I built and sold a successful SaaS, published two books, and help founders help themselves. AMA 👇

@iamjonjackson It became more stressful over time, mostly due to a few mistakes I made. Initially, it was a lot of fun. Building the product, engaging with the community, seeing the numbers climb, helping users get the most out of the service. All in all, that was enjoyable work, and we were able to do this as a side project. Both @simpsondanik and I kept our day jobs until we were somewhere between $10k and $20k MRR. But then, the little things started adding up. Customer service conversations became interruptions to my product work, and keeping up with breaking changes in the integrations we supported meant that we never knew when the next error avalanche would come in. My biggest mistake was not to hire help. I thought that as a bootstrapper, I needed to solve all these problems myself. That created unrealistic expectations and a high baseline stress level. It culminated in moments of extreme tension and anxiety, physical stress and health issues that I am still working through. So my advice is this: if you feel you're overwhelmed, don't dismiss the feeling. Build systems, hire people to help, and make sure you get back to a bearable level of stress. Can't avoid it, but you can manage it.

@philip_tribe If I have an idea about a potential audience that I am not yet part of, I try to join their communities as fast as I can. The only way to understand people's actual challenges and how they tackle them is by observing them. As powerful as our brains are, we are always biased towards our own experiences, and while this is helpful initially, it can limit our understanding of the reality that other people feel. So my highest priority would be to embed myself in as many communities as possible. How to find them? Ask! Find a person that is a member of those communities already (or whom you suspect to be) and ask them where they: - hang out to chat about their interest - learn more about their particular interest - find help when they're stuck - talk shop with other enthusiasts - follow experts in their field Any of those prompts will likely produce one or more communities to join. Maybe they can even help you get in there in case those communities are invite-only. In that case, prepare for people wondering if you are legitimate: show that you care about the actual community more than just using them as a potential business audience. Be honest in communicating your willingness to contribute and empower others. Show them why you care.

@simon_barker1 While this depends heavily on the kind of product (a book with 0 sales after a few months is DOA, while a SaaS business might take a few months to ramp up enough interest), when you feel like you have to PUSH really hard to get users, that's usually a bad sign. @mijustin talks about the pull of a market (or the evidence of demand) a lot. If people don't even care to look at your product, that's pretty bleak. If people are curious about your product, try it out and then fail to convert, that's actually a good sign. It means that they have a real problem that triggered them to check out if your product can help. It didn't, which is why they didn't buy. All you need to do now is to figure out where you need to make changes to map your product onto their existing expectations. Look for pull in the market. Check out this post (and everything else Justin writes about): https://justinjackson.ca/misconc...

@digitalbreed My unfair advantage is that I don't have a job :P At least right now, I have a lot of mental space to get things done, because no one else tells me what to do. But even while I was still employed and built FeedbackPanda with @simpsondanik, I always tried to be as efficient as possible with my time. I developed optimized processes to get things done effectively. Take my weekly writing routine. Every Monday and Tuesday, I write one article for my blog. One topic, 1k-2k words. On Wednesday or Thursday, I record the article as a podcast episode and then schedule the article as the content for my Friday newsletter. Then I post it on the blog. One piece of content, three outlets. Potentially, the article might also be a chapter of my next book. Or the foundation of a workshop. So that's 5 potential uses for one piece of content. That's the kind of leverage I try to build whenever I can. I also have to make it clear that I have no children. No pets. No commitments to nursing family members or anything like that. Maybe mowing the lawn sometimes. I am very privileged.

