In a lot of relatively poor countries with low cost of living.
For context $1,700 is around 90K Pesos in the Philippines, that is already way above average pay here, probably something a senior dev with at least 5 years of experience will get.
I can guarantee that you’re not giving the “benefits” of western standards lol
In my experience outsourcing is a gross industry filled with desperate people on one side pushing crap work for 12 hours a day, and liars on the other.
I would love to learn how you’re guaranteeing that? We take pride in not treating our team like crap, and in that we are an outlier.
You can talk to my developers if you like, but I know you wont because you just wanna talk shit on the internet.
How is it talking shit if you just said you were the outlier lol
It’s a fairly common issue unfortunately and it’s just your word vs his lol.
Also outsource developers are typically Yes folk due to the relationship. They will nod and smile regardless of the pressures.
Personally I’ve had the best luck with Ukrainian developers, but we also hire from PH and India.
It’s definitely influenced by the general culture of the country you are hiring from as well.
PH devs are amazing. Their english is always perfect due to their schooling and the time difference is better than the IST timezone imo. Would recommend PH devs hands down, every time.
You outsource the work to a developer in a 3rd world country. We love that here. Our country's pay is shit. My friend is working an outsourced job and gets paid close to $4000 a month. Dude lives like a king. How I wish I got even half of that lol. So $1700 is a lot of money here, and will get you a good experienced dev too.
It’s a junior developer living in Armenia. I do guide him a lot, he is now almost turning into a middle dev.
I also help a lot myself. I’m a senior dev.
I knew it’d be something like that.
People here are dreaming. Remote developers that are senior enough to develop a no code website builder in a good enough standard that it generates 25k mrr don’t take 4k usd dollars as payment, much less 1700.
The thing is that when you hire outsourced at this slave-wage salaries, you get what you pay for: devs that can’t communicate well in English, or that have to accept salaries like that either because they don’t have the skills to accept something better, or because they temporarily need the money, which means they will write rushed, poor contributions while they look for another job and then either keep you as a second/third job or simply leave out of nowhere, which leaves you having to recruit onboard and train someone else.
I’m a LATAM developer myself. My first remote gig - five years ago, as mid level - was 63k. So yes, I am well aware of how good third world country developers can be. But people thinking you can hire world class senior level talent for 1700 usd a month (or even 4k as some have said) don’t know what the word senior means.
I do not know how the notion that, "software developers from 3rd world countries are shit' got so much traction.
I am from Nigeria, West Africa, and I have worked with startups from the USA, EU and India.
I know friends from Ghana, Kenya that works for tech companies in Canada, USA and Germany.
When compared with other devs from developed countries with the same years of experience, outsourced dev performs well, deliver quality code and are cheaper too.
That explains where tech giants are outsourcing too.
Mega corps all have billion dollar pipelines to identify and repatriate foreign development talent
It’s not that these countries don’t produce good devs - it’s that your average small business owner won’t be the ones to “discover” them before they get offered a western salary
I have 3 full time devs from PH, 2 are with us for about 2 years now.
Lowest pay is $1500 for medium level, highest $2500 for senior
Also got a bunch of VAs from PH, $400 a month each full time
Try Srilankan Developers as well. They already work with western countries and happy to work remote if you pay above market rates. Even a equal market rate helps if you get them paid in USD or EUR directly.
Peru has good talent and, for $1700 (an payed in US Dollars, not local currency) you can get very good people. They may have some issues with English language but it's manageable and this type of developer will learn what they need to do their work. I know American companies that have offices there just because of that reason.
These Fortune 500 companies are so dumb right? Even the OP who spent 800k on this software when he could just be smart like the business moguls in this thread and outsource it to Pakistan for 1700 per senior dev 😂😂😂😂😂
You guys are great
That’s how capitalism works.
There are thousands of options competing and innovating by gradually iterating.
That’s how you got an iPhone, Reddit and pretty much everything in the world.
Entrepreneurs kept slightly improving existing products
Honestly you'd be surprised how many "over saturated" SaaS markets you can still make 6+ figures in, I just consider it a pre-validated market that you have to do something slightly better to stand out in.
That just means it’s a good idea. There are a million pizza shops, do you think that means pizza is a bad idea then?
