Ask HN: One man bootstrapped SAAS business, do you disclose that to clients?
If you are the only one primarily running your SAAS business, do you disclose that information to your clients ? Do Clients care ? Would love to hear from single person bootstrappers.
Published in 2014, this chronicle by @codegeek details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 18 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 11 comments
I don't throw it in people's faces, but equally don't attempt to hide it. I was very self-conscious about it years ago, but clients have by-and-large responded very positively to it.
My favorite way for massaging the issue is: "Yep, at present I'm the only person working on this full-time. There are plusses and minuses to this. For example, we can't offer round-the-clock phone support standard with our plans. That's a minus. On the plus side, any time you have a problem, it gets dealt with by me, who built the software and has all necessary authority to fix your problem, rather than somebody reading from a script in a call center somewhere. Your call on who you want to rely on when it's something critical to your business." (I stole this line from Jason Cohen and oh boy does it work.)
I would encourage you, if you deal with larger companies, to be able to walk the professionalism walk while you're talking the professionalism talk. When I started by business ~8 years ago I was a kid with a web app. These days, I might think of myself like that, but when I'm talking to the IT department at a hospital words like "designated HIPAA compliance officer" and "errors & omissions insurance policy" and "LLC" come up a lot.
I'm a one man bootstrapped business (at the moment). Judging by my help@ emails, most customers perceive my company to be a bunch of people. I don't hide it but I don't shout it out either.
My customers tend to be small too, so it has been much more of a positive if they find that I'm similar to them. I can't always respond to email within a day in which case I'm up-front about my limitations.
And who likes the copy/paste responses you get from many SaaS, especially the likes of PayPal/eBay/Amazon/Google et al? You have a massive advantage to build loyalty and relationships by stamping your personality and approachableness on your comms.
That said, maybe if you're shooting for monthly subscriptions from enterprise clients $1k+ it can hobble you. Patrick at Kalzumeus seems to know that area well.
As a one man bootstrapped SAAS business, I generally omit that information unless asked. If the question is asked, I answer truthfully. The hardest part about being a one man startup in my experience actually is getting press coverage. When they ask you about your "Team" and you say it's you and a freelancer, the conversation seems to end pretty quickly.
I'd love to hear others opinions on how to approach the press as a one-man bootstrapped SAAS startup?
This probably makes a difference based on the level of availability that your clients expect from you and based on how "corporate" they are.
Corporate clients like working with bigger companies. Why? Because the person making the decision doesn't want to have to justify the decision to use a startup. Even thought the payoff might be greater to go with the startup, it's the _easy_ decision to justify by going with a large, established company.
It depends on what the customers think and if what they think is why they subscribed. If they think that the business is larger and more stable, and value that, they won't be happy.
Personally, I prefer to be visible as an opinionated single founder from the start because it attracts customers who want me to 'win' along with them. I like the model of Brennan Dunn's Planscope in this respect.