Frankly, I always find these stories miraculous. Even though I'm a full-time web developer, I find it daunting merely to design a landing page with user sign-up, let alone a feature worth paying for and an account subscription flow. There's just so much to do. It seems like years of work.
I know there's things like SaaS pegasus, but that forces Django. SaaS Pegasus and Bullet Train are also very expensive with no real options for trial. I wish tools like that - automating the basics of an ecommerce business - were more developed and available, preferably open source in the long run. I feel like it's the future we're slowly moving towards but we aren't there yet. We have widely-used open source frameworks for technical foundations - rails, django, etc - but no higher-abstraction equivalent that handles "features" like subscriptions and accounts.
It is infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010, and I'm hoping the time between now and 2030 represents a similar jump.
This is exactly why I built Molecule.dev. It's brand new, using all the latest and greatest battle-tested tools.
I started it because I recognized that it took entirely too long to implement some of the most basic core functionality for cross-platform apps in a way that is up to my standards (i.e., minimal with no real vendor lock-in). It actually boggles my mind that nothing of the same quality as Molecule.dev exists yet. It's obviously a problem that developers everywhere run into when building custom apps. I've seen a few solutions, but (again) they're all either not up to my standards or they try to lock you in.
I think most developers prefer to implement things themselves, as they have their own preferences and may (like me) not trust that the code quality is up to their standards, so the difficult part here may actually be to convince developers that the code is high quality and something they themselves would write.
> It is infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010, and I'm hoping the time between now and 2030 represents a similar jump.
I'm not convinced that is true. At least if you compare 2012 with 2022, it was very easy to get a Rails app working, with user authentication/signup/password reset/etc (Devise), integrate Stripe for payments, deploy the whole thing on Heroku. It wasn't an overnight project, but one person could get that done in a few weeks of full time work. There was a lot of energy and excitement around this stack and the community often created "one good way" of doing things.
In 2022, all those technologies are still available, but they are uncool and most of the internet will dissuade you from using them. Instead, unopinionated micro-frameworks are in vogue, and you you're down a rabbit hole creating the same product by gluing together dozens of libraries, writing a jamstack SPA, deploying the whole thing on kubernetes. You could easily spend several weeks just building out user signup flows, password reset, email templates, etc.
I'm not saying it's all bad today: you can do much more with a SPA than you ever could with server side HTML + jquery, and back in the day when you hit a wall with Rails it was often extremely difficult to work around, whereas today's libraries are much more flexible. But for the happy path of "scaffold a functioning SaaS app", I definitely feel like it's harder to get started today than 10 years ago.
I mean, it is years of work, speaking from experience. I make a similar tool (but for Node.js/Vue, if you're not a fan of Django), and it took around two years to get it to where it is, with user account creation/management, subscriptions, teams, admin dashboard, scripting, etc. I'm definitely not charging as much as Bullet Train, but also I feel fully justified in charging instead of open sourcing it. It's been my sole serious side-project for years now after all.
The problem for trials of stuff like this, is that you have no real way of enforcing it. You just have to hope that trialers feel like doing the right thing and paying if they continue to use it, because trying to recover a few hundred dollars through legal means is just not worth the time and money you'd have to spend.
In the end, I settled on a 60-day money-back guarantee, and I've already issued a few already, to folks who thought it had a feature it didn't yet, or ended up not pursuing their idea, etc, so it seems to work pretty well.
It does take a lot of time and experience to create these types of solutions.
For example I put together https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/. It's a video course and SAAS example app that ties together a bunch of features. I've easily put in over 1,000 hours to create and update it over time. It's also been extracted from building multiple SAAS apps for clients (I do contract work).
The way I look at it, it's paying $59 once to get a well tested code base that's going to save you 100+ hours of research and development. I also give lifetime updates and support along with refunds for up to 1 year. For context since I created it in 2015 I've re-recorded the course twice and continuously add a bunch of incremental updates. Every few months I go in and update things to their latest versions. Answered a countless number of questions too.
I think the key is having at least something done. Nowadays, most of my new projects are done by copy pasting things I've done in previous ones. This reduces the time spent setting things up considerably.
Laravel is great in this regard. They have a number of first party packages like Laravel Spark that handle the heavy lifting of subscriptions, Laravel Nova that lets you spin up admin panels real fast, Forge for hosting... Highly recommend checking it out if you don’t mind PHP.