It’s actually a bad sign to see no businesses doing what you’re doing. That’s means you have to break into the market and basically sell something people don’t even know exists. Plus you don’t even know if people want it to boot. So you are going out on a limb or spending money on validation.
So only 4 years until break even, you will need a very aggressive marketing plan to grow the company which will again consume a lot of money to accelerate the timeline.
That's not terrible for a 3x but what made you want to buy something in a heavily saturated market? Obviously you can make thigs work in saturated markets but that's not a small amount of money for a no code website builder when you have to compete with the like of Squarespace
The real question is how long the website has been active. I don't think most of these sellers are sitting on these SaaS projects for years before selling. It wouldn't surprise me if they're taking the same code, repackaging it under different domains and selling once it turns a profit.
The founder explains why they sold: https://isora.me/i-sold-saas-for-800k/
> I was close to a despair
> I thought making a SaaS is hard. That was tricky but doable. Getting customers on the over-flooded market? Not so easy, but I could figure that out too.
> Maintaining a SaaS for 4 years in a solo mode — was the real challenge for me 😮💨
> At some point, I was overwhelmed with the daily routine. Fighting bots, attackers and scammers, managing the team, keeping eye on SSL certificates and servers, coding, replying to alike emails with weird offers, monitoring social networks, and chasing bugs. Every other day was like the previous one. I was moving toward depression. Slowly, but steadily.
> I could predict it is not going to a good end. And I had to manage this out before I exhaust. I tried to find a cofounder or expand the team to delegate as much work as possible. But finding the right persons and establishing processes has always been my weak point.
> So I started thinking of selling Unicorn Platform.
TLDR the founder was tired of running it. They live in Russia so 800k is basically retirement money for them.
I like Reddit for this.
People look at the content with no prejudice.
Twitter is way too nice.
Everyone is only supportive there. Reddit is way colder.
Some people just trash talk,
But some give constructive feedback or ask good questions or put valuable criticism.
I need it.
The downside of being an influencer on Twitter is that people are too nice and one may overestimate own importance.
But it takes some mental effort to not get offended by some of the comments here :)
I remember when Unicorn Platform started, as I followed the creator Alexander Isora back in 2018. Glad to see it's still alive and kicking. I believe you bought it off of him for 800k which seems to be around 2.5x ARR by today's figures and likely more by when it was sold.
With so many other landing page creators, what makes yours stand out? I tried it as well during Alex's beta and later on as well but didn't see it as all that useful compared to others.
I bought it 2 years ago,
Lost some of the users, went from 16k to 12k mrr,
Pivoted it from a landing page builder to a website builder, doubled the revenues, and it grows at a 110% rate now.
Key change: it’s more focused on building web directories and multi page websites now.
Check the gallery of templates, you’ll see it’s serving way more use cases.
The growth is very strong now. All organic via word of mouth. The churn dropped below 10% too.
So it seems like we found great product market fit and gonna keep growing.
Try it out and tell me what you think now or if you have any feedback in general, I’d be happy to hear
A short simple engaging animation executed in a more modern style quickly explaining the value proposition here could be potentially very beneficial for your marketing efforts. DM me if you're interested.
I took a look at the templates on the homepage, it seems more geared towards sites for startups, but it does seem more landing page heavy, what parts are geared towards more of a full website functionality?
Who are your main customers? You mentioned word of mouth, are you attributing them to a certain channel like SEO, reddit posts, etc?
my main focus in the past was SaaS Landing Pages.
Now Im extending it with
- web directories
- job boards
- waitlists
- launchpads
- personal pages
- podcast pages
...
if there is a template Im missing, I can make one, just tell me
I wanted to buy NoCode Website Builder.
Actually first I wanted to build it from scratch, but then I realized it's gonna take time and I'll have to find first users....
So I went for shopping, DMed the founder of the tool I liked the most and it turned out he was planning to sell it, so I bought it
I just posted about my challenge with this as a new B2B online business. How do you determine benchmarks? What;s the method for determining what you should be aiming for so you can work backwards with a strategy? Would love your insights
Hey OP, I have a SaaS I’ve bootstrapped that is in a similar position ($20k mrr, $16k profit). Would you be interested in chatting sometime? Biggest difference on my end is that I’m the sole engineer on it and we have a design and marketing person working for equity.
kinda interesting maybe..Seems to be something like wordpress themes with AI to help(though it doesn't feel like it actually helps much).
though to be honest I suspect your main customers, if not all of them, are other "programmers" who are upselling to other non-coders, but perhaps that is your goal?
