Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been building a SaaS product for the last year or so while working a day job and raising a family, and am only now close to the point of having something I consider beta-able (https://www.contabulo.com).

I think I made the mistake of getting too fancy with the architecture (but designing architecture was too much fun to resist), so I’ve ended up with something that’s a collection of Clojure services on the backend, running on several linodes along with rabbitmq, elasticsearch, etc. Well, at least it should scale decently, if the need arises :fingers crossed:

So this project has probably taken way too long to get to a MVP. But hey, the day job won’t let me do cool stuff like use FP languages, design architecture, do front end work, etc., so I need some sort of creative outlet :)

Now if I can only find some folks willing to test this thing. So far I’ve only gotten a small handful of email sign ups via my landing page. Maybe it’s time to spend some money on AdWords, etc.

> Contabulo is Coming Soon

> We’re currently working hard on getting Contabulo ready and hope to launch a beta in the very near future.

That's probably killing you. My advice would be to get rid of that immediately.

It sounds like in general you need to reprioritize and refocus. You use the words "SaaS product," "project," "creative outlet," and "this thing" to describe your efforts thus far. "Things" don't make money, businesses do. You need to stop being an engineer building a product and start building a business if you actually intend to generate income from this endeavor. To that end, I suggest a few immediate actions:

- Give users the ability to sign up and pay you money. If users can't pay you, you'll never make a dime. Stop worrying about architecture or feature development or closed betas and focus 100% on attracting and retaining high-quality customers. Don't do any further development beyond bug fixes until you have paying customers and can articulate why additional features will drive growth.

- Consider offering a free trial to get "testers" instead of a beta (but don't call them that). The free trial will allow you to collect feedback from real customers without establishing an ongoing expectation of free or reduced cost that can kill long-term revenue. In general, startups price too low. Read a few articles like https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... and https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-product/

- Spend a lot more time & effort on your branding/marketing. In particular, your site currently shows two screenshots that look quite similar to Trello + photo attachments, and has a bland tagline of "Organize. Collaborate. Get stuff done." Differentiate yourself from potential competitors and clearly communicate value. Also, minor nit but there's no reason a static landing page should show a loading bar before revealing the content. That alone is going to cost you real $$$ in page bounces.

>Give users the ability to sign up and pay you money.

Agree with this. Years ago I ended up in a situation where I had 10's of thousands of people using our "beta, not for serious use" service for free. I didn't want to charge money because I figured that only made sense if the product was finished and up to the standard I'd want (it wasn't). People would email every day asking if they could pay something.

Not so smart...

Thanks, a few folks have told me to just launch the thing already. I’ve been stuck in a “just one more feature” loop for too long. Probably ought to just give the stripe integration a good round of testing and call it v1.

And yes, I definitely need to work on the marketing site... I’m afraid I’m not the world’s best salesman.

>> Stop worrying about architecture or feature development or closed betas and focus 100% on attracting and retaining high-quality customers.

Hang on... don't you need a product that people want to use and pay for? You can't just magic that up out of nothing. There's a necessary amount of development required isn't there to get something built that people are willing to shell out for.

Yes, but this individual already has a functioning product or is very close. Too many engineers think "I'm going to put out the most perfect product with all the features I want" when what they need is to put out a usable basic product, start making money, and iterate on new features based on what their customer wants.

Start with things that don't scale. Approach people directly.

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