Making your first dollar from a SaaS project

To share our experience (we sell SAAS in financial services): our first solution took us 6+ months of development (one person) to get our MVP launched and another year to get people to use it actively without active outbound selling (that is to say it was sold but we had to hold your hand the whole way through).

Some thoughts: internally we consider the "V" in MVP to encompass not just what is the minimum you need to do to solve a problem but the minimum to solve a problem (worth solving) at a level someone is willing to pay you for the solution. That often is more extensive than a traditional MVP which is why SAAS solutions require so much up front development. Consumers are not fond of subscribing to services and businesses don't like beta products.

A couple additional thoughts as we now actively sell 4 SAAS services:

- to be successful in SAAS you need to build something people need. They say there are two types of businesses: painkillers and vitamins. If you're a vitamin you are 20x more likely to fail than a pain killer. The value prop is just too hard to communicate and people's attention spans are too limited - the more you understand the user / workflow / domain the better. I realize this may sound obvious but I do my best to pay forward the mentorship I received and I am shocked at how often I come across people trying to solve other people's problems as an outsider.

- with the exception of notable billion dollar startups we all love and read about daily, I believe the dream of "build it and they will come (register, put in their credit card and bam you're done) is just that, a dream. Yes organic growth is real but all my buddies who have successful SAAS companies spent a ton of time and effort selling them before that organic growth kicked off. This could be an east coast vs west coast thing as my network is hitting niche workflows but worth sharing regardless.

I'm not sure why this is on the front page. I mean, $1 that you just made yesterday doesn't really indicate product/market fit, nor seem very noteworthy in general. If anything, it seems more like a midway point in the journey of what you might expect to get there. You might have to pivot several times after realizing traction is not stable or perhaps not scalable vis a vis marketing efforts, as has been my experience. Kudos to building something though.

Edit:

I get the point others are making about celebrating a milestone and your first sale being the stepping stone to the next, but I don't think it addresses mine:

Is $1 that you made just yesterday really enough data to demonstrate to others what to expect? Is there really any conclusion that can be drawn from such a small experiment? Maybe it's just me, but I feel like there would be much more interesting insights to discuss after waiting more time or when more sales occurred.

Honestly this looks more like an SEO piece given the keyword rich external links in the article from a high PR domain and boost from HN. The author has mostly just submitted his own articles on HN to boot.

Separate from finding someone who is willing to make a purchase, getting the technical bits in place in order to properly accept a purchase can be challenging, too. It's not just about being able to charge a credit card.

In our case we're an infrastructure service that charges customers based on their usage level. This required collecting the right metrics, consolidating them durably, making the metrics visual somewhere so customers understand how they are being charged, implementing notions of billing cycles, syncing with the payment provider (in our case Stripe), UI elements to indicate if the account is paid or not, ability to cancel paid service, etc.

All in all it took us a good two months from when we wanted to charge people to when we could actually charge people. Of course every service will have different technical needs. Congrats on the first buck. :)

I've crashed and burned on SaaS enough that I'm very into the landing page approach -- don't build the product, but convince people you have so that they can click the "buy now" button. That way you feel more confident that the market exists while you're actually building it. After all the projects I've failed at, nothing is harder for me to do than spend 200+ hours on something without having a clue whether it will reap benefits or not. Corey spent 100 hours trying to gather traction. He could have potentially skipped the 100 hours it took to build it and instead just tested the sales side.

There are people who can know where a market is and confidently blaze straight into it without any validation. I think I'm just not that genius or lucky.

In 1998, before people had much of clue about what represents success and how big things can get given time, I built a software product and posted it to the net. Within a week or so there had been a handful of sales at $100 each.

That looked like failure to me at the time - "that's a trickle of money - extrapolating maybe $25,000 per year? Not enough to pay my bills. I need to get a job".

Today that sort of start looks like a whopping success.

I've been trying to replicate that start ever since.

The upside is that I did go and get a job, and through that job met the woman who I had kids with..... if that's that path to getting my fabulous kids then I don't regret it.