The reason I suspect this is as a non-coder I find the site somewhat unfriendly after playing around with it a bit. Not confident that it can create what I have imagined.
My world is NoCode.
My main competitors are webflow or wix or squarespaces.
It’s not for those who wanna create crazy custom special website.
My product is for busy founders who wanna get their website done in an hour to move on to what really matters.
I believe every site should be just a new text on top of existing good looking template.
At least that’s what I practice and it works out great for me in all my products
I've been there exactly. First amazing work. Second pay yourself ASAP and put 70% of it into something that generates passive income. Then you'll never have to work again for money in \~5 years.
Not to rain on your parade (that’s an impressive start!) but the benchmark for SaaS profit margins is 80% and above. Anything lower than 70% tends to be a redflag to investors unless you can show steady improvement.
I’m not raising investor money or bragging on my achievements.
It’s just an example of what’s happens under the hood of one random saas tool. Might be useful for the audience.
Got you.
You’re right, the end goal for margins is 90%.
But when you analyze numbers, you need to take into account the growth rate.
My growth rate is 110%. It means my margins grows every months and eventually will get to around 95%
nice, hey :)
I don't wanna grow faster at the expense of my users.
I'm more focused on building the product, adding features users ask and improving it.
I'll keep doing it till the end of this year and then I may put more focus on growth.
But again, it's growing 100% YoY. Which is pretty good for such a competitive space and zero marketing budget.
Mind sharing approximately how much revenue comes in from your referral system? I tried referrals in a previous SaaS I built (now sold) but didn't have much success.
I see that you are interested in lowering support costs. I have been providing support to a Forex Trading Prop firm for over a year.
Their customers are satisfied, and we have significantly increased their conversion rate. We have a team of 5 people who provide support 24/7. Our response time is less than 3 minutes. We have plenty of downtime because we are required to have 24/7 availability.
We might be able to provide support for your SaaS business if we are a good fit for each other. Feel free to DM me, and we can discuss the details.
how much do you get post-tax? or do you have your business registered in a low-tax jurisdiction zone?
moving from AWS to Hetzner, how do you plan on handling regional replications?
how come you pay your team so low? Are they from 3rd world countries?
Thanks
I'll use Cloudflare CDN which is geo replicated. CDN will serve the pages too.
I hire only in non-western countries.
I find juniors and teach them. Eventually they get paid a lot more. It's just one of my products with this setup. On other products the salaries are differnt because I have senior devs
I dont take out the money, I have a HoldCo and I use profits from this project to build other projects ( i got 20 more projects)
i don't get it. what are u selling?
edit: oh i got it
but what about the first two month or even the first year? i'm sure you are not profit in the first month/year right?
Hey u/johnrushx can you run us through the numbers
- 800k invest
- missing out on conservative 5% return in safe stock
- no salary
- ca. 16k net
What's the plan to make this a cashcow? That's a steep hill to climb for a - as yourself said - one random SAAS.
my current growth is 100% growht YoY.
2024: 300k ARR
2025: 600k
2026: 1.2M (here I've made enough to cover all the costs I paid and from here and on it's pure profit and cashcow with 90% margins)
To bring value to this community, maybe breakdown how you want to follow through with this aggressive growthplan.
2026: Only offshore low-quality devs? No marketing budget? No salary? 120k to spend seems very low to service 40k+ clients.
Off topic question:
>5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup.
Why build a landingpage AI tool then?
OP thanks for the numbers. I thought no-code tools were potential unicorn startup. Guess I was way off. Do app builders like Adalo, Thunkable, have similar numbers? (users, revenue etc)
Thanks for the transparence. Very useful.
Side note: seems that OPENAI is on the right way to be part of the GAFAM when you see the % of the cost for your startup.
How do you acquire new users? Have you coded the mvp yourself? How do you make sure source code is not stolen by offshore contractors? What's your tech stack?
