How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

If you want to compete with the big players, you have to solve the most important pain point and work upward from that small use base.

My case: I work on https://hanami.run (will soon move to https://mailwip.com due to hanamirb.org conflict) and email forwarding is very competitive. Big and old players are all over the place because at the end of day, setting up email forwarding isn't hard and many open source project did it, heck you can spin up AWS lambda for incoming email in no time.

The pain point is: email will drop sometime, time to time no matter how good an email forwarding service is because they have to scan spam, have false positive, or because of strict DMARC/SPF rule. And I have no tools available to help me out there. So I focus strongly on my maillog features with many level of privacy:

- no log at all: defaut

- only log spam email: give you another chance to read email on our UI

- log meta data

- log meta data + subject

- log whole email

Then, next steps is regex forwarding. Again, I learned this from reddit, forum search of those use base.

Basically I focus on those small features that big player doesn't have.

Then I was able to obtain a very small user base who has issues with big providers. Then I work upward from there to spin out given now that I had a working and good product that people are willing to pay for.

The rest is just iteration.

I hate to be the stereotype of skeptical HN reader but I think this headline oversells the article.

Specifically for me it doesn't speak at all to the differences between starting a SaaS like this as a team of founders versus as a solo founder. As a committed solo founder all I can say is that choosing solo founding is not something to be undertaken lightly!

My startup CV is now roughly an equal length of being on a team of 4 founders and the current solo founder situation so I see the differences all the time. There are a lot of positives to both options but to write an article like this and not blend an awareness of the trade-offs between the two makes it much less interesting.

I've really struggled with being a solo founder despite it being a strong preference and learning to face every aspect of the running the business with a very conscious awareness that you're +1 in certain things and -1 in others is the only way I've found to make it work.

The idea you choose is a big part of this. I've seen thinking about your idea & solo founding preference described on twitter by @warikoo like this:

2x2 matrix

X-axis: Do you have the core skill reqd for the startup? Y-axis: Are you a control freak?

Y,Y: DON'T have a cofounder

Y,N: Could get one, but with complementary skills

N,Y: Hire people, might make them cofounders later

N,N: You have to have one!

"Solo Founder" seems like a proxy that just acknowledges that Software Development is now a Profession.

We don't refer to Doctors, Lawyers, and Accountants as "Solo Doctors", etc...

They are simply people who have studied their area of expertise for years, are disciplined and principled in their approach, likely carry some form of E&O insurance to warrant their work, and are perfectly capable forming their own legal entity and opening their own "office".

Broadly speaking, these professionals belong to networks of other professionals, who occasionally collaborate on projects.

Reading the article in this context then, focusing on a niche makes perfect sense for any Professional.

that's exactly what we did and doing very well. After trying lots of stuff in the last 12 years and actively participating in the indie communities, that's the easiest way to make it work.

Find a popular product, pick a growing niche that product serves not so well (you can see that in reviews, twitter, etc) and build a specialized version of that product with a friendly and modern UI. When serving different niches, usually products require different configurations for each and get quite heavy and confusing. You can fix that by specializing on one niche.