Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
Hi, I'm 19yo. I bootstrapped a SaaS in March last year together with a friend (he does sales, I do engineering). Currently we are at 250k ARR and growing fast. (Based in Netherlands).
I'm sharing this because I'm looking for people who went through a similar situation. I went from "coding in my bedroom next to my university study" to "doing technical interviews with senior engineers" and "enterprise sales to c-level people" within a year. I do like to push myself way beyond my comfort zone (it's my go-to strategy for learning new stuff) but sometimes it is quite overwhelming. Sometimes, when I can take a step back, I realize how insane this situation is.
Luckily I have supporting parents and peers, who try to advise where they can, but none of them have experience running a fast growing company.
Anyway. If anyone has had a similar experience, please share. If you know a community/network with similar people, please share.
Published in 2021, this chronicle by @snerual details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
First off, congratulations. This is quite the accomplishment for anyone of any age.
I started a niche B2B SaaS company with a co-founder when I was 23 (www.gingrapp.com). We sold it off when I was 27 and I stuck around for 2 years after acquisition. By the time I left there were 30+ employees and 8-digit ARR.
I’m currently 30, married with a toddler and semi-retired. The last 10 years of my life have been absolutely nuts and like you I wish I had someone who’d been through it before to talk to. It can be hard to relate with others as a founder. A frequent refrain I encountered when trying to talk with friends/family was that I had “first-world” problems that weren’t worth talking about. Ugh.
First off, I don’t think age matters per se. I’ve known founders in their 40s and 50s to flounder just as often as founders in their 20s, just usually in different ways.
The first piece of advice I’d give is that this whole experience will be a roller coaster and you can’t always control what happens next. It helped me to remember that I’m but a passenger on this journey.
I think I’d have a lot more to share with you privately. If you ever want to chat, my email is in my bio. Would be happy to talk further.
Here is a piece of actionable advice.
Join a supoort community in your area. You are looking for something for entrepeneurs in holland ideally. These usually have a price of admission like $300/yr but can be worth every cent
For example, ecommercefuel is fantastic for ecomm sites. Mastermind may have something to offer for your geography. Its going to boil down to reputation and how much you put in too.
You need a forum of entrepeneurs for people that are dealing with the same issues as you: payroll issues, VAT issues, engineering best practices, accounting advice, dealing with fraud, chargebacks, churn prevention, sales , banking contacts, brand registration and protection, outsourcing copy, and most importantly, advice on how to hire key staff
As you can see, its a lot. You need a whole village to figure that out. I am not sure whats out there for EU virtual "villages" for SaaS, but HN may be able to help.
From one entrepr3neur to other: if you dont have a crm already for sales leads, and your sales cycle is not self serviced, try the streak plugin for gsuite.
Good luck.
You're already in one of the best communities there is: Hacker News. Don't underestimate what you can learn just by carefully reading the threads here.
I went from "idea in my dorm room" to interviewing and hiring executives in their 40s and 50s within 24 months. The best lesson I learned is that there are way fewer "rules" than you think, and smart, disciplined, focused entrepreneurs can accomplish way more than they assume. It's reasonable to reflect on your inexperience in order to prevent mistakes, but you should never feel intimidated by it, or let other people intimidate you. The world (and YC's portfolio) is full of "inexperienced" people like you who have built billion dollar companies that disrupted industries and became pillars of the economy.
If you post contact information in your profile, I'm sure at least a few people with relevant experience would reach out and offer to be a resource for more specific advice. I've done that a few times here with mostly successful results.
Congrats, thats some impressive growth in a short time.
If you want to know what not to do, I'm happy to chat, email in my profile. I've made almost every possible mistake in the last 20 years ;-) Despite all the mistakes my current company is a couple of stages past the 250k ARR and I'm on the right track.
In the end most advice in this situation is not rocket science, like for example:
- reserve time to work on your business, not just in your business
- build a team, not a group of individuals
- leadership becomes important in this stage, start reading on the subject, there is a ton of information available.
And most important, try to enjoy the ride. There is not one big moment you are working towards, it's all the little moments that mather.
Hi, since someone else mentioned your product's website I looked over it and I'm curious.
As far as I understand students need to install your app and the app requires users to log out and when they log in, it's launched automatically in full screen mode and users cannot escape until they submit their answers.
What if I install your app in a sandboxed environment (like a windows box in a vmware virtual machine)? While the app is in fullscreen mode inside it, I think there would be nothing preventing me from using host machine's functions (like accessing internet via browsers or opening documents). Have you considered these kind of risks?