Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project
Published in 2017, this chronicle by @welder details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $10k.
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 ★ 399 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 163 comments
I must voice concerns regarding this product. Just took a look at the Notepad++ plugin (https://github.com/wakatime/notepadpp-wakatime), because this is something I know a lot about. To begin with, it sends filenames to the mother ship instead of just the programming language. I would consider filenames to be sensitive information giving a very good idea of the project you are working on...
Also problematic is the fact that plugin is doing almost nothing; instead it downloads Python from the official place, downloads a whole Python project (called CLI) and executes it. Also, there's an automatic update mechanism in place which updates the CLI every now and then. It sounds as a recipe for a disaster waiting to happen.
Edit:
I guess what I've said applies to every software with an auto-update function and that's of course quite the norm today. As ztratar pointed out, the usage of SSL provides a decent level of security. I still would wish for the user to be notified in some fashion. Also, from what I understand, the WakaTime CLI seems to have an option to hide filenames, it's just not changeable from the Notepad++ plugin.
A user emailed to tell us that the ownership of this project and this story of its founding are disputed and there's a legal process going on. A quick check shows a bit of supporting evidence for this, so I think it's best if we bury this post for now. We have no way to tell who's right, and it doesn't seem fair for HN to implicitly take a side by featuring one side of the story.
Incidentally, we invited this submission as a repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546345. We do that when we run across a good submission that didn't get much attention the first time around, and we think the community might find it interesting. We wouldn't have done that if we'd known the story was disputed. The principle remains the same, though, so if any of you know of a good submission that fell through the cracks, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll consider putting it in the queue.
Be careful what you measure, because you will get more of it. I don't think # of seconds editing a file is a good proxy for measuring bug free and understandable code. But if you want more # of seconds with files open and being edit, this is your tool it seems.
Am I missing something about this product in that it measures anything related to code quality?
If a company relies heavily this tool to measure its devs productivity, that would be a red flag about what developer attributes the company rewards. I guess it could be combined with other measures, but the leaderboard and gamification will incentivize behavior not closely tied to getting things done, in my opinion.
And, yes, the success is inspiring and despite my negativity I'd be curious to hear how the tool has been used to improve a team's productivity. I spent some time on the product's web page, but it doesn't really address how time spent in a file relates to productivity.
Congratulations. I'm not sure if the actual author is on this thread or this was posted by someone else but maybe someone can answer...
One problem I have bootstrapping my SaaS is that I have no money to market. I can tweet and do direct marketing but that is slow and time consuming. Any recommendations from the crew on HN with how I can market to a large audience without needing a huge budget to spend on Adwords and things like that?
Infrastructure cost is quite high, almost on the same level as Pied-Piper wonder how much time before something better or even free appears.
Also if any dev is reading, a good addition will be able to run this on my own premises, this is some information valuable for project leads but its hard to justify monthly cost for something you usually take for granted.