SubmitHub: how a solo founder built a $46k/mo SaaS business in 10 months
Published in 2016, this chronicle by @csallen details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $46k/mo.
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 ★ 517 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 121 comments
Kudos! I get really excited when I learn about people working hard at creative and useful things like this. I also think it's important to note that, while this is surely no small feat, it sounds like this is the fruition of the author's accumulated experiences, network, and reputation "[over] the course of my ~7 years running a blog", and probably even longer with a strong passion for music and the people in music.
This comment is not to downplay the author's accomplishments--I think keeping to something for even 5 years is ridiculously hard, and that should be commended, especially if it resulted in something that people find valuable. Rather, I hope that people reading this won't lose hope when, 10 months into their own businesses, they don't see the same levels of popularity or financial success. This project seems to be the tip of an iceberg. I think luck is also a strong component, but it definitely favors the prepared.
Tldr: "I was born in South Africa and moved to California just before the start of high school, graduating from the University of California, San Diego in 2007 before working a corporate job in DC that ultimately landed me a sweet gig at Google. My responsibility once there was to figure out how much to pay the company's executives, which meant I was lucky to enjoy face time with many of the top brass.,One of the biggest frustrations of running my music blog was that by the time I took it full-time, I was receiving upwards of 300 email pitches a day from artists, record labels, and publicists, all looking to have their music featured on Indie Shuffle.,Then, toward the end of last year, I decided that a good way to learn some new coding languages would be to try and solve this problem by developing a website to streamline the process."
As seems to be common on Indie Hackers, the title is extremely disingenuous:
1) It took him 6 years to build an audience before turning it into a business. The title makes it sound like the entire process only took 10 months.
2) $46k/mo of what? Revenue or profit? If the latter, at least half immediately goes to the music blogs.
3) Where exactly does the $46k/mo number come from? It's only mentioned in the title and explained nowhere. Is it a projection, an average, the best month, ...?
Courtland, you have a great site and I really enjoy your articles. Please don't spoil your awesome content with vagueness and clickbait.
1.) Build an audience (~6 years)
2.) Build your business (a few months...)
That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover & Product Hunt:
https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a1a2c0
The title was "Product Hunt's Rise: An overnight success 1,834 days in the making"... Same exact story here except growing Indie shuffle took closer to 2,190 days!
Something that I think is worth pointing out: that site doesn't have a recurring revenue model and also charges very low fees, two things that go against the common wisdom of "just get people to pay you every month, and add an enterprise plan in there for good measure".
The truth is that the classic three-tiered SaaS business model is just one of many possible business models, yet many developers-turned-entrepreneur adopt it without stopping to think whether it's a good fit or not for their product.