I bootstrapped a SaaS business from my kitchen table...it's now worth just shy of $100M.
I thank the heavens everyday that I didn't go the VC route. I can pretty much do whatever I want without this constant growth at all costs pressure. It also gives us a massive advantage against VC backed competitors. We can make decisions that reap benefits 2-5 years out.
This has created a situation were every competitor follows the same trajectory where it eventually leads to an over-complicated, bloated product that users hate. They come to us and it's like a breath of fresh air.
I have a $100M SaaS in a different space but the underlying tech is identical. I had this idea ~10 yrs ago when we first started writing our own import logic to move users over from competing services.
The engineering challenges to make this work flawlessly is going to be substantial to say the least. I GET from ~70 data sources right now...I couldn't imagine having to GET,POST, CHECKPOINT and DIFF with all the edge cases that appear.
Best of luck but this is a very hard problem to solve. Would love to see someone see this through!
I built a $100M SaaS. Do you want this more than anything? Are you willing to do do whatever it takes and go 1-2 years without a salary?
If you answered yes then you just need to leap and iterate on the user feedback loop.
My first mvp compared to what I'm selling today is completely different. I pivoted 20 times at least.
So the name of the game is to just start building and not be overly concerned with making mistakes. Find what doesn't work and move toward what does. Mimic nature by constant evolution.
I spent 10 years creating failure after failure...learning many things a long the way...at 27 my co-founder and I started a SaaS that is now worth $100M...we made $475 our first month which was roughly 10 years ago
when I was at your stage I thought the idea of $1M/m was an impossible dream...it's not...just keep iterating, listening to your users, following your gut and make good decisions everyday
Congrats! I ramped a little faster but followed the same path. The project started at my kitchen table now grosses $13M per year (10 years later). Keep going my friend; the road will be rocky but it's well worth the time and effort once you reach the top of the mountain!
same exact situation...we moved over all bright eyed with hip skip and a hop in our step...within 24 hours we experienced a full system-wide outage followed by a full system-wide block storage outage a few days later....their system has the reliability of a hobby project
totally false; I run a fully remote company with ~20 employees and we pay our devs more than what they would make at a comparable office job. That being said (this is going to sound bad), the lack of a personal relationship off the top allows us to fire quickly. So we tend to pay more for but only hold on to very competent devs.
I was going to mention this...I've been using this setup for over a year with 6,000 domains...me thinks someone at autotrader needs to get better at Google :<
I used this about 2 years ago and it was absolute junk...it couldn't run a mongo cluster and seemed to be half complete functionality wise. They were certainly more than willing to take my license fee.
I see it still has a very dated UI. Hopefully the system actually does what the company promises.
Helping others realize the wonders of financial independence so that they can experience more happiness by spending time with friends, helping others etc.
Sure he's not curing cancer but there is a tremendous amount of nobility in his future actions.
I migrated to packet all bright eye'd and full of wonder...terrible mistake...outages on a weekly basis and they have no availability zones so when outage occurs the entire region is down. Replicating across regions failed our latency requirements so that was a no-go.
I can't stress this enough. Having to roll your own / administrate a logging system, Database, load balancers, autoscale, file storage far exceeds the added cost of the cloud. Now that GCE has sustained usage discounts of 39% it makes no sense to go bare metal right now.