As someone who has built and shipped lots of projects, both for work/startups as well as personal/side ones, I would say that most of the time with building/shipping products quickly, tons of corners are cut. It may not be obvious at first sight but you could see if you look for it. That's typically how one person can build and ship something in very short time. As a simple example, in HN, tech circles and the software engineering industry we talk about node, react, microservices, architecture design, etc. but when you're one person trying to ship a product, there's a high chance you're writing some basic HTML, jquery and some php backend, rather than a react SPA with SSR/SSG. (Not saying this is how OP did it, just in my experience how I and a lot of others did it)
You're also right that it's infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010!
> I find it daunting merely to design a landing page with user sign-up, let alone a feature worth paying for and an account subscription flow. There's just so much to do. It seems like years of work.
All of those things are built into Jumpstart Rails, which the author now uses. To be 100% honest, just using a highly productive framework like Rails, Laravel or, my personal favorite, Phoenix, goes a long ways towards making it quick to build all of those features. If you're experienced with a Rails-inspired fullstack framework, I'd say the work involved is closer to a week or two at most.
Jumpstart gives you a sane default for that week or two of work.
It isn't! I started without any development experience and built an MVP in 3 weeks with user sign up, pricing and subscription using some getting started guides and stakoverflow. Not best practise or anything, I'm sure you laugh if you saw some of the code. Taking card payments was something I was worried about but Stripe has pretty good documentation for a layperson.
I would be really interested to see a rough $/hr estimate from OP. Like, if he really did get $200/mo for 1-2 hours of work a month - that's ~$100/hr! It's a good rate! But any increase in time demands is going to sink this as a productive side gig and obviously it's unfit to use as a main gig.
Personally, given the number of people who never even launch, I congratulate every dollar of MRR. Everyone has to start somewhere, and lessons are learned with every incremental win or loss.
There are a couple negative comments here. Don't let that get you down. You've done more than most. You built a product, validated, and made real money on that product. Then you exited with a positive payout. Great job!
This is actually an underserved niche, speaking from personal experience. Kudos to OP for acting on it! Family always comes first, I can’t help but think that OP could likely have 10-20x’d MRR with just a little more focus on marketing?
I see that the author is affiliated with https://jumpstartrails.com in some way (not sure whether they are a contractor or user or w/e). Does anyone have any direct successes with jumpstartrails or any other similar all in one frameworks?
I started a company a couple of years ago and sunk weeks/months into the boilerplate, eventually to abandon the project, package the core product as an CLI and open source it. Hoping to avoid that again in the future :p
There have been a couple huge successes with it. One of them is processing millions in revenue a month. A lot of others are doing well and chugging along. Can't share the exact ones without permission, but I've been blown away it.
At the end of the day, it's nice to help people focus on their unique business features and not payments, teams, etc.
I'm in charge of Jumpstart iOS! It's a similar template but for Turbo Native-powered iOS apps.
Jumpstart takes care of a _lot_ of the boilerplate code in building a saas. I think it's worth the investment, but I'm involved in the project, so I'm pretty biased.
I used Jumpstart on a recent side project. It's pretty good but because it comes with so many things baked in, you have to agree with most of their stack/gem decisions and methodology (which I do for the most part) but you need to consider that going into it.
This is garbage gatekeeping, and it misses the fact that entrepreneurship is usually a journey of learning as much as a financial journey. Look closely at bios of home-run entrepreneurs and you will frequently see a smaller win or loss before the exit for which they become known. What is the point of denigrating people for not having sold a SaaS as successfully as you have?
I wish them hearty congratulations on the sale and good luck with the next adventure.
On HN we're used to seeing Show HNs like Dropbox's which turn into billion-dollar companies. So, sure, it's easy to dismiss posts like this one.
But here's a 2022 challenge for everyone: Start something new and get your first paying customer. You have exactly 1 month from now. I look forward to your Show HN.
Anyone who has boiled water understands the difference between the working enough to make steam vs working enough to keep the water hot.
Regardless of how much this made, the OP sold a business and crossed a chasm many find very uncomfortable to cross. Congrats on breaking past the inertia to ship, and then sell; it is truly commendable regardless of the naysayers.
