What is your playbook for profitable SaaS without outside investment?

We've built a couple of saas businesses without any investment, as complete unknowns. It's doable, and today it's easier than it has ever been. You can go from 0 to revenue in less than 6 months. The big problem is that there is a ton of software out there, including free software, and people will only pay if your product is much better in some way that actually matters. If you only give yourself a few months to build a product you can only build a couple of features, so those features better be really good.

I don't have one yet. Still working that out!

I am certainly monitoring this thread with a lot of interest.

My approaches and results so far:

- Email marketing. This was done by identifying businesses in the local area (roughly 1,000 of them) and just churning through contacting them, ideally with the name of the owner sourced from their website. Result: literally not a single response or conversion.

- Posting to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with tutorials, news, offers about my product every 3 days. Result: also zero. I should note that I have never had a social account before this, so I have no existing networks of friends and family to rely on.

- Talking about my product on Hackernews. Result: hundreds of page views and 4 free trial signups. Nice! Finally something.

- Reddit posts: tens of page views, no signups, so far as I can tell.

I have a few more routes, like paid for advertising, but I am honestly trying to do this all at a cost as close to 0 as possible (FWIW, I'm paying about £10 a month for my VPS and Cloudflare workers, that's it)

The product is a static website builder that's supposed to be much easier to use than WordPress, mostly cheaper and also super usable on mobile (which is rare I believe).

https://pinkpigeon.co.uk if you're curious, and apologies for the self promotion.

My approach has been to resell something that already exists, with a healthy margin.

Of course there are downsides, as well all know starting a business relying on Twitter's API, for example, ended badly for almost everyone. But if you get lucky, or you're quite small, then there's room for you to collect money with a simple wrapper or two around existing services.

It's 2021. There is very little opportunity left in SaaS that hasn't had mind boggling amounts of investor capital thrown at it. These are your competitors. In every single conceivable niche. Not bootstrapped companies. Venture backed. Millions in capital earmarked for marketing and sales. For things like mattress testing and sushi restaurant POS.

There is no playbook for profitable bootstrapped SaaS in 2021. The winners either have a special secret that they wouldn't share for the world or they're lying about being profitable.. or in most cases the "successes" are simply such amateurs they don't understand basic accounting and believe that "profitable" means "slightly more monthly revenue than the cost of the servers".

If you embark on this be aware, the days of having your own little saas as passive side income are long behind us. This is serious serious stuff now.

I was able to bootstrap a SaaS business by working as a contract engineer half to three quarters time and building my company in the remaining time. I lowered expenses by moving in with family and eventually to SE Asia until profitability. This meant I had infinite runway but also it took longer . I prototyped for six months and then ran/tested the service for free for almost two years before it was ready for paid plans. Then it went from 0 to ~15k MRR in the first month. A couple of tricks like requiring Dropbox connection for users file storage and utilizing webrtc’s p2p capabilities helped keep running expenses manageable during the lead up to profitability.

Build on someone else's Marketplace. Identify a niche where your product name will be the primary form of initial marketing in that marketplace. Keep costs as low as possible. Time to profitability is a function of how much you can manage costs.

There is no playbook. Every market and company is different.

It took me over five years and two failed businesses to not reach profitability. Survivorship bias is a big thing in this space.

1. Be a consultant in a specialized domain

2. Notice a problem everyone is having in your domain (a problem you're tired of solving over and over)

2. Go from 40 hrs billable -> X hrs a week billable. Spend 40-X hrs on product to solve problem

3. Tell your clients about your product that solves the problem you see they're having. Use their feedback to make it better.

4. If clients stay engaged and love it, then you invest deeper into it

5. If you're known in your domain, you probably have the beginnings of some marketing channels to share your product.

6. Talk about the _problem_ not your solution per-se. Make a lot of content marketing about the problem people are having. Seed Google and adwords with this content.

7. If (6) draws people in AND you can convert them to try out your tool, you have the start of a marketing/sales funnel

8. You can decide if you try to convert (7) into consulting clients or SaaS sales. If the SaaS sales is working out, and they pay a price that makes it worth your effort, then you're, and your marketing funnel continues to be strong, THEN and only then you might be on a path to profitability

the only way to be profitable is to start selling. the only way to avoid debt is to have money. the only way to have money without investments is to sell from day 1.

either you invest with time & money, or lots of time, or lots of money... but sooner or later you need to sell. so if you don't want to invest money, or lose time, better sell & pre-sell before it exists, or before it is automated. grow afterwards

I am trying to build a SaaS myself, currently, it's at $80 MRR with minimal costs (single server). Though if I counted my time spent there and compared to the average salary, that project would be a total failure.

It's been probably 15 years since I started thinking how having a passive income covering living costs would be greatly liberating. I like FIRE movement, and was lucky enough to create a website for tracking dividends as my master thesis at the university. As any website requires time just to keep it running, I always knew I have to create a website that would be useful for me, so I don't lose interest in it and the project doesn't die after few months.

Financial independence is not that hard, it's just simple math on cash flow and how inflation and debt works. I knew dividends will be probably hard to beat long-term with other passive income, so I was pretty confident I would keep building a dividend tracking website for me, even if nobody else would be using it. I thought there must be a better way to track dividends than putting them manually on spreadsheets.

So how much time it took me to reach profitability? Probably a few years. I have not been asking for paid membership before that. I added a paid membership that was equal to free membership about a year ago. I called it supporter, as there were no upsides from paying for it. But some payments did come. And as I had new ideas, I started to bring these ideas to life only for paid memberships. Slowly it grows. I still want to have a usable free membership for the majority of users, but I think I would not be doing it forever for free.

So what I think works well? Find a community for a problem you are solving, so you get a lot of feedback and improve it all the time. Give paid membership to valued members in those communities - moderators, admins, youtubers, ... Be active on those reddits/facebooks, solving their problems and getting the users for your service. As the site grows, you can slowly implement more and more features for paid membership only, until you have a good free/paid ratio (up to you to decide ideal %).

Most importantly I still use it myself, for tracking my own portfolio - https://www.digrin.com/portfolio/24-dividend-growth-investin... and keeping an eye on my estimated financial independence year. I feel much better building a tool for myself and like-minded people, not just profit.

i had couple tries on this topic, latest "finished" product is https://insightrend.com/?page=term-trending

so far didnt "make it", but i think i may return to it eventually, i didnt try everything with it yet.

I always found it super hard to market my products (or there are other problems with me lol )