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Comment by bdunn | Hacker News Reader

A little over $2700/mo with Planscope (https://planscope.io), my SaaS product that's been out since February. I'm averaging about a 8% growth rate month to month, so very excited about how things are going.

* Bootstrapped

* Raised my consulting rates to free up more time for products (= same amount of consulting income)

* Most new customers come via referrals from existing users and organic traffic (via targeted blog posts)

* Wrote a complementary book targeting people who aren't necessarily looking for PM software (http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com), and upselling Planscope through that. Extremely successful so far.

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great job!

These are the sort of success stories from you regular joes that are more common than the typical "1 billion dollar acquisition" startup.

A couple of questions if you don't mind:

a) What technology stack are you using/did you use to develop planscope?

b) How did you deal with scalability?

c) Are you doing everything by yourself? Support, Development, Marketing, etc.

Thanks in advance!

a) Ruby/Rails on the backend, Backbone.js on the front

b) I really don't have any scaling issues. I have about 120 paid customers, and on a given workday half of them login at some point. It probably takes quite some time for the average B2B product to run into scaling issues (unless you're doing some sort of extreme number crunching or something)

c) I do everything. 20% of my product time is spent coding, the rest is marketing. Support whenever I need to (usually less than 30 mins response time if I'm awake)

Feel free to drop me a line with any other questions, I'm pretty much an open book :-) brennan at planscope.io

thanks for the answers! And yes, I will definitely drop you a line if i ever get my site up and running. I'm still in development mode now. :)

Again, congrats on your product and hope it gets better in the near future.

This looks great! I'll be checking this out. I've been in the market for something new/different/some kind of change with my freelancing project management.

I love the layouts on these SAAS products. Is there a central resource you guys all use for design? Any recommended reading? Websites/blogs?

The winning formula: Headline that keeps people from clicking the back button; subheadline that briefly describes the product; a few bullet points, testimonials, or short blurbs of text describing the benefits of the product; supporting imagery (screenshot); clear call to action (sign up!)

I did my own design, but there are plenty of themes out there that could incorporate the above formula and do just as well (or better).

Thanks, And how about for the Saas software itself? I note a lack of pure black text, it's always a dark shade of gray...softens the look nicely. Little touches like that, anywhere those tips come from? Any blogs, forums or such to follow on the design of saas software, specifically webapp deaign?

Check out theme forest, as a coder with very little design skills I generally grab a design from there Then once you are sure people want the product hire a design er to overhaul and improve your design (or you can do it yourself)

Check out http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates - lots of quality ready-to-use templates there

This is a great success story. Would you mind sharing what your conversion rate is on the 14-day free trial? Have you experimented with asking for a credit card upfront? Also, was there ever a time you thought about giving up?

* About 20% of people who sign up for a trial end up paying.

* I don't have a CC paywall, but people I trust who convert much higher than I do recommend it, so I'll probably A/B test a paywall soon enough.

* Nope. There is no such thing as a singular product launch. If you launch, and no one shows up, figure out what went wrong and repeat. Persistence is everything.

I don't have any questions, but I'd just like to say I'm an avid follower of your project and blog, and I truly appreciate your transparency.

It's a win-win for everyone.

I really like publicly journaling how my products are evolving over time, especially since it seems to be either helping or inspiring some people. And plus, I know I've received direct or indirect customers from doing this.

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