Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month

[frits1993]

Running a profitable SAAS has been my dream from the moment I wrote my first line of code.

Here on HN and IndieHackers I've always looked up to the people who pay their bills with recurring revenue from their tools.

I've tried, many times, to do the same, without much success. A couple of rather successful HN pitches, but none of my projects ever even paid me a beer (let alone my rent).

Until this month! Last year I built myself and my girlfriend a tool. Even though I did build it for other people to use it, I had never thought someone actually would. Long story short, half a year later I provide my service to more than 5000 (fully organic) users.

This month is the first month in which revenue is high enough to pay my rent with it. Disclaimer: I share my rent with my girlfriend, but it does sound cool to say.

Looking back at the proces, it does match with a lot of other success stories I read over the years in the HN community. The main lesson which I can now confirm: build something that scratches your own itch.

So... Thanks you guys, for keeping me motivated and inspired.

[tckb]

congrats! mind sharing your story?

[frits1993]

Sure.

Last year June, I built a small online tool for me and my girlfriend to manage our IPTV playlist. I bought a domain name and put it online because our IPTV player needed to access it through a URL. A couple of months later, and 7 users found the tool and were actually using it (keep in mind that that's pretty impressive for a tool as not-user-focused as it was back then).

So I then decided to spend more time refining it. Building more features, introducing paid plans, and making sure everything worked as user-friendly as possible.

It basically all started growing organically from there. This month so far I have a Stripe balance of €620 (roughly 687USD) after fees, which is my 5th full month of running with pricing plans.

As you can imagine, I'm super excited to see if it can keep growing like this!

[mduerksen]

Pardon my complete speculation, but I bet your success factor is "I built ... my girlfriend a tool."

My only successful product to this date is an app I built because my wife asked me to. It is in an non-technical domain which I knew nothing about. I thought it was rather non-promising, but, since it was a pet-peeve of hers, I gave it a try.

It was an awesome (and very bonding) experience - she explained me the problem(s), and I tried to simplify and structure it (didn't think gardening could be so complicated). Both of us were in their respective element, and from back and forth an app was forged.

To this day I only half-jokingly call her my product manager. The app has brought in 5 digits last year and is rising.

Last week, she briefly mentioned another problem, in another hobby domain of hers...

[wink]

Lucky you. I tried to make a game with my (then-girlfriend, now-) wife and it kinda fizzled out. Sure, took on too much, I'm not the best with bringing projects to launch, but whatever.

I really can't say who spent more time (she did graphics, I wrote code) but to this day it's a bit of a sore point to talk about, just that we were both absolutely not happy with the outcome and see it as completely wasted time.

[cosmodisk]

I remember giving an "advice" on this in one of my comments: developers can discover amazing things once they step away from their day to day stuff,where there are already so many things created that it's pretty hard to come up with something unique. Gardening fits the bill pretty well in this case.

[namelosw]

> "I built ... my girlfriend a tool."

This also strikes me - After I live with my girlfriend for a while, I (or she surprisingly) found I have no interest in social media apps, discounts, traveling, eating tasty foods, mainstream movies/TV series...

Being immune to popular things is nice sometimes. But not being able to have empathy with most people is a great disadvantage for product development, since markets which are too niche mostly cannot easily afford rents or just don't worth it at all. It's much nicer to "build ... my girlfriend a tool" TBH.

[ryantgtg]

My wife works in fashion and sometimes has SaaS ideas that fill a niche in her world, and which I never would have thought of myself. Unfortunately so far my programming skills are not up to snuff to fulfill her needs. But I’m working on it!

The ideas generally fall into “my company is paying lots of money for some really powerful, complicated software, and we use about 5% of what it offers. Why not create cheaper software that just does the 5%?”

[yroc92]

Any chance we could check it out?

[wikibob]

Yep.

eBay started as a website to sell Pez dispensers for the founders girlfriend.

https://time.com/4013672/ebay-founded-story/

[mcv]

It makes sense that building something that other people want to use is going to be more successful than building something primarily for yourself. Particularly if "other people" means "non-technical people", because anything you can build for yourself, any other technical person can also build for themselves. (Just look at the crazy number of javascript build tools and dependency managers.) But building for non-programmers, well, that's a potential customer base.

