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Comment by a13n | Hacker News Reader

It's really easy to make a few hundred dollars a month if you're good at product and can do basic marketing.

1. Find a popular SaaS product. Like Intercom, Algolia, Segment. Make sure it doesn't have a free plan. This guarantees there's a market for the tool. Check out GetLatka for ideas. https://getlatka.com

2. Build your own take on the product. Find the minimum set of features that make it valuable. 10% of the work for 80% of the value.

3. Sell it at a 50-90% discount. There will be price sensitive customers that want the popular product, but don't want to or can't afford it.

4. Target bottom of funnel marketing channels: Targeted quora questions. Paid/organic search queries. Set up retargeting ads on Facebook. Product hunt launch it. That should get you a steady stream of customers.

I don't think this is a great way to build a million dollar business, but is a very easy way to make a few hundred. Shoot me an email if I can be helpful.

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I launched a SaaS startup called "SalezTalk" with the same exact strategy. The problem with this strategy is that it assumes that reaching to a customer is an easy thing.

One of the most difficult thing in a SaaS is reaching to a customer in a cost-effective manner. It's common nowadays to have a CAC of $100+. So paid acquisition channels would be impossible if your prices are low.

If you already have a community or a user-base, then probably you can make a few hundred dollars out of it. But if you are starting from scratch, I would rather suggest going for a big idea instead of a smaller one because your marketing efforts in both the case would be almost same.

Posting answers to highly targeted Quora questions is free. Launching on Product Hunt is free. Writing targeted content that ranks on Google takes time, but costs no money. Retargeting ads are cheap.

I agree that if you're trying to build a big business, you need to think hard about how you're going to get customers. But if you're just trying to make a couple hundred a month (as OP asked), it's a completely different ballgame. You just need a tiny sliver of an enormous pie.

Getting on the front page of PH is not easy.

What's your email I'd ? :) Thanks !

My first name @ my company's domain

Dunno why people are still afraid of just posting their email addresses. I use gmail for my domain specific account and just rely on their spam catching tools. If you run your own server then there are lots of anti spam tools as well.

Edit: To expand on my reasoning, don’t make it hard for people to contact you. There’s no reason to be afraid of spurious email contacts. They’re easy to mark as spam and ignore future contacts.

When have you seen people obfuscate their public social media contact addresses? I haven’t seen anyone hide their Twitter, FB public pages, or LinkedIn addresses. Email shouldn’t be any different for general contact purposes.

Now the one exception I have is work email addresses. I don’t publicize those.

charles@geuis.com

Maybe because it makes their accounts easier to find when people google their email address?

You never know what someone might do with that information I guess :)

I totally get that. But in this specific case where someone is saying “contact me”, I don’t think you should make this’ll at harder.

Some people get really hostile online and try to start witch hunts. I've seen it happen even here on hacker news.

just shoot you an email.

> Make sure it doesn't have a free plan

Nothing wrong with being free. It can get you popularity like dropbox, robinhood etc

If the aim is to build a limited version of a product, targetted towards price sensitive users, and the existing product has a free tier you can't compete on price, and there may not be many paying customers anyway.

I think his point is that if the existing service has a free plan then it is going to be hard to undercut them on price. Dropbox and Robinhood want to dominate the market. OP's advice is for making a couple hundred bucks a month on the side.

Hi Andrew, thanks for the awesome sharing. Is there anyway I can have your email? Thank you.- Allen.

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