines changes rarely. For example, the primary database server currently has an uptime of 375 days.
Another simpler alternative is to just run a cgi-bin on hetzner webhosting (https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting/level-9/).
I suppose it sits halfway in between as you do need the java runtime, but with fat jars you can also quite reliably and easily run on bare metal managed through systemd.
There are a few things to consider outside of that, though those are also fairly easy to manage.
Log rotation and clean up is something a lot of cloud native people will not be familiar with.
It's refreshing to see one person or small teams happily prioritizing work/life balance over the never ending treadmill of profit and growth.
Finding what "enough" means to you is hard, holding that line over nearly a decade of success is even harder.
I'm making progress as I am also acting as a fractional CTO for a few start ups where I only took equity and only used my platform. All the companies are going to migrate off at some point, but they found market fit and are staffing up full engineering teams.
Over the next few years, I'm going to continue just having fun building. However, I have a few verticals that I plan to launch in and start figuring out marketing for that is... reasonable.