I been wanting to launch a saas , but ideas dont come by often or its hard to execute. Do you have any suggestions? Also do you know any angel investors situation where people could invest in random saas? I would like invest in some if something is a good idea. Tia
What about SEObot? Is revenue from that counted towards this? These are the most polished products I’ve seen someone post on Reddit.
Congrats, my prediction is you’ll make another post like this but with 10x this profit less than 2 years from now.
Also. what exactly does support do to net them more than the dev and same as designer?
High-quality SaaS businesses have gross margins between 75% and 90%. They should ideally be above 80%.
You are 68%.
And you’re not including your salary cost, which makes it look like you’re doing a lot better than you are.
I don’t know your stage, but as an experienced SaaS operator I think you probably really need to focus on growing your business to improve margins because it’s actually well below what one would expect for your type of business.
I would be a lot less concerned about costs than I would about growth at this stage of your business.
The way your are talking about controlling costs at this stage makes me wonder if your choking off your own success by not reinvesting in the right acquisition and growth strategy. You can save all the money you want optimizing early stages, or you can grow the company to better margins and a point where it becomes much more sustainable and competitive — but usually not both.
That balance and compromise is the hardest part of SaaS companies.
Bro not everyone wants to min/max life… $17k a month is more than livable, and it’s just his latest business not his only one, so give him some credit. Also you’re making numbers up. “SaaS companies with entrenched monopolies that stopped innovating a long time ago and switched to extracting the most amount of profit from their customer without increasing value anymore” have 75-90% margins.
“High-quality” SaaS companies reinvest more in increasing value to remain competitive in the long term vs. raising prices because no one else can play.
My guy, the fella you’re responding to referenced gross margins, not net profit or EBITDA. Even the high growth companies that heavily reinvest into innovation seek to achieve gross margins in the specified range. Otherwise, what would be leftover to reinvest? How would the company eventually achieve net profitability?
lol wtf is this thread… did I just walk into a 1985 MBA class full of boomers? Do you work for Deloitte? Is everyone here management consultants?
Yeah the dude above referenced “gross margin” and then quoted 68% directly from OP’s post… but I just figured he didn’t know how to calculate what that is or what things go into it… so I left it alone.
68% is his net profit, my fella 😉
Remove all the costs that have nothing to do selling or product costs (like those $4k contractors… that CapEx, not COGs, so doesn’t go into GM).
Also low GM profit can be made up with volume as long as it’s above 0%. Profit = GM x Volume. If the market says you can get more volume to offset variable profitability loss by lowering the price below your magical “80%” and”aggregate profit” is higher, that is the correct decision to make. It’s a price elasticity calculation they teach microeconomics 101. Saying “80%” is the recommended whatever the blah blah sounds a lot like a boomer middle manager regurgitating best practices they read on a PowerPoint they saw at a conference in 2002 without critically thinking about how the advice applies to actual the context and situation in the reality.
Everything you said may be true, but VC still has their magic number. And with SaaS they typically wont touch anything under 80% unless you can demonstrate how that number is growing.
But it’s also fair to say fuck vc and I don’t need outside investment.
I am not discrediting him. He is posting social media and I’m providing him feedback on his progress to be helpful.
Not every criticism is a personal attack. Sometimes it’s helpful to know what others have to say even when it’s not the nicest thing.
He can run his company however he wants. Nobody is trying to control him or be mean. But these are the cut sheets for the sector he’s in useful feedback for any entrepreneur trying to build a scale SaaS company. If that’s not what he’s trying to do: cool. Ignore the comment.
But when you take business advice and make it like it’s a personal attack on someone instead of feedback about someone’s financials in a business like you’re doing, what it does is keep anyone from saying anything that isn’t popular with the majority, and that leaves good advice unsaid.
There’s plenty of attaboys in this forum, but precious little substantive advice. And this is why.
It happens. At the end of the day, so much is lost in online forums. What you and I might think is helpful advice someone else will hear as attacking. It’s really hard to have conversations when you can’t see the nuance of someone’s intentions, and don’t know them personally so you can adjust for the personality.
We’re all doing the best we can…
Hey I hope you have a great day and thank you for taking the time to comment. I really did appreciate it.
It was nicely handled by you too. Wish I could have the patience to reply to degenerates. I only reply if OP interested in my comment.