[rimliu]

  > Pardon my complete speculation, but I bet your success
  > factor is "I built ... my girlfriend a tool."

The first unicorn in my country was born the same way.

[ohadron]

I guess this is the tool, from OPs submission history: https://m3u-editor.com/

[beznet]

I might be living under a rock, but what is IPTV? Even a Google search on it makes me scratch my head. I use Netflix, Hulu, etc but those have always been referred to as 'Streaming Services' , are those somehow categorized in the IPTV umbrella?

[tchock23]

I like the ‘screenshots’ section prominently featured on the homepage.

With the trend toward illustrations and mocked up interfaces it seems like many SaaS companies leave out actual screenshots these days.

To me that’s an important gauge for whether I’m going to have a decent user experience if I sign up (even if it’s just flat screenshots with no explanations)...

[monkeydust]

Would be nice if you had a primer to IPTV for novices like me where I have the feature on my TV but have not explored.

[_bxg1]

Yeah, I thought it was weird that they didn't link the actual service

[seanwilson]

Have you thought about increasing your prices by a lot? I'm not the target market but $1 per month for the cheapest plan and $5 per month for the most expensive one sounds insanely cheap to me.

[skrebbel]

Seconded. Just make sure you increase them for new customers but not existing ones. You can even try A/B testing price levels and the likes!

[frits1993]

I've definitely considered it, and I use some custom plans for users who exceed the limits of the Pro Plus plan, but I think current prices are alright.

Also, keep in mind that these prices apply on yearly plans, and most paid users use monthly pricing, where prices range from $2 to $8.

[tomaszs]

I actually like the pricing model. Because it is very cheap for the user and the creator can make a lots of money by scaling. I am a strong oponnent of high prices for SaaS for so many reasons. First, it discriminates citizens of poorer countries. Secondly, a lots of SaaS make this model that aims to heavy users only. Users who can spend a lots of more money as a single person. So there are great services, but a lots of occasional users just cant use it (and pay).

[sinni800]

First thing I thought when reading "M3U Editor" was music playlists for local music... Man, definitions sure changed. I don't personally like conflating terms very much, but that happens a lot nowadays.

The following isn't feedback, just personal rambling: Also I can't feel but somehow I would be unable to make a software that has that kind of "playlist protection" as a feature that needs a higher tier of monthly payment. I seem to come from times where things like this sure warranted a one time payment but not an ongoing one. Though it might be that I have my head stuck up my, well, you know and I need to get with the times of SAAS

[tracker1]

It's the same list format from back in the WinAmp days afaik, but the reference points are video streams instead of audio.

[rotterdamdev]

Same here, having grown up in a time when I could purchase software and own it, SaaS feels bad and I avoid using it wherever I can. That said, I DO like making money on the side, and I understand why people prefer many smaller purchases to one big one.

[jwr]

Fellow solo SaaS founder here. Congratulations! This is a fantastic milestone to reach, and not an easy one, in spite what many people think.

I am doubly impressed, because your product is B2C. I honestly don't know how to make money on B2C, it always turns out to be a money-losing proposition unless you have a huge market. I hope you will be able to make it work!

[bflesch]

Congrats for getting from zero to one! It seems like you have some product market fit, that's really great.

As others have pointed out, I'd recommend:

- please rename "amateur" to something more positive. no customer wants to be called an amateur

- Increase prices for the pro tier

- Improve your "pricing plan" page, take a look at other (more successful) SaaS products and change button labels accordingly. Just take the best things from their landing pages!

- create a proper comparison matrix / table for all the plans

- visually de-emphasize the free tier, and focus on the 3 paid plans in your comparison table. people will always buy the middle option, so you can increase the price of the "best" option by a lot in order to anchor your value

- add features which are available only in "pro" and "pro plus", e.g. support, direct email to developer, etc!

- maybe build a mobile app for this? it seems like something that could be nicely integrated into a mobile-first experience. you could make it exclusive for pro users

[LeifCarrotson]

Amateur has no negative connotations to me (as a native English speaker from the Midwest US). It's comparable to "hobbyist" or "enthusiast", basically meaning "someone who can do X but doesn't get paid for it". I think a lot of people would be proud to be amateur musicians or amateur athletes, for example, and would have said that no (non-professional) customer would not want to be called an amateur. Just shows you have to be careful!

