How I built inBoundio — a 1100+ users SaaS business as a Single Founder with Zero Marketing Budget
We formally launched inBoundio last week, I kept it in beta (not sure that is the right term) for 8 months and kept working on it. It was slow going since I was the only one working on it and sometimes there was no progress for days. There were times when I got stuck and was waiting for people to reply on stackoverflow to answer my questions so I can finish the coding. Lot of things went wrong, lot of things didn’t worked out and few things did worked out. In this post I am trying to put down my learning. InBoundio is just starting and in no way a finished product nor a mature product but I feels I should share my knowledge and experience right now instead of waiting for one year as by then I may forgot many of the smaller things. So here is the complete story, if you want the TL;DR version, scroll to the bottom where i have put everything in points.
How I built a 1100+ users SaaS business with Zero marketing and as Single founder
I stopped thinking too much, stopped planning and just started doing things which I wanted to do and which I loved. I love technology, internet and marketing so the product which I built aligned with all this and hence i never have to look at where I was going. Failure looked acceptable as I knew I was going to enjoy what I am going to build.
I also didn’t set any deadlines for me, didn’t cared about making money or set any targets. This took time out of the picture which gave me more comfort and settled down the nerves. I wanted to make sure I make as less mistakes as possible and I wanted to understand the market and user requirement well hence I kept on working alone and have only taken an office and hired 2 awesome developers (who in just 5 weeks have become a big part of my life) last month.
Since it was a one man company, the expenses were negligible. I got free 1 year hosting from RackSpace which saved some money too. I got the logo done for $3 and the dashboard was using $12 template. This was all the expenses initially. I did tried to use freelancers later on as I wasn’t able to code some features and I paid them mostly through selling software and offering services. I sold both software + services as packages.
Offering services also helped me to understand client needs and what exactly people want. InBoundio still in early stage so I will keep on doing this for at least this year too.
The experience with freelancers was hot and cold. Overall I felt I wasted lot of time and lot of features were never got shipped and I probably overpaid to few but I have learnt my lesson.
inBoundio is still in very early stage and I am still working on finding the correct business model and what we want to do but I felt I better write this post now as I wanted to share my experience and journey so far (posts like “How we sold our business for 20 million dollar” sucks,right?)
Right now I have a small team who is working from our office. Working in an office and having a team gives more structure to business and also makes things move fast. For example, we are shipping new features on daily basis which was not possible earlier. We just launched ourchrome plugin and waiting for our WordPress plugin to get approved.
My Learning while bootstrapping as a single founder
I am splitting my learning into 2 section. Startup and Business/Life.
1. Use freelancers wherever you can but be careful too. I had mixed experience with freelancers. I met some nice people but I felt I also overpaid sometime and some times the freelancer just wasted time and did nothing. There is also a huge cost involved in finding the right freelancer as well as the cost involved if something goes wrong. You can use freelancers for small tasks like testing. I hired a freelancer from Vietnam on oDesk for $5/hour and he did lot of testing and found lot of bugs.
2. Do not hire people unless you need them. Try to do as much as by yourself and understand technology stack of your product as well as marketing. Find your first paid user by yourself. Find new marketing channels by yourself. Do sales and support by yourself. Take all the phone calls by yourself. Do the site support chat by yourself. All this are part of building business.
3. SaaS businesses don’t grow fast and there is nothing great about them — InBoundio is growing 15% month on month which I think is on “faster” side of growth but most of the SaaS businesses grow very slow. In fact I don’t even think SaaS are the best business model on the web to make money as the unit economics doesn’t work and most of the B2B products don’t spread by word of mouth which means higher cost of marketing and no viral effect.
4. The best feedback you will get is from your product users — The best feedback I have ever got is from inBoundio users. I have asked questions on various web marketing forums like warriorforum as well as on Reddit and Hackernews and I got good replies but somehow the best real feedback I got was from the current users. Aimee who was the first paid user has replied to so many of my emails telling me what was broken. You can ask questions on
5. Building is easy, Marketing is not — Marketing will always take more resources and time as compared to building. The problem is, most of the founder puts all their energy in building and then run out of steam and ideas. Products fail because they hit the wall of “How to Market and Sell” and the founders and have no answer.
6. Win-Win partnership works on Internet — The best businesses on Internet are where your user also wins. If you are just focusing on yourself and how you can grow and how you can make money, you will find yourself alone which is not what Internet is about.
7. Bootstraping is not easy, doing it is as a single founder is even more difficult — Bootstraping sounds great when you are able to pull it off but when it don’t work out, can do lot of damage to your personal finances. Being a single founder also means you are taking the risk and will burn out fast. So far, things are looking fine for me so I will keep on doing what is working. If I feel I am burning our or need funds for additional growth, I will look at alternatives though personally I will always chose Freedom over Money.
1. Success and Failure are meaningless terms. Don’t waste your time judging yourself from others parameters.
2. Don’t look at other startups and how they are doing. There are people who started before you, in ahead of race and some have already finished the race before you even started so it is stupid to compare your startup with others.
3. Don’t waste too much time thinking about company vision, disruption and denting the universe. You will end up doing what you want to do anyway irrespective of what your earlier vision says.
4. Use your own software, this is the best way to understand the limitations of your software. I only uses inBoundio to market inBoundio, yesterday I sent 1000 emails and today I made some social media postings. When you use your own software, you can take better action on your user feedback and what you want and what you don’t want.
5. There is nothing wrong with doing services to fund your company product. I personally feels a business is a business, it doesn’t matter if you are doing services or product, the end goal is to build a business.
6. If you are not enjoying what you are doing, don’t do it. It is just not worth it.
7. Only do things which makes you happy. I don’t think I need to explain this.
8. Don’t chase money, it will always be the byproduct of your success. If you do well in life, you will make anyway. If you start chasing money, you will be cutting corners, will compromise on quality and will just become mediocre and unhappy.
9. How big you will get, how big your business will become and how much money you will make is NOT in your control. It doesn’t matter if you have amazing team, great product, have big funding and are working 18 hours a day, you can and will still fail. So don’t waste your time on thinking things which may or may not happen. Live in present, build your company in present.
10. Don’t plan too much. Most of the plans are just wishful thinking.
11. Money will solve only one problem, Money. The rest of the problems of building business have to solved by you only.
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