Cool story, although I can't help but notice that the product is a tool to automate twitter, and twitter turned out to be a critical piece in marketing the product, and later, marketing (and even selling) the business. That is, it all seems very self-referential, revolving around twitter, and this is why the turn-around was so fast. Also, it was all very low stakes.
This comment probably sounds a little like sour grapes. But let me clear: this was a remarkable and laudable accomplishment. The time and place were right for OP, and it's bad sportsmanship to take anything away from a pilot that tacks with the wind to win the race.
My question is will this product be successful in the hands of the new owner? The signal of success is so low -- a few hundred dollars in revenue -- that it could well be random noise. I'd like to see any data showing the success rate or these projects post "micro acquire".
I'm interested, since i'm running a product that does around 2k MRR, 10k MAU. However profit margin is only around 20% de to user acquisition costs/ operational costs.
Congrats! If someone told me that there are people willing to pay for images generated by crawling a website (not even rendered, just opengraph/metadata), I’d say they were pulling my leg.
One question - I know you mention in the article that your project was becoming a bit of a burden, but do you think you could've taken it further with a bit more time?
Can't help but feel like you should have kept the SaaS and grew it more and sold it later, or at least keep it running and leverage it for an llc/business/tax deductions.
[+] [-] aerovistae|4 years ago|reply
I know there's things like SaaS pegasus, but that forces Django. SaaS Pegasus and Bullet Train are also very expensive with no real options for trial. I wish tools like that - automating the basics of an ecommerce business - were more developed and available, preferably open source in the long run. I feel like it's the future we're slowly moving towards but we aren't there yet. We have widely-used open source frameworks for technical foundations - rails, django, etc - but no higher-abstraction equivalent that handles "features" like subscriptions and accounts.
It is infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010, and I'm hoping the time between now and 2030 represents a similar jump.
edit: found this list though https://github.com/smirnov-am/awesome-saas-boilerplates
[+] [-] loh|4 years ago|reply
I started it because I recognized that it took entirely too long to implement some of the most basic core functionality for cross-platform apps in a way that is up to my standards (i.e., minimal with no real vendor lock-in). It actually boggles my mind that nothing of the same quality as Molecule.dev exists yet. It's obviously a problem that developers everywhere run into when building custom apps. I've seen a few solutions, but (again) they're all either not up to my standards or they try to lock you in.
I think most developers prefer to implement things themselves, as they have their own preferences and may (like me) not trust that the code quality is up to their standards, so the difficult part here may actually be to convince developers that the code is high quality and something they themselves would write.
[+] [-] amacneil|4 years ago|reply
I'm not convinced that is true. At least if you compare 2012 with 2022, it was very easy to get a Rails app working, with user authentication/signup/password reset/etc (Devise), integrate Stripe for payments, deploy the whole thing on Heroku. It wasn't an overnight project, but one person could get that done in a few weeks of full time work. There was a lot of energy and excitement around this stack and the community often created "one good way" of doing things.
In 2022, all those technologies are still available, but they are uncool and most of the internet will dissuade you from using them. Instead, unopinionated micro-frameworks are in vogue, and you you're down a rabbit hole creating the same product by gluing together dozens of libraries, writing a jamstack SPA, deploying the whole thing on kubernetes. You could easily spend several weeks just building out user signup flows, password reset, email templates, etc.
I'm not saying it's all bad today: you can do much more with a SPA than you ever could with server side HTML + jquery, and back in the day when you hit a wall with Rails it was often extremely difficult to work around, whereas today's libraries are much more flexible. But for the happy path of "scaffold a functioning SaaS app", I definitely feel like it's harder to get started today than 10 years ago.
[+] [-] DanHulton|4 years ago|reply
The problem for trials of stuff like this, is that you have no real way of enforcing it. You just have to hope that trialers feel like doing the right thing and paying if they continue to use it, because trying to recover a few hundred dollars through legal means is just not worth the time and money you'd have to spend.
In the end, I settled on a 60-day money-back guarantee, and I've already issued a few already, to folks who thought it had a feature it didn't yet, or ended up not pursuing their idea, etc, so it seems to work pretty well.
[+] [-] joemasilotti|4 years ago|reply
There's also an open source version that handles a good chunk of the stuff needed to get a Rails saas up and running.
