Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?

There are many things that might influence the result and therefore your decision.

I once worked for a product in the SaaS business and what helped us is understanding "where are our customers". So, where are _your_ customers? How do they come to your product, how do they discover your product? After having this answer we focused on improving that conversion rate (for us it was all about being first on google and having a high-converting landing page, but in your case forums might be a better place to look at. It all depends on the target customer)

Also, one issue I've often encountered is that knowing the customer and selling to the customer might be very different things. Did you only sell online? One great piece of advice is try to sell the product IRL and record the audio. After many failed and successfull attempts you'll have recordings of _what works_ and what doesn't work for the kind of customer. That information will be useful to convey the benefits into your landing page / homepage.

Back to your question: How much growth should you expect? It is a generic question. How many people are impacted by your product? How many have that specific itch to be scratched? How fast can you get to them? How good is your product at scratching the itch? The (partial) sum of these questions might lead to the answer. If you have many people impacted by your product, if the product scratch a big itch and you can reach all the people at the same time, chances are you're going to grow fast.

If you grow slow, is it bad? It might be bad if you're asking 5$/month for an extra. If it is 100$/month maybe a slow growth might make sense.

In the end, if I were in your shoes, I'll wait a year to decide if it's time to give up, but at the same time I'll set some monthly checks to see how growth is going, what are the feedbacks and how the community is reacting and test each month a different way to market the product. A good book on this is "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg

PS I also run a side business creating cosmetic products (not saas) and my growth has been relatively slow. The product (in my case) fixes a big itche and had no competitors. Reason for that is that achieving a stable efficient result is quite hard, but we somehow made it (bootrapped obviously). In our case slow growth was a good thing because it allowed us to fix the issues in the product before being too much known in the public.

I think it takes a very long time to grow a SaaS. Think multiple years. I started 4.5 years ago and it took nearly 4 years until I felt fully comfortable. Slow growth is to be expected. My growth curve, in fact, isn't a curve at all: it's pretty much a straight line if you plot paying customers. It looks better for MRR (monthly recurring revenue, your main metric), because I've been working on raising ARPU (average revenue per user).

The "long slow saas ramp of death" is real. Google it.

You can supposedly grow faster if you do marketing well. But from what you wrote I'd guess that you do not do marketing well. My adventures with marketing came down to the following conclusions:

* Spending money on ads is basically burning money and does not work for me. (tried Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook ultra-targeted ads, Quora). This became painfully obvious after I implemented my own conversion tracking, because I did not trust their metrics/analytics.

* You will find plenty of marketing experts all around you, but none of them will work for a commission, which speaks to how much trust they really place in their "skills".

* Since I am a solo founder, I eventually decided that I'm OK with my organic growth and I'd rather concentrate on making the product better. This helps in building bigger product value, improves customer retention, allows me to raise the ARPU, and in general works great. I just don't get the marketing-pumped stream of new customers. But I'm OK with that, especially at this point.

That said, I think I would expect more than 8 paying customers after a year. My ramp-up in the first year was slow (the product didn't have a lot of value back then), but it was quicker. I just checked, and I had 25 paying customers after one year from the first one.

I've been running various online businesses, including SaaS, for eight years.

There is no general answer to your question. Are those 8 customers paying you hundreds of dollars each per month, or tens of dollars? What's the reason you haven't gotten more? Have you lost motivation to work in this space / on that project?

I was in a similar situation to you a few years ago. I had started a clone of patio11's appointmentreminder.org for the Austrian market. After 2 years, I had 8 customers and €2k monthly recurring revenue. But it was very difficult to get new customers. I decided to stop growing this business. Since then, I've lost 4 of the 8 customers, but those that remain now pay me more for additional services, so I'm back at €2k MRR. I'm satisfied with my decision.

Another project I worked on is https://fman.io, a desktop application. There, I wish I had stopped sooner. I spent 3,000 hours and made <€20k. I actually recorded videos about this and the other business I mentioned above [1], [2].

In general, I suspect most founders keep going longer than they should. The fact that you are even asking the question indicates to me that you are losing motivation. Maybe it is time to move on.

If you'd like to talk about more details privately, feel free to reach out by email. You can find my address at http://herrmann.io. Good luck!

1: https://youtu.be/I1K3IkOlaVw

2: https://youtu.be/NWCOwvp23uk

I've seen many founders slowly grind out their spirit in a bad market. So the first thing you need to clarify is:

- do your customers know that they have a problem

- is the problem painful enough that people are happy to pay for a solution

- do your customers have money?

I've been running a SaaS for professional freelance photographers for 10+ years now. Customers going bankrupt really drives up my churn rate. It's a frustrating market. I keep the company around because it's profitable, but I would never want to invest additional work in that product.

I also once built a sound plugin to add 3D audio support to existing movie production software. Pretty much no chargebacks and no returns at a much higher price. Here, marketing was easy because a good prospect would buy 20 licenses in bulk for the entire studio. We got featured on magazines, had interviews with famous actors, musicians, and directors. In short, everyone was feeling great about working on it.

I've also released some games that gained no traction even when I made them completely free with no ads. That was pretty frustrating.

What I'm saying is choosing the right market can make the difference between you feeling great and making easy progress, and wasting lots of effort only to feel frustrated later on. Make sure you choose a market that makes you happy.

There is a reason why nobody is making X optimized for broke cynics.

So, to get an idea of what order of magnitude you're dealing with, you'll want to run two experiments, at a cost of, say, $1000.

First experiment is to see how large a customer base there is. You want to see how often people are looking for a product like yours or your competitors. Make an Adwords campaign with the right keywords, bid high enough to always be shown first, and then run this for a while to get an idea of what the search traffic is like.

Second experiment is to see what portion of that customer base you can capture. So, continuing on from the previous experiment, you now want your site to be set up, and then measure what percentage of those searches result in people actually clicking on your site. And then what percentage of those clicks result in them actually putting in their credit card information and paying for the first month. If you can't have people signing up on their own, then give them a form to submit their information instead, and then make some estimate on what percentage of those will fall through.

Then, that gives you an idea of what your baseline growth is. And then anything beyond that, i'm sure you would've already hired someone who could give you way better industry expertise than you would find by asking HN.