@surender_singh I advise you to monetize immediately. The people who you serve with your community product very likely all monetize their communities themselves. They are creating value because you allow them to. I think freemium is great as long as the paid part is mandatory for those who make (sufficient) money from using your product. In terms of platforms like yours, I've seen the "the first $500 you make in a month are free, after that, we take x%" work pretty well. Here's the thing with free platforms where the users make money: you pay for everything as the business owner. You literally pay for them to be able to make money, and they don't compensate you for it. Charging a fee (either flat or a percentage) has a strong validation effect: if you product is good enough, people will pay. If it's not, they won't. People will always use a free product, even if it's bad. You'll never know if people would pay for it or not — until you ask them to. So here's the path forward that I would take: track how much your current users make from their paid communities (if you can). Create a plan with a monthly fixed fee that is reasonable for that level of average income. Create a plan with a percentage fee. Put them into your product and send out an email that the product will become paid for those over a certain amount of revenue. Then, see what happens. It's scary to think that people might leave the platform, I know that. But if they aren't willing to pay, do you really want them on the platform anyway? Try to talk to as many people as possible about their reasons to why they reacted the way they did. A business that doesn't make money is not a business, it's a hobby project. Charge money.

@arvidkahl Thanks so much Arvid! Really valuable advice. We have many community owners making some good $$$ using the product - and thus far we have been lenient in asking for money. I will test both a subscription fee as well as a take on the sales that happen through pensil.in

@arvidkahl @surender_singh I know this is an AM for Arvid, and his response was great, but I just wanted to add something to supplement his answer. I just read this article yesterday and I think it really ties in to what Arvid said. Hope it helps! https://coda.io/@rahulvohra/supe...

@tanoy27 Our marketing and all of our sales efforts were very much focused on Word of Mouth. We knew that our customers were a highly tribal community that was already sharing a lot of product recommendations among each other. We tapped into that by making our product very recommendable: we had a win-win referral system (our customers were used to that from their online teaching job also having a referral system), we focused our newsletter on our customers instead of our product (we lead every newsletter with a customer interview that focused on their life journey). We implemented a document-sharing function in our product that allowed people to exchange student feedback templates, meaning that people would be incentivized to invite more teachers to get access to their templates. We focused on network effects and fostering community whatever we did. Our onboarding was video-based, and some of our customers even made youtube tutorials (that we didn't ask for) to help people use our product as efficiently as possible. We also tried a lot of things that didn't work. Paid ads had no effect, for example. A cheaper pricing tier backfired, so we removed it. All in all, our focus on our customer audience meant that we actually had to do very little in terms of marketing, they did it for us. We were present with them, and they tanked us by talking about our product.

@arvidkahl This answer is so good. Thank you for taking the time and answering every detail of my question. I really appreciate it. I hope a lot of people read this answer because it is very insightful. THANK YOU

@_lhermann When I had published Zero to Sold, I set myself a goal. I want to write one book a year. For as long as I enjoy it. So the second one was on the horizon immediately after I released the first book. Zero to Sold kind of happened by random chance. I was writing for my blog every week, and it all fell into place over time. First I combined all those posts into a guide, and then I extended the guide into a book. I set out to blog, and a book just happened. For the second book, it was much more intentional. But the writing part was indeed the easy one. Self-publishing is full of interesting challenges. First off, if you don't have a publisher, you don't have editors. You need to find those yourself and then also learn how to work with them. Many editors are trained in traditional ways, and for a "let's get this done today" kind of person like me, having to wait for a couple weeks for someone to "get to my book eventually" was frustrating. The same is true for the production of my audiobook(s) — it just takes a while. That's the crux of it: as a bootstrapper, you only rely on yourself or equally motivated co-founders. The moment you involve other people for whom it's just a job, the level of intensity and speed goes down quite a bit. That was hard to adjust to. But hey, this is ultimately a champagne problem. Things will get done eventually :)

@arvidkahl Thanks for this thoughtful answer. You really make it sound easy. "Just write some blog articles and a book pops out" :D

@_lhermann Yeah it sounds easy in retrospect. I think I had so much to say that things connected with each other eventually just by the sheer volume that I wrote about. So maybe that's the lesson here: write about something you have a LOT of opinions about :D

