from Hacker News

State of Independent SaaS 2021

by einarvollset on 2/10/21, 6:25 PM with 44 comments

• by limedaring on 2/10/21, 7:34 PM

  Really valuable insights; really shows how different independent SaaS is. For instance, 56% of founders are solo in indie SaaS, whereas a lot of traditional VC accelerators prefer (or require) at least two founders on a team.

• by shoo on 2/10/21, 8:03 PM

  Regarding "which best describes how you validated your original business idea?", is anyone aware of more research around the effectiveness or practicality of different validation approaches? That is, rough false-positive (validation indicated that business idea had sufficient market demand when it didn't) and false-negative rates (validation indicated that business idea had insufficient market demand when it did) for different validation approaches.

  Naively it'd be great to have data of the form "given our idea for a business was bad specifically because there would be insufficient market demand, when we validated the idea by method A (e.g. getting verbal commitment from n potential customers), validation result indicated there was enough market demand to proceed, we decided to proceed, but the business failed later specifically for a reason that the validation approach was intended to measure (customers willing to buy the service) and not for some other reason". I.e. known ground-truth, measurement, measurement result, decision to proceed or abort based on measurement result, actual outcome.

  Probably would be a very tricky thing to isolate the effectiveness of the validation approach and tease it apart from other confounding factors.

• by davidw on 2/10/21, 11:04 PM

  Rob Walling and that crowd are great. I read Start Small, Stay Small years ago and found it to be full of good advice that I was able to employ to make a "productized service". It never really took off, but paid for some new computers and a few vacations, and I learned a ton from it. Wish he or someone would update it, as I think it was a fantastic resource. It had a lot of specifics and details that more handwavy business books just sort of gloss over.

• by kirktrue on 2/10/21, 7:54 PM

  A love the idea origin breakdown on slide 17.

  Over half of the product ideas (~57%) came from experiencing a problem/issue firsthand.

  The percentage tips to ~90% if you also include experiencing a problem/issue secondhand (through friends, clients, customers, etc.).

  A measly 8% came from research alone.

• by bandrade on 2/10/21, 7:41 PM

  75% of those with free trials do not require a credit card up front. This was always my preference as a purchaser because I didn't have to bother my boss and get approval to try out a product.

• by polote on 2/10/21, 8:06 PM

  - How the founders were selected ? And where ? initially they say "hundreds of non-venture track" but then 14% raised money

  - What is a MRR Growth in dollars ? Thats not how we compute growth

  - Is that data statistically significant ? there 2% of companies which had 4+ more founders and still you try to make a correlation between growth and founders count.

  - There is 66% of companies who have employees but only 66% of founders who work more than 30 hours a week ? That doesn't seem right...

  I like the initiative, but we need more clarity to really be able to trust the data from this report

• by tematema555 on 2/10/21, 11:35 PM

  I assume SAAS is one of the best model for independent developer. If you build a helpful product, users will stay for a long time.

  If you build it well, it'll probably be alive for a long time. (low daily expenses needed)

• by itsdrewmiller on 2/10/21, 11:20 PM

  I love the "Expected/Unexpected" break down on the key insight slide intros to each section. Most of the unexpected ones I did not expect!