rubeng

Bidsketch | https://bidsketch.com | Portland, OR | REMOTE

Bidsketch is a profitable bootstrapped SaaS (subscription web app) that customers use to create client proposals. I launched Bidsketch working nights and weekends, and eventually grew it to a small team of four. Now we're looking for someone with Rails experience to join the team.

Some of the benefits:

- Work remotely

- Flexible schedule

- No layers of management and no investors or shrinking runway to worry about

- Fun and friendly team that gets stuff done

We currently have a great team of four :) I'm the founder -- I mostly do marketing and some lightweight coding. Nicole does customer success (which means she helps customers). Eric and Paul do a lot of the heavy lifting and spend most their time writing code. Our team page can be found here: https://www.bidsketch.com/about

You can see more details and apply here: https://weworkremotely.com/jobs/2232-rails-developer

It's still early but haven't had any issues so far.

Totally agree with Alex. This is something that I (and most other SaaS owners I know) look at regularly. And it's not always easy.

Glad you liked it! You're right; I could've used a lot of these strategies when I was hiring inside of a big co.

Not a prob! :) These were single people with a limited budget. I do have a Bidsketch customer that almost falls into this category (and I helped find a dev), but I didn't include him since he runs a small SEO shop where he's used to outsourcing and had tens of thousands to help him fund the development. Dane Maxwell, which Nathan mentions and doesn't have dev experience, also took the outsourcing approach in building his $40k+/month web app. Though he had a few years experience trying to bootstrap other apps before he was successful to that level.

You know, after I helped them out with picking a developer, they didn't ask for help once development started. I offered to help but they either didn't run into problems or didn't come to me when they did.

These are the ones that were successful at it...many more were not. But I don't know if the ratio is the same for people with/without dev experience (plus sample size is too small).

What I do know is that most:

1. Got help picking a developer initially

2. Had some guidelines on how to work with a developer

3. Had no development experience

4. Had to get learn how to outsource and made some mistakes (but eventually made it work)

Outsourcing is tough at first but it gets easier. Like any skill, you have to get better at it.

In any case, I do think it's a great idea to learn how to program so you're not so helpless if/when problems come up.

I'm a big fan of outsourcing development as that was the route I chose to launch my product (http://www.bidsketch.com) in a much shorter time than it took when I was doing everything myself.

I outsourced the early code and design. Quality of both was shaky, but I only had $3,000 to put into it so I wasn't working with much. I later picked up on the last 25% of the development to get into a beta (since my cash ran out), but I was very glad I took this approach.

I've since been able to work with higher quality of developers and designers and improved both areas, but when you have a product that's solving a real problem, customers will be more than happy to pay for that shaky 1st version (as they did with mine).

That said, I have a dev background and learning Rails before outsourcing it was a big help. I know people that don't have a dev background and successfully outsourced dev of their products (I even helped a couple pick their developers), but it's a bit tougher and it helps if you have at least someone with a dev background that can help you pick the right developer.

Love that talk, thanks. I do have some ideas for tests I want to run in the future when I get back into optimization mode.

I tested increasing prices without touching anything else and it resulted in significant revenue increase but I hit a local maximum as the segmenting was off and value communication needed to be improved. The right branding with the wrong pricing can actually hurt so it's extremely important to get both pricing and value messaging (including the qualitative stuff) right.

Sorry about that. What happened when you submitted the form? Did you receive a confirmation message saying that you'll receive an email? If so, you might want to check your spam folder in case it made its way there for some reason.

Two reasons for the email: 1. Marketing purposes. So I can send additional educational (and hopefully useful) content. 2. I actually take the name and email address then dynamically create a PDF proposal using that information on the cover page.

The execution is a bit sloppy as it was an experiment and quickly put together so I'll need to work on improving that now that I'll be keeping it.

I had more people signing up for the higher tier plans when I a/b tested the plan names. Don't remember what the numbers were exactly but it was interesting to see behavior change because of the plan names.

I grandfathered existing customers in so they still have their existing plans.

Should be good now, thanks!

Sorry, just restarted the service. Thanks! I need to add monitoring to that service since it's now past the experiment stage (was being tested against a video at one time).

Author here. Thanks for mentioning that; I've gone ahead and added a link.

Ryan: I'd love to hear specifics about the problems you're encountering with being remote at this size?

I have a remote team and we're growing but I would like to stay that way for as long as we can so I'm interested in hearing about some of the specific issues.

Like anything else, the more you do it the easier it gets. I have two part time developers working for me (one from Nepal and the other from Ukraine. They're both great. Much better than the 80-90k/year developers I worked with when I had a day job.

