bacheson1293

how do you know he's a good person if you don't know him well?

check out statamic...it's a breath of fresh air

I bootstrapped a SaaS business from my kitchen table...it's now worth just shy of $100M.

I thank the heavens everyday that I didn't go the VC route. I can pretty much do whatever I want without this constant growth at all costs pressure. It also gives us a massive advantage against VC backed competitors. We can make decisions that reap benefits 2-5 years out.

This has created a situation were every competitor follows the same trajectory where it eventually leads to an over-complicated, bloated product that users hate. They come to us and it's like a breath of fresh air.

I have a $100M SaaS in a different space but the underlying tech is identical. I had this idea ~10 yrs ago when we first started writing our own import logic to move users over from competing services.

The engineering challenges to make this work flawlessly is going to be substantial to say the least. I GET from ~70 data sources right now...I couldn't imagine having to GET,POST, CHECKPOINT and DIFF with all the edge cases that appear.

Best of luck but this is a very hard problem to solve. Would love to see someone see this through!

I built a $100M SaaS. Do you want this more than anything? Are you willing to do do whatever it takes and go 1-2 years without a salary?

If you answered yes then you just need to leap and iterate on the user feedback loop.

My first mvp compared to what I'm selling today is completely different. I pivoted 20 times at least.

So the name of the game is to just start building and not be overly concerned with making mistakes. Find what doesn't work and move toward what does. Mimic nature by constant evolution.

I spent 10 years creating failure after failure...learning many things a long the way...at 27 my co-founder and I started a SaaS that is now worth $100M...we made $475 our first month which was roughly 10 years ago

this company is run by a bunch of scam artists...they scammed me out of close to $10k

statamic is incredible...I can't recommend it enough...such a breath of fresh air

when I was at your stage I thought the idea of $1M/m was an impossible dream...it's not...just keep iterating, listening to your users, following your gut and make good decisions everyday

Congrats! I ramped a little faster but followed the same path. The project started at my kitchen table now grosses $13M per year (10 years later). Keep going my friend; the road will be rocky but it's well worth the time and effort once you reach the top of the mountain!

same exact situation...we moved over all bright eyed with hip skip and a hop in our step...within 24 hours we experienced a full system-wide outage followed by a full system-wide block storage outage a few days later....their system has the reliability of a hobby project

totally false; I run a fully remote company with ~20 employees and we pay our devs more than what they would make at a comparable office job. That being said (this is going to sound bad), the lack of a personal relationship off the top allows us to fire quickly. So we tend to pay more for but only hold on to very competent devs.

I'm currently hiring remote full time PHP developers for my saas Agency analytics ... Blake[dot]Acheson[at]agencyanalytics[dot]com if interested

I was going to mention this...I've been using this setup for over a year with 6,000 domains...me thinks someone at autotrader needs to get better at Google :<

I used this about 2 years ago and it was absolute junk...it couldn't run a mongo cluster and seemed to be half complete functionality wise. They were certainly more than willing to take my license fee.

I see it still has a very dated UI. Hopefully the system actually does what the company promises.

same here....went from rolling our own to Chargebee...so glad we did

Helping others realize the wonders of financial independence so that they can experience more happiness by spending time with friends, helping others etc.

Sure he's not curing cancer but there is a tremendous amount of nobility in his future actions.

Look beneath the surface my friend :)

i agree it's not scummy but it's far from nice...see Chicago

Neil appears to be deleting any negative comments

I migrated to packet all bright eye'd and full of wonder...terrible mistake...outages on a weekly basis and they have no availability zones so when outage occurs the entire region is down. Replicating across regions failed our latency requirements so that was a no-go.

I can't stress this enough. Having to roll your own / administrate a logging system, Database, load balancers, autoscale, file storage far exceeds the added cost of the cloud. Now that GCE has sustained usage discounts of 39% it makes no sense to go bare metal right now.

It's important to determine whether or not the person is qualified and capable. While questions have their merit I'd recommend a more creative exercise.

If you have the means, take a trip half-way across the world and live in close quarters for 3 weeks together (while you work to get the business off the ground). If you can't stand them by the end of the trip; walk away.

I've been working with my cofounder for 15 years now and together we've accrued more than ~$30M in combined revenue from a handful of projects. Being able to argue, disagree, make a decision, move on and then grab a beer after work like nothing happened is paramount. Your personal relationship with this person will be the first domino in every decision you make.

FYI pricing is not a powerful enough differentiator as you scale this thing ... I've used docu-sign a lot and it's UX is very simple and effective. There is not a whole lot of meat there either.

That said well done! Looks very sleek.

I agree. Rancher has too many balls in the air. They are trying to support Cattle, Swarm, Mesos, Kubernetes...

As a result they aren't terribly good at anything (The UI is insanely slow). Other specialized tools that just focus on one orchestration framework could zoom past Rancher. Look at the Kubernetes UI in 1.4.

the machines don't cost anything?

I've lived on both sides of the fence. I cover much more ground living in the city then I ever did living in the country or suburbs. I drive 1-2 times a month now compared to 2-3 time a day living outside the city. In my experience the city inspires a lot more exploration. My daughter is all over Toronto on a daily basis.

Rancher now supports Kubernetes and Docker Swarm if you are not already aware.

Absolutely. This situation is handled by using Environment variables. Depending on the environment, I use environment variables to point services at different places (ie dedicated production database server vs my micro dev mysql container).

Toronto, Canada | My SEO Tool Inc.

Senior Backend Engineer

Myseotool.com is an established SAAS company which has grown rapidly, based solely on a great product and word of mouth. In a nutshell, our app reports on common online marketing metrics relating to SEO, Social and SEM. We are looking for a talented backend developer who is well experienced with PHP and MySQL.

As part of a small team, your involvement will have a direct impact on the direction of the product. Our working environment focuses on passion and innovation. Each project will require your involvement from the planning stage all the way to execution.

Must Have Phalcon PHP MySQL REST API Linux Sys Admin GIT Webdriver + Phantomjs

Nice to have Front end skills (angularjs, css, html, graphic design, javascript) Docker Job / message queueing (Gearman, RabbitMQ) Prior SaaS experience Providing technical support Experience using marketing tools (moz, raven, hubspot)

Email Resume to blake.acheson@myseotool.com

I've been in this exact same situation. I was writing software for a telemarketing company. Initially business was booming using a similar model to the one outlined in this article. In short, the owner made some questionable financial decisions and the company went bust. I was now out of a job but I left with the experience of creating and maintaining the technical side of a multi-million dollar SaaS company. Moving forward I was determined to be my own boss this time around.

I developed a SaaS for marketers and constructed a basic sales funnel incorporating telesales.

What I quickly found out is that my niche(marketers) is comprised of technical, high-level users. The same scripted sales approach that made my last company extremely successful was alarmingly unsuccessful when trying to close deals with marketing agencies and consultants.

Eventually I bootstrapped to over a million in sales by trimming down to a handful of coders and a single marketer. We implemented a trial period and let the software do all the heavy lifting. Not only does this reduce overhead and complexity but it also attracts the "right" type of customers. Customers that need convincing typically don't stick around long. Churn is SaaS kryptonite.