@chddaniel We have yet to find our local maple syrup supplier of choice. So much to do after you move to a new country :D Finding the right tool to set up a community is indeed incredibly complicated, and it differs greatly depending on the topic and members of said community. Circle is my favorite for communities that care about meaningful 1:1 exchange. The conversations, the threads, the posts in there are all focused on inviting meaningful debate. With links and videos being easily integrated, it just feels "complete" — but it also is a very exclusive club, for the reasons you mentioned: it's off-platform. People need to create an account and everything to participate. Social media will allow for communities to be constructed more easily, particularly on Facebook. But you need your community members to be on Facebook already for this to happen. Same for LinkedIn and the like. That leads me to this. For communities that congregate around a topic purposefully and very intentionally ("Discussing Aristotelian Philosophy and How It Can Be Applied to AI", "EdTech SaaS Entrepreneurs"), a Circle instance is a great idea. You have more control over that as the community leader, and you can customize it to serve your tightly tribal group of contributors. For indicental communities (such as circumstance- or location-driven ones ("Farmers of Southern Ontario", "Victims of Bad Customer Service by Phone Companies")), social media will be better, as it allows discovery much better. I wrote about all those community types in the "Communities" chapter of The Embedded Entrepreneur. Reddit is somewhere in between. It just makes any kind of selling very hard. And if you want to use your community to sell your products (or allow them to sell theirs), a self-regulated community might be preferable.

@fatimarizwan I just responded to a similar question here: https://www.producthunt.com/disc... There was barely any difference between our first few and then first few thousand customers. We made every effort to allow for our existing customers to recommend the product to their peers. The more recommendable the product, the more our "outsourced" marketing would scale. So we kept the things that worked: focus on our customers as PEOPLE, building a strong network effect into the product, making user-generated content easily discoverable and usable, highlighting community members, and doing customer support without pretence: showing that we are just people, not a faceless corporation. Humanizing every contact with our customers as much as we could while trying to automate the functional transactions (like billing or solving common problems).

@diederikmathijs Grow your curiosity and involvement in the communities you enjoy. Embedded Entrepreneurship is a great way of doing this, as the "business idea" is a consequence, not a prerequisite. Spend time with the people you want to serve and empower the most. If you're a writer (or want to be one), hang out with other writers and listen to their challenges. In the meantime, WRITE. Write about writing if you want to. Or anything else. Just hone your craft, and do it IN FRONT OF OTHER PEOPLE. Become an expert — or just an ambitious learner — in your space. Grow your reputation. Ideas and projects will follow. Build little projects that help yourself. Try out new technologies to understand where they can be applied. And take copious notes whenever someone complains, cries out for help or asks for recommendations or alternatives. That usually is a great opportunity to think of a solution to someone's very real problem. Grow your reputation, your technical expertise, and your insight into the critical problems of your communities. And finally, grow your library ;)

@arvidkahl Thanks for taking the time to answer! I've been working on growing my library and maybe some day it'll be as big as yours 😉

@seneca_96 Have something worth paying for. Free customers will use your product even if it's hard to use. Paying customers won't. They'll only pay if they spend less energy on both using your product AND making the money needed to pay of it. One of the best ways to get there is to understand your customers' value metric: what number goes up when they make more money. For authors, it's number of books sold. For freelance programmers, it's the number of invoices billed in a month. Find that number, then find a solid threshold between free and paid (first 50 sales free, first 10 invoices a month free, stuff like that). Charge money after they reach this. If no one wants to pay for your product, ask them what you'd need to offer to have them pay.

Wow, thanks Arvid! This is such great advice, appreciate your thoughts and suggestion here. Here's us on Product Hunt, in case you're curious: https://www.producthunt.com/post...

@jasraj0 We definitely focused on building with and for our audience with FeedbackPanda. We were part of the communities of our customers and were very keen on enabling them to connect with each other, inside and outside our product. But I've cranked it up to 11 with my writing efforts. Now, I spend hours of every day talking to my readers and followers. Mostly because I enjoy it, but also because it's a great way to stay in touch with the community and what they are challenged by the most. I've been building in public a lot over the last few years, and I've learned quite a bit. Time for me to share that, isn't it? :D -- My life has changed significantly. First off, my calendar is empty. You know what I had in my calendar this week? "ProductHunt AMA on Monday". Just that. Nothing more. That is the ultimate luxury: complete control over what I do and how I do it. Being financially independent also has allowed me to think more long-term about my investments and projects. I don't need to say yes to anything just because I have bills to pay. I can now commit to only those things that I really care about. And more than ever before, that's time spent with my partner and the family. We moved to Canada two weeks ago to be closer to family, and I am focusing on that. Because I want to — and I can.