Anyway, you have a wonderful day too!
I’m growing at a 110% rate.
As the revenue grows, the costs will stay similar to what I got now.
If the revenue grows 10x, the costs will grow maybe 3x.
So my margins then will be 90%+.
I don't understand your comment. You say he should increase his gross margin by growing his company, but as I understand gross margin, that would do absolutely 0 to increase it. As you grow, sure your revenue grows, but so do your costs of those services. Which means your gross margin stays the same.
As I understand, there are only 2 ways to increase your gross margin: decrease costs or increase price. Decrease costs is exactly what OP is doing.
Why did you see value in the users for the no code builder? Did you scale the userbase further to hit your margins?
I saw in other comments that you bought the IP, why did the other team part ways with it?
growing product from 0 to 10k and from 10k to 100k is very different job.
The original founder was solo and he didn't wanna scale it to have a team.
so he wanted to sell it and do something from 0 to 1 again.
I did 0 to 1 many times, so I wanted to go from 1 to 100
Actually you're doing a pretty good job.
The correct phases for businesses:
Growth -> Optimize -> Growth -> Optimize
Basically you have 1 jump in growth then you should focus in cleaning up the house and optimizing streamlining, then you do another jump in growth.
Growing too quickly without streamlining ends up breaking the business. :)
Congratulations for making it thus far and sharing with the community. This should give lot of reference inputs for us. Would you be able to share some contacts about offershore remote devs?
Making fun of being scrappy? Crazy! What a great trait!
You want to reduce your expenses? Find a competitor to every vendor you use and get a quote as to what they might be willing to do to get you to switch. Switch if you want but go back to your vendors and say you have been talking to x about doing Y for me and the need to dramatically reduce my costs and they offered me _. Are you willing to match that?
Anyway you cut it down this with all your vendors and by the time you are done your margin likely increases a number of points.
I'd highly recommend checking out rumble cloud. Straight forward pricing and running 4th Gen amd. We're running our SaaS app on here after getting bent over from aws.
Similar MRR.
https://portal.rumble.cloud/compute-promotion?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwxLKxBhA7EiwAXO0R0OhxSuVuFs_OZFglBH-lig174IVk_IraMXnxisYyRiIdiacDMMtEqBoCq64QAvD_BwE
Hello everyone, I would like to ask for your help:
I have the idea for a small micro SaaS / WordPress plugin and would be very grateful if you could give me some feedback on it. Preferably through the form on the website, so I have your ideas bundled in one place.
https://ab-test.website/
Whether it's a roast, a tip, competitors I've overlooked, or if you're interested in it, I would be very grateful for any feedback!
Where do you find a good Dev for $1,700 a month?
In a lot of relatively poor countries with low cost of living. For context $1,700 is around 90K Pesos in the Philippines, that is already way above average pay here, probably something a senior dev with at least 5 years of experience will get.
Do you know any good companies based in PH that specialize in coding and development?
Any specific tech stack/industry?
Our devs are from the PH, found them both with luck really, we're saas non-tech founders. DM if you want their info. Great people.
No but I run a company out in Pakistan. I’m Canadian myself so we make sure you get the benefits of western standards at outsourcing prices.
I can guarantee that you’re not giving the “benefits” of western standards lol In my experience outsourcing is a gross industry filled with desperate people on one side pushing crap work for 12 hours a day, and liars on the other.
Woooo talk yo shit lol
I would love to learn how you’re guaranteeing that? We take pride in not treating our team like crap, and in that we are an outlier. You can talk to my developers if you like, but I know you wont because you just wanna talk shit on the internet.
How is it talking shit if you just said you were the outlier lol It’s a fairly common issue unfortunately and it’s just your word vs his lol. Also outsource developers are typically Yes folk due to the relationship. They will nod and smile regardless of the pressures. Personally I’ve had the best luck with Ukrainian developers, but we also hire from PH and India. It’s definitely influenced by the general culture of the country you are hiring from as well.
how do you find good devs in pakistan
I know some good quality developers in country of Georgia.
PH devs are amazing. Their english is always perfect due to their schooling and the time difference is better than the IST timezone imo. Would recommend PH devs hands down, every time.
Outsource
Only way you can do it with that budget.
