HACKER Q&A
📣 sentimentscan

One-person startups/SaaS that are profitable?


Hi, I was wondering as I am starting startup, are there here any one person startup/SaaS? And how do you manage marketing/sales/development, as I feel those are completely different skill sets.


  👤 arthurcolle Accepted Answer ✓
builtwith.com

👤 mrieck
Balancing marketing/sales with product development is one of my weaknesses, so I actually wrote a post about it on IndieHackers:

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-product-has-been-launch...

That site also has a products page where you can search for solo founders making > $XXX revenue. There are tons of profitable solo SaaS.


👤 clay_the_ripper
I run a "one-person" saas that is profitable. I have an offshore contractor that helps me run the service, and one offshore support person to help with tickets.

I do all of the marketing, product development, finances, sales & customer success.

Do I recommend it? Probably not. I am very tired of doing everything myself and am excited to grow it to the point of hiring more team members. I recommend that when starting a startup to plan to build it big enough that you can afford not to do everything solo. It's stressful and lonely, but also strangely rewarding.

A note on "offshore" team members: I hear a lot of people say offshore workers are low quality or don't care about the work yada yada. I have found the opposite to be true - offshore folks are the same as any other people you employ: pay your people well, treat them with respect and invest in their future and they will do great work. My support and ops team members have been with me for 3+ years.


👤 pouzy
I run one too. International, customers in Europe, us, south America. It's been running for almost 8 years, so now it's practically 'finished' - basically does the job for the niche it's targeting.

But I'm tired of being solo, so I'm merging with other people that are more on the sales part. One of them also has a profitable company (not saaa - involves people transportation) and needs a tech to make everything smoother (insurances contacts etc)

We'll see how it goes because we come from VERY different perspectives and need to bend our habits to be able to work together

Having a profitable SaaS is awesome (I can work on it something like 2 days a month if I want to, just managing specific invoices) but you just get nuts working from home alone after a while. It was fun during COVID-19, can't say it is anymore


👤 ed_mercer
Check out levelsio, a single guy pulling in ~200k MRR using pretty much outdated tech stacks https://twitter.com/levelsio

👤 mahidol
I'm guessing Inkdrop: https://soccermatics.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

The dev (Takuya Matsuyama) also has a nice website and a YouTube channel - https://www.craftz.dog


👤 for_i_in_range
I'm doing roughly $20k/mo. with a physical monthly newsletter delivered to people's doorsteps. Here's the old-school salesletter for it: https://www.scottscheper.com/free-trial

Here's a picture of my Stripe account from last month: https://cloud.scottscheper.com/3k3Yry2V

Happy to share how this model works. There's a lot of subtleties to it.


👤 jklein11
Not an answer to your question but why are you offering sentimentscanner for free?

👤 talldatethrow
I make about $10k a month with a one person saas. Self taught via YouTube and stackoverflow. Sales background career wise, although I was a Basic/VB nerd as a kid.

Php, jQuery, running as a SPA technically with php server side rending the html I have jquery squeeze into whatever div makes sense.

Runs on a $4 a month namecheap server, only because I ran into a stupid limitation on the $2 server.

Faster than most modern SPAs or websites you find on the internet.


👤 singhrac
If I recall correctly https://www.listennotes.com is a one-person operation. The owner has posted about it a few times: https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behin...

👤 edweis
I am profitable with https://garnet.center This Shopify app turns your e-commerce store into a marketplace. Happy to answer any question.

👤 sochix
Recently I hit 200k ARR with my SaaS for Microsoft Teams -> https://perfectwiki.com

Basically it's a knowledge-base fully integrated with Microsoft Teams.

- I'm working on it alone for the last 3 years

- I don’t raise any investments

- I achieved this number only by organic growth

To get more details on how I achieved it you could read my AMA on r/SaaS. https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/15tnt60/i_built_micro...

P.S Small self promotion -> I created a Telegram channel where I share tips & tricks on how to build SaaS for Microsoft Teams. Join me here -> https://t.me/teams_development


👤 rozenmd
After 5 years and probably like a dozen failed attempts, I run a profitable one-person SaaS.

I initially thought "it was about the tech" and tried remaking levelsio's remoteok as a serverless app, and was surprised that no one cared what I built it in, and that traction/marketing was everything.

I wrote up an article each year about the journey:

- https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-busine... - https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-star... - https://maxrozen.com/indiehacking-3-year-review - https://maxrozen.com/2021-strangers-paid-my-macbook - https://maxrozen.com/2022-just-keep-shipping


👤 physicsguy
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