SaaS is more established now than it was in 2012. We no longer have to explain to potential customers: a) what SaaS is b) that it's secure c) that they can trust us with their credit card info Hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses have used SaaS at this point.
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I'm not sure if Constant Contact's "long slow SaaS ramp of death" story is applicable to bootstrappers. - $107 Million IPO in 2007. - Spearheaded a brand new category for SMBs (email marketing). - Acquisition was largely done through radio + Chamber of Commerce presentations
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Bootstrapping is different from VC-funded/public companies: 1. Scale needed for profitability: a bootstrapped SaaS can be really small (1-2 people). No investors to appease! 2. Runway: bootstrapped founders don't have a lot of money. They don't have years to "find their way."
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If we go back to Gail's story, this is what "slow ramp of death" looked like at CC: Oct 2000: launched Apr 2001: 100 customers Sept 2001: 1000 customers Seems pretty fast actually! What's the problem? Scale. "We had 25 employees; we weren't even close to covering our costs."pic.twitter.com/ek8cOMvCuo
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In 2000, the costs for starting a SaaS were a lot higher too: "We had to license our billing system for $250k. Now, you can get it online for pennies." The SaaS ramp was "long and slow" partly because tooling was expensive, complex, and time-intensive to implement.
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Constant Contact's experience isn't a good model for most indie SaaS. "Every $30k we added in MRR required 1 additional engineer and $15K in sales and marketing."
"We achieved profitability at 15,000 customers. Problem was, it took $21 million of capital to get to that."
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My biggest concern with the "long slow SaaS ramp of death" is that new founders take it as gospel. They treat slow growth as a positive signal (when really, it's a false-positive).
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I'm mostly looking at this from the perspective of a small (1-5 person) company. The minimum bar is much lower (and often easier/faster to reach) when you're an indie bootstrapper. When you're small, the revenue needed to hit profitability might be $100k/year!
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Justin Jackson podał/a dalej Reilly Chase ☁️ ☁️ ☁️
As an example, in 2019
@_rchase_ went from Jan: $3K MRR
to
July: $9K MRR 

(Pretty fast SaaS ramp!)
For him, reaching $100k ARR meant:
- profitability
- freedomhttps://twitter.com/_rchase_/status/1156633632527855616 …Justin Jackson dodał/a,
Reilly Chase ☁️ ☁️ ☁️ @_rchase_1/ "Hardcore Year" (http://rchase.com ) MRR in July: ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ $9,109 of $8,333 goal (109%) Totals@hostifi_net $8,463@ghostifi_net $361@locklinnetworks $125@captifi_net $147@patreon $13 I reached my goal for the year!
Details in thread
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W odpowiedzi do @mijustin
In retrospect, it was quick, but even 0-$9K MRR in about a year felt like an eternity. Not knowing how long it would take was the worst part... my original goal was $2K MRR at the end of year 1 (to follow Storemapper’s progress), so I did think it was going well though!
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Yes, and remember Gail’s talk was also “in retrospect.” For Constant Contact, it felt like a “long slow ramp.” For you (and many others) it was clearly pretty fast in retrospect!
Wydaje się, że ładowanie zajmuje dużo czasu.
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