And the pricing page (https://m3u-editor.com/#pricing) looks pretty good to me - nice horizontal feature matrix, easy to locate buttons...not sure OP wants to use dark patterns like de-emphasizing the free tier. I do agree that the top plan should probably be more than $5/mo.

[pimterry]

> please rename "amateur" to something more positiv

As an alternative to amateur, I like "Hobbyist".

Fewer negative connotations, and users can self-categorise between Hobbyist/Professional easily to find the right package. If I'm using a product for serious work, I know that 'Professional' packages are likely targeted at my use case. If I'm just messing around with something, Hobbyist is going to resonate pretty clearly and I'll start there.

[munk-a]

> - visually de-emphasize the free tier, and focus on the 3 paid plans in your comparison table. people will always buy the middle option, so you can increase the price of the "best" option by a lot in order to anchor your value

Maybe avoid the dark UX pattern if you can avoid it. Though it's accepted in industry at this point that customers will need to actively fight against the producer not to get swindled - it's still nice to respect your customers.

[disiplus]

im not sure the "amateur" needs changing, it could be used to point more users to middle tier, we have something like that, where we call our first tier something that like that, and the second "smart" and people take the second one. also there is a decoy effect. we push our middle tier like that without "fake" most popular tier badge. we don't have a free tier.

[frits1993]

Awesome, great pointers. Thanks for that!

[MisterBastahrd]

Home, Plus, Pro.

Microsoft figured this out years ago.

[momozaur]

Does it really need to be a mobile app? I mean, does a mobile app would realistically really get him more clients?

[esch89]

That's so exciting and encouraging! Congratulations :)

Looking forward to your future update that says, "My SaaS paid for my yacht."

[mathdev]

Congrats, these micro (or nano ;) business success stories are the most inspiring.

[lebaux]

> The main lesson which I can now confirm: build something that scratches your own itch.

Honestly, can we agree it is 50/50? The "Mom test" is a good way to make sure you are not wasting your time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hla1jzhan78 (3:16)

[armstrong]

Can I show off a bit about my project too? We make a huge database of user manuals you can check it here https://manualsbrain.com/en/

[amdavidson]

This is textbook copyright violation.

Scraping other people's content and then watermarking it with your brand while showing ads?

You're just buying time until someone big enough cares about what you are doing.

[dordoka]

Honest suggestion: you should submit your own Show HN post for that. I reckon you are being downvoted for "hijacking" another post, not based on the merits of your project.

[akudha]

Wow, how long did this take? very impressive.

No issues with copyright and such?

[stef25]

Congratulations!

Two small comments

- Adjust your pricing. The difference between 1, 2.5 and 5$ is almost nothing. I'd suggest free - 5 - 20, or something along those lines. - The buttons in the screenshot below: the ones on the second row should have some spacing above them. It's a typical responsive layout thing.

https://m3u-editor.com/img-new/playlists.jpg

[niemyjski]

Congrats! I wish we could do the same but with full time employee(s) being covered. But I'm terrible at marketing and just want to build the oss products. We have over 1k stars in multiple projects for .NET but the developer market is hard to get paying customers (we all want everything for free ;-)). It also doesn't help we have massively funded companies competing against us...

[DiviDragon]

Thanks for sharing. I love these stories. Very inspirational. And your public webpage looks very clean and professional.

[manicksurya]

I have always been planning to do something like this. Can you share your timeline ( from inception to prod).

[war1025]

Based on your landing page, you default to yearly subscriptions.

Does that mean you would need to get an equivalent number of new users to pay your rent next month? Or is your monthly recurring revenue now high enough to cover your rent?

Either way, an exciting day for you I'm sure. Good luck going forward!

[gldev3]

I love reading these stories, it kinda boosts my productivity. Glad life is going great for you OP.

[starpilot]

"Build something you would use" is going to be replaced by "build something a non-technical person has requested." The latter has a higher likelihood of not already existing and a proven appeal outside of the tech monoculture.

[DonnyV]

You just sent me down a rabbit hole of what is IPTV....LOL! Thanks

[chipz]

Wow! I like this kind positive post! If you have the story behind your product and how you build it, we'll definitely wanna read it!