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Comment by 20years | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it is absolutely possible. I have been doing this for years focusing on niche SaaS products that are too small for VC funded or big companies to go after. I am currently bringing in $20k/mo from my SaaS stuff (3 different niche products) and additional revenue on top of that with adsense/affiliate stuff.

I ran an advertising agency with employees at one point and grew it to $50k/mo but hated it so stopped and went back to single founder SaaS stuff.

Before the recession hit, I also ran a SaaS product in the Real Estate sector that brought in over $70k/mo at its height. I had a few employees during that time too.

I personally enjoy being a single founder running niche products but it has its downsides. Also, once you reach a certain growth point, it becomes much more difficult to go it alone. At that point, you can either hire employees to help or decide maybe it is best to sell.

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Have you sold any of your businesses before? If so, how did you seek out businesses to buy yours?

I haven't but am considering selling one of the products next year. I plan to go through a Broker.

I had a soft offer in the $3 mil range from a big company for that real estate product I mentioned. They reached out to me. I pretty much blew it off because it was in a growth phase and I felt I could grow it more. 6 months later, the real estate market crashed and that product lost 50% of its revenue within a year. In hindsight, I wish I took that offer a little more serious.

Unrelated point, but I would do anything (even put school on hold) just to be able to work with a mentor like you. Being a solo founder for niche Saas products is exactly what I aspire to be, and learning from someone who's been there and done that would be a terrific experience

these guys do an internship you might be interested in https://empireflippers.com/ (caveat: I don't know anything about them)

I will reach out to you at the beginning of the new year. Honestly though if you are interested, I would put you mostly on advertising related stuff. Coding is the easy part, advertising and acquiring users is the hard part. Learning how to advertise a product and acquire users for less than what you are spend is one of the most important pieces of running a SaaS.

Oh wow, that'd be super amazing, and I look forward to that.

I wholeheartedly agree that advertising and acquiring users are the most important pieces, and also one of the hardest. Finding a niche and the market to go after (who do I approach? what do I say? what sort of problems can I solve that hasnt already been done? etc) has been a stumbling block, not to mention the fact that I'm far from technically fluent to spin up a basic prototype to demo.

As such I kinda put that aspiration on hold and decided to hone my craft in CS / programming in general, so that at least I have a solid, technical base to built off on.

Anyhow, I really appreciate your response and am excited to hearing back from you.

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