Comment by speleding
1 day ago
Congrats. A word of warning: I scaled my SaaS site to $1M in AAR in a few years, but then a lot of competition appeared and a decade later it's still at only $1.5M. I have a good time running it and I can live comfortably while feeding my team, but with my initial success I had hoped it would go up further faster. So keep those expectation low, the next million may not come as easily as the first.
Knowing what you know now, is there anything strategic you would have done differently after reaching that 1M ARR milestone?
Good question. The main problem I had was being too slow scaling up from 1 person. Building a good team is tricky, it's very hard to convince great devs to join you when you are by yourself at a time when they had a pick of jobs from FAANG. Even if you can match the salary of well funded startups, other companies can offer working with a larger team.
So you have three options: 1. hire sub-par people, 2. get VC funding to hire an entire team, or 3. continue doing most stuff by yourself.
I tried hiring sub-par people. That was a mistake, they took way more effort and negative energy than I got in return from the salary I paid them. I did not want to take on VC funding to be able create a large team at once, and in hindsight I think that was a good idea because several of my competitors did, and then had to fold 5 years later when they ran out of funding and their revenue was not high enough. (Also, the freedom of being a 100% owner and not having anyone tell you what to do was a major quality of life improvement for me that I never want to give up again once I tasted it. I hope you savor it as I do!)
So being smarter about hiring is what I would do differently, but that's easier said than done. I think the job market today probably does have more high quality devs available that don't mind being employee number two.
Edit: to add, once competitors appeared it became much more of a marketing game than a web dev game, because customers just tend to click the first three google hits. Getting good at marketing, and hiring the right people for that, is a whole other ballgame if you're a dev.
I think there's a certain type of engineer that actively prefers working in a small team where you can make an outsized impact and wear many hats. I'm one of them lol.
I wonder if you could bring on just one really good dev who matches that description vs scaling up to a larger team. In many cases, a very small team of A+ players can beat a large team of B players.
Although it sounds like you're saying marketing/distribution may have played a larger role in your trajectory? In hindsight, do you think focusing your team-building efforts on the marketing side would have been a better strategy?
1 reply →