[+] [-] nickjj|4 years ago|reply
For example I put together https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/. It's a video course and SAAS example app that ties together a bunch of features. I've easily put in over 1,000 hours to create and update it over time. It's also been extracted from building multiple SAAS apps for clients (I do contract work).
The way I look at it, it's paying $59 once to get a well tested code base that's going to save you 100+ hours of research and development. I also give lifetime updates and support along with refunds for up to 1 year. For context since I created it in 2015 I've re-recorded the course twice and continuously add a bunch of incremental updates. Every few months I go in and update things to their latest versions. Answered a countless number of questions too.
[+] [-] rockbruno|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanmancan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] didip|4 years ago|reply
I can blitz through building a basic SaaS product, but will it be worthwhile to:
1. Make enough money to replace $dayjob.
2. Make enough money to even cover the headache of supporting customers.
3. Make enough money to even cover the hosting cost.
[+] [-] godot|4 years ago|reply
You're also right that it's infinitely easier to build and deploy things in 2020 than it was in 2010!
[+] [-] AlchemistCamp|4 years ago|reply
All of those things are built into Jumpstart Rails, which the author now uses. To be 100% honest, just using a highly productive framework like Rails, Laravel or, my personal favorite, Phoenix, goes a long ways towards making it quick to build all of those features. If you're experienced with a Rails-inspired fullstack framework, I'd say the work involved is closer to a week or two at most.
Jumpstart gives you a sane default for that week or two of work.
[+] [-] Rastonbury|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2457013579|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PaywallBuster|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joemasilotti|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runako|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drorco|4 years ago|reply
Nevertheless, nice work.
[+] [-] jtap|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirso|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joemasilotti|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LenP|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dm03514|4 years ago|reply
I started a company a couple of years ago and sunk weeks/months into the boilerplate, eventually to abandon the project, package the core product as an CLI and open source it. Hoping to avoid that again in the future :p
[+] [-] excid3|4 years ago|reply
There have been a couple huge successes with it. One of them is processing millions in revenue a month. A lot of others are doing well and chugging along. Can't share the exact ones without permission, but I've been blown away it.
At the end of the day, it's nice to help people focus on their unique business features and not payments, teams, etc.
[+] [-] aantix|4 years ago|reply
The scaffolds are already updated to utilize the latest Rails 7/Hotwire patterns .
I'm currently developing with it on a personal project.
[+] [-] joemasilotti|4 years ago|reply
Jumpstart takes care of a _lot_ of the boilerplate code in building a saas. I think it's worth the investment, but I'm involved in the project, so I'm pretty biased.
[+] [-] joshmlewis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brobles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mandeepj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellavora|4 years ago|reply
Sold is sold. Crossing that threshold is a huge step. Congrats to the author.
[+] [-] joemasilotti|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runako|4 years ago|reply
I wish them hearty congratulations on the sale and good luck with the next adventure.
[+] [-] 7fYZ7mJh3RNKNaG|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allendoerfer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altdataseller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonofaragorn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rastonbury|4 years ago|reply
Person put in 1-2 hours of work after the first two months.
[+] [-] erikbye|4 years ago|reply
But here's a 2022 challenge for everyone: Start something new and get your first paying customer. You have exactly 1 month from now. I look forward to your Show HN.
[+] [-] sabhiram|4 years ago|reply
Regardless of how much this made, the OP sold a business and crossed a chasm many find very uncomfortable to cross. Congrats on breaking past the inertia to ship, and then sell; it is truly commendable regardless of the naysayers.
[+] [-] javajosh|4 years ago|reply
This comment probably sounds a little like sour grapes. But let me clear: this was a remarkable and laudable accomplishment. The time and place were right for OP, and it's bad sportsmanship to take anything away from a pilot that tacks with the wind to win the race.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shrimpx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fasteo|4 years ago|reply
>>> My life goal quickly became: how can I spend as much time as possible with my family?
Wasn't Mugshot just like passive income at that point ?
[+] [-] stuckkeys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeeWEE|4 years ago|reply
I'm interested, since i'm running a product that does around 2k MRR, 10k MAU. However profit margin is only around 20% de to user acquisition costs/ operational costs.
[+] [-] dt3ft|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrintellectual|4 years ago|reply
One question - I know you mention in the article that your project was becoming a bit of a burden, but do you think you could've taken it further with a bit more time?
[+] [-] saasly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uxcolumbo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allynjalford|4 years ago|reply