@arvidkahl thanks for writing back, Arvid :) It's nice to hear that you're able to go at your own pace and have the freedom you've built for yourself. I hope it continues!

@ben_w1 I might be biased here, but I would suggest learning how to code, if you can find the time for that. If not, sign up for no-code tools and see if you can create a prototype of the product you want to ultimately create. This can be used to attract technical co-founders and potential future customers alike. It's also very cheap and the skills you acquire can be transferred to other spaces in the future. The most important thing: show evidence of your conviction. This is an entrepreneurial aphrodisiac for future customers, partners, and co-founders alike. People LOVE seeing someone building as much as they can even if it's hard.

@joe_glover1 Thanks Joe, that's very kind. It's fun to be me :D And it's incredibly awesome to see so many people on their entrepreneurial journeys.

@_luke You can find it on Gumroad (http://gum.co/embedded-entrepreneur) and you can order it as a printed version by asking your local book store to order it from a Print-on-Demand service by ISBN: ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 3982195764 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3982195766

@kunalmishra If you're not technical enough, you either need to become a tech founder or find one to help you. I'd definitely recommend finding a technical co-founder and splitting the equity with them. I wrote about the potential dangers and confusions with co-founders here: https://thebootstrappedfounder.c... Reaching out to techy people is a good idea. Just make sure you have a convincing argument as to why your idea is worth their time. The more validation you can show, the more likely that someone will find it interesting. I get pitched a lot of projects every day, and I say no to almost all of them. What I want to see in a potential founder is ENTHUSIASM, a great understanding of the problem space, a lot of VALIDATION (pull in the market, competitive alternatives, budgets for stuff like this) and a whole lot of WORK ALREADY DONE. Show that you care about the people you want to help. Show that you have done your research as to how you can turn your product idea into a business that reliably generates money. Show them your (feeble but persistent) no-code attempts at building. Show the evidence of your conviction.

@dinakar I loved seeing our product impacting the real lives of real people. Having customers talking to us in our Intercom chat about how much more time they got to spend with their kids was one of the most amazing things I ever witnessed. Building a business that WE OWNED, something that was able to create financial independence over time, while we watched it's value and MRR grow, was equally amazing. The thing I didn't like was that as the sole technical founder, I was responsible for everything. Maintenance, bugs, customer confusion, integrations breaking. It was all on me. It resulted in a lot of stress and anxiety that I wish I would not have had to suffer through. In the same vein, selling the business, as wonderful as that was, also surprised me: all of the motivation and passion that I found in helping people was gone the moment we sold. I had to painstakingly find a new source of energy for myself, and it took me by complete surprise.

@fernandomtl The best place to find co-founders is in two communities: your personal founder audience (the other entrepreneurs you surround yourself with) and within the community you want to serve. Best if the person you talk to is in both! This might take a while to become apparent. Look for the very enthusiastic people. The helpers, the connectors, the ones who lift up others. Then, talk to them about a partnership. It's scary, but it's worth it. I have written more about this at https://thebootstrappedfounder.c...

@new_user_22867f40a7b39 We had a 30-day trial for FeedbackPanda. Our product was used on a daily basis, which made people invest a lot of time an data into it within that free month. If two months are not enough time to enter the data required for your customers to feel invested, here are a few ideas: - A concierge service, helping them with their data entry. YOU enter it for them, fully or partially, and while you do that, you can build better import systems to speed up the process. First you speed it up for yourself, then you can bake this into the product - Integrations into other services. anything that makes data entry faster or automated is a good idea. Browser extensions and OAuth2-based connections are candidates here. - Internal Data Exchanges between the users of your product. If it makes sense for your business, allow users to share non-sensitive data with each other. That way, they can support each other, build network effects, and allow for user-generated content to add value to each others product usage.