Initially I start by posting the job, then filtering in stages before asking them (and paying them) to complete a small 1 to 2 hour coding project. The coding exercise can be done many different ways but the purpose is to evaluate problem solving, code quality, knowledge of libraries, code structure, etc. It's amazing how much insight you can gain with something like that.

More importantly, having them work on something real helps me further evaluate communication, responsiveness, and other attributes I look for in a good dev.

I've tried both ways and saw an immediate increase in paid conversions when asking for cc info upfront (8x increase). I've talked to several founders that have tried both ways and all but one saw a significant increase as well. The number of trial accounts is lower of course.

Another benefit is that you can add a required textbox to ask for cancellation feedback when someone cancels. The feedback you get is awesome.

That said, you may get different results so it's worth testing. For something this important you'll want to let the data help you decide instead of relying on what others are doing.

I did not let my employer know. I understand that sometimes there can be risks from a legal perspective but given the context I felt the risk was extremely low. Plus, it was none of their business. I'm still blown away that in this country (US) people that work for others have to sometimes worry about their jobs going after them for what they do outside of that job. It honestly sickens me.

I built my startup while working full time at a corporate job. After a year and a half I quit because I was able to grow it to the point of where it was able to pay living expenses and support my family. Was it hard? Very. But there are many things you can do to make it easier for yourself.

Use your job to fund the building of your product. You rent your body out for 8 or 9 hours a day, make it work for you as much as possible and hire someone to write code while you work and sleep. This means you can spend your free time marketing (yes, before you launch) and you'll drastically increase your chances of success.

The whole thing about TechCrunch being perceived as being so influential to the success of a startup is strange to me. TechCrunch doesn't make or break your startup. How you grow your business after the initial launch traffic dies down is what matters.

Of course not. Customer data isn't something I would ever share.

Companies that choose to do so will do it regardless of whether they're directly paid for it. It's not a tech problem and it's not something they need a 3rd party vendor for.

I don't see what's silly about the explanation considering it's about efficiency and performance. As a KISSmetrics customer I can tell you the focus is on funnels and key data; not on an internal cookie ID so that we can collude with other companies.

It's all relative. Our family was considered poor when we lived in the US (as opposed to when we lived in Mexico). The first time I got a construction job that paid $8/hr I thought I had it made. This was low pay for construction workers but more money than almost anyone else I knew was making.

A couple of years later I dated a student nurse that told me her first job would pay her $16/hr. I was blown away and thought she was lying or exaggerating about the pay. People I knew just didn't make that kind of money.

Anyways, I eventually discovered programming and got a job with a relatively small developer's salary. It certainly was real money to me. It was life changing.

Of course, once in that environment it doesn't take long to take a good look at those around you and feel undervalued/underpaid. Funny how that works.

KISSmetrics specializes in funnel analytics, not helping advertisers. I'm surprised by the number of people making that assumption.

I have a SaaS app and I use KISSmetrics to learn what sorts of things engage visitors and customers the most. It's helped me make critical decisions that benefit both me and my customers (by improving multi-step processes).

Thanks; this is one of the challenges I run into with marketing and trying to find traffic sources. I've had good success with word of mouth, integrations and giving away free templates for users feeling the type of pain my product solves.

Thanks! Everything from scratch; no UI/design framework used.

>> Do you want to know if the majority of HN is starving wanna-bes? Ask.

I assumed this was the point of the question because it focuses on net profit but you're right, there's not much to add to the answer that could be helpful to others. Also, I answered as a single founder which is different than a team of people saying they just cleared 50k/year from a net profit per person perspective. But because of the way the question was phrased, I'm not sure if that matters here.

Definitely more than 50k/year net and growing at a nice pace. I'm a single founder, worked on my SaaS product nights and weekends, and been live almost a year and a half. Also, just quit my day job a couple of weeks ago so I can do what I love full time. My product: http://www.bidsketch.com

I work for a PEO -- Professional Employer Organization -- and that's essentially what we do. Clients that come onboard with a co-employment contract for their employees. We pay their employees, our clients pay us and we become the employer (in most states though laws are always changing). This means we have 90k employees that help us negotiate some pretty good rates for Benefit plans. It's actually a pretty decent way for a smaller company to offer benefits to their employees that are competitive to larger companies.

We do try to take on companies of a minimum size (10+ employees) but sometimes end up taking on companies with 2 or 3 employees because the owner forecasts explosive growth -- which never happens. All that said, it's a freaking battle with the carriers every year to try to keep the increases at a lower rate. Also, we have "rate buckets" where we place clients according to risk and past medical history of its employees. It still tends to work out better than if they would attempt to get insurance on their own.