02thoeva's comments

Have seen this far too often. I was at a successful UK based startup very early on, so my strike price was pennies. Those who joined a year or two later were looking at strike prices in excess of £30 with hundreds shares. Recent investment rounds put the share price at around £120, but as always current employees can't sell until a full sale or IPO.

The result? A swell of employees who want to leave/move on but can't afford to buy their shares and leave. It's lead to a number of people just hanging around, even when their enthusiasm and passion is waining.

Not what options are designed for!

Went full time on our side project, https://emailoctopus.com, last year when we hit the $5k a month mark. We'd been working on it for 3 years and had some steady growth - contracted a few days a week alongside until I could afford to go full time.

In hindsight should have done it sooner, a year on we've grown so much more by taking it seriously as a business. We value our time more and as such charge more, yet growth has only accelerated.

I think you misunderstood, I work for EmailOctopus. Sorry for the confusion.

Use it for both EC2 and SES. Our customers link their own SES account to send out campaigns, so the advantage of being on EC2 is that many of them don't pay a penny. Server costs is about 10% of our revenue, so will weigh up the pros/cons of moving in the near future, I'm sure.

AWS fees. We're an email marketing platform, we send around 150m emails a month, all of which we need to store and process clicks/opens on.

We ran our side-project, https://emailoctopus.com, for around 3 years before going full time. As a low-cost platform, our sales are quite low touch, so we'd be able to set up our marketing projects (Facebook ads, email campaigns) in the evenings and just let them run on a schedule.

Support was a little bit more tricky, however. The only solution we found here, other than outsourcing to an Upworker, was to try to minimise support. Make your help docs as useful as possible and spend time on improving error messages.

I would also advise you to switch to working on the project full-time as soon as you can afford to. Our growth went through the roof (we'd spent around 3 years getting to £1k MRR and tripled that in the first full-time month). Some reasons why? We could spend time with our customers and focus on improving our metrics, the stuff that you just can't automate away. We also began treating it more as a business and valued our own time spent on the project more, which resulted in increasing our prices and getting across our value proposition better.

Still like using SCSS with Bootstrap. So easy to get into the habit of nesting things 10 selectors deep though - a style guide is a must.

We've had quite a lot of experience using Amazon SES, as we run an email marketing platform on it. We run both our marketing and transactional emails using it for https://emailoctopus.com.

If you're already using AWS then I'd definitely look at SES. I appreciate the price may seem too cheap, but the service is now used by huge companies for their transactional emails, the likes of Netflix rely heavily on it. As long as you configure your set-up correctly with DKIM/SPF I'd be surprised if you ran into too many delivery problems. Also worth noting they now offer dedicated IPs, for a not too costly monthly fee.

We did write an article here: https://medium.com/emailoctopus/the-road-to-one-billion-emai...

Although in short, we built a product to serve our own need, launched it totally free for everyone and ended up gaining around 2000 users very quickly. Within a year we had grown MRR to the £3k mark, so we contracted alongside running this 2 days a week. Now, another further year on we're full-time with a few employees.

So we work the hours which work for us now and are free to work from anywhere in the world. For example, I'm not an early riser, so start work at 10am and if I want to leave early, I do. We're very relaxed on exact hours as long as we hit our commitments for the week, which we outline on a Monday.

We launched https://emailoctopus.com around 3 years ago as a side project. The most difficult thing with launching a SaaS is the early days, where you've spent hours upon hours building the app and are only bringing in £400 a month.

We stuck with it though and today have a full-time team of 5 working on the app, are paying ourselves a similar wage to what we were earning in our full-time jobs and most importantly have almost complete ownership of our work-life balance.

I'd really recommend a SaaS business if you are after recurring, side revenue and as mentioned before https://www.oppslist.com/ is a great place to get some initial ideas. Your marketing skills will improve too - just stick with it for a year or so if you do go that route!

In the UK, Eve, a rival maker also just (around a month ago) IPO'd here in the UK. Their figures are scary at the moment, with a CPA hovering around £250-£300 and returns of 15% on the mattresses with the 100-night trial. All that with an average order value was only £450, on a product people buy every 10 years! They lost £11.3m last year on earnings of £12m, so no wonder their shares have been on the decline since IPO.

The mattress market may be big, but there are so many clones - surely only one or two can win out.

I put this article together after reading and commenting in this earlier HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14279870

I think there's a real attitude when starting as a side project to go with rock bottom pricing, feeling like it's the only way to compete with the more established players. Unfortunately, I think this hinders the progress of many exciting projects and slows down their early growth. In short, you almost definitely can and probably should charge more.

Just checked out the Smart Passive Income post. It's amazing that almost 10% of ConvertKit's revenue has come from this guy. Thanks so much for sharing.

Think this also shows how important your product pricing is, particularly if growing by these traditional methods. The affiliate model of giving away a 30-40% recurring cut (as Aweber and CK do) is unsustainable unless your prices factor this in and affiliates will also only work with you if your prices are high enough in the first place to make it worthwhile.

So we launched https://emailoctopus.com around 3 years ago, it was pitched as 10x cheaper than Mailchimp and that's remained our core proposition.

That said, it's very difficult to grow a bootstrapped business when you're not charging much. At the lower end of the market you usually have less committed customers and depending on the SaaS, you may attract less favourable customers. As such we're slowly moving away from pricing being our only unique selling point and beginning to look at differentiating features.

Copying features at a lower price is a fine way to start out as a one-man band and gives you sufficient focus to get it out ther door, however, to grow the business I think you'll need to look bigger.

I run EmailOctopus - happy to discuss anything we can do to help you out, as we're a relatively small SaaS business ourself and know the struggles.

Fair question. As it stands, there are 2 of us collecting and curating the pieces from what we consider some of the better liberal and conservative opinion sources.

We're trying to maintain the quality and integrity of the articles by limiting the number of newsletters we send out to one a fortnight.

It's possible in the future we'll open it up to readers to submit insightful articles for others to read. The curated newsletter is step one to gauge interest in such a product.