Pt 5: Lessons from Giving Up on Bootstrapping a SaaS Tool with No Budget, Beginner Coding Skills & Less Than 15 Hours a Week.
I noticed my previous posts have picked a little bit of interest so I wanted to quickly summarise my experience.
While I believe that the fundamental process I used to come up with a SaaS idea was solid, the strategy to execute it was somewhat flawed.
The basic process which I still personally feel is the wisest way forward is:
- Start with an audience you want to serve
- Talk to as many of them as you can to understand their pains (read “The Mom Test” to know how to ask them questions.
- Identify a common frustration, understand it to the best of your ability and come up with a concept for a SaaS that should solve it (ensure your target audience would be willing to pay, preferably $50+ on a monthly basis if you aren’t getting funding)
- Don’t build anything until you can get at least some pre-sales. If you can’t manage this, you’ve not validated your idea and you’re gambling your time.
- Once you’ve validated, build an MVP — a SaaS that only does one thing (the most important thing) well.
- Test this and improve it
- Scale the product if necessary
Why I think the execution failed:
- The experts whose advice I was basing the strategy on, such as Jason Cohen, hadn’t built a new SaaS company in over 10 years. Since then, email has changed a lot and decision-makers are now bombarded regularly by strangers who want something from them.
I actually had the chance to ask Jason a question about this and he answered that he expects the same strategy wouldn’t work today for the reasons I outlined above. You can listen to the podcast here — my question was asked at the end. - It turns out I don’t find the actual work of building a SaaS super inspiring. Realising that the emails weren’t working well for me was my first hurdle and the first test to see if I really wanted this. The answer was “no”.
If I was truly committed, I would have got back on the horse with my newfound knowledge and taken another swing, and another… until I saw progress. I had a one-sided fantasy of running a SaaS business and wasn’t being fully conscious of the drawbacks. This caused me to run out of steam.
Closing words
I hope this anti-climactic ending isn't a disappointment to those who might have read the previous posts. The result is a reflection on me and not the idea of bootstrapping a SaaS.
There’s a huge community of people building inspiring small bootstrap SaaS businesses from scratch and getting really impressive MMRs. The ones I followed were #indiehackers and #buildinpublic on Twitter. In these groups, I found inspiration, mentorship, and a community of extremely driven and creative people.
I hope you got some value from my posts as I tracked my journey and appreciate everyone who took the time to read them.
Good luck!