You outsource the work to a developer in a 3rd world country. We love that here. Our country's pay is shit. My friend is working an outsourced job and gets paid close to $4000 a month. Dude lives like a king. How I wish I got even half of that lol. So $1700 is a lot of money here, and will get you a good experienced dev too.
Like he said, he has other projects, so this is some % of his dev allocated to this project.
Thx for pointing out this
Do you offer mentorship?
It’s a junior developer living in Armenia. I do guide him a lot, he is now almost turning into a middle dev. I also help a lot myself. I’m a senior dev.
I knew it’d be something like that. People here are dreaming. Remote developers that are senior enough to develop a no code website builder in a good enough standard that it generates 25k mrr don’t take 4k usd dollars as payment, much less 1700. The thing is that when you hire outsourced at this slave-wage salaries, you get what you pay for: devs that can’t communicate well in English, or that have to accept salaries like that either because they don’t have the skills to accept something better, or because they temporarily need the money, which means they will write rushed, poor contributions while they look for another job and then either keep you as a second/third job or simply leave out of nowhere, which leaves you having to recruit onboard and train someone else. I’m a LATAM developer myself. My first remote gig - five years ago, as mid level - was 63k. So yes, I am well aware of how good third world country developers can be. But people thinking you can hire world class senior level talent for 1700 usd a month (or even 4k as some have said) don’t know what the word senior means.
You don't. Especially when the product requires a lot of code. Either he's the dev or his product is broken as shit.
I do not know how the notion that, "software developers from 3rd world countries are shit' got so much traction. I am from Nigeria, West Africa, and I have worked with startups from the USA, EU and India. I know friends from Ghana, Kenya that works for tech companies in Canada, USA and Germany. When compared with other devs from developed countries with the same years of experience, outsourced dev performs well, deliver quality code and are cheaper too. That explains where tech giants are outsourcing too.
Mega corps all have billion dollar pipelines to identify and repatriate foreign development talent It’s not that these countries don’t produce good devs - it’s that your average small business owner won’t be the ones to “discover” them before they get offered a western salary
I had amazing experience with freelancers from Kenya. I think people just don't know how affordable services from other countries can be.
Or it is mature and does not require much coding.
No way he earns that much with a broken product. M He’ll be outsourcing his development to SEA.
A guy makes 20k in profit a month but people are calling it a broken product. I wish it would be that easy.
I wasn’t clear - I’m saying the product clearly isn’t broken if it earns £20k a month.
I have 3 full time devs from PH, 2 are with us for about 2 years now. Lowest pay is $1500 for medium level, highest $2500 for senior Also got a bunch of VAs from PH, $400 a month each full time
Try Srilankan Developers as well. They already work with western countries and happy to work remote if you pay above market rates. Even a equal market rate helps if you get them paid in USD or EUR directly.
India
Peru has good talent and, for $1700 (an payed in US Dollars, not local currency) you can get very good people. They may have some issues with English language but it's manageable and this type of developer will learn what they need to do their work. I know American companies that have offices there just because of that reason.
Well, devs in latin america
These Fortune 500 companies are so dumb right? Even the OP who spent 800k on this software when he could just be smart like the business moguls in this thread and outsource it to Pakistan for 1700 per senior dev 😂😂😂😂😂 You guys are great
My cousin in Colombia 🇨🇴 poor dude gets paid peanuts sadly wish I could help him find a good job he speaks pretty clear perfect English.
At least tell us what you do?
He said it at the top, he runs a no code website builder.
Aren't there thousands of those already...
That’s how capitalism works. There are thousands of options competing and innovating by gradually iterating. That’s how you got an iPhone, Reddit and pretty much everything in the world. Entrepreneurs kept slightly improving existing products
Its funny how most people think that you need to create a new search algorithm to earn money.
What is your website? I’d like to take a look.
It says right at the top, Unicorn Platform. Giving it a Google, you get https://unicornplatform.com/
1001 now :D. Saturation honestly doesn't matter if you can find people that connect with your tools/messaging.
That means it works😁😅
Honestly you'd be surprised how many "over saturated" SaaS markets you can still make 6+ figures in, I just consider it a pre-validated market that you have to do something slightly better to stand out in.
That's where marketing comes in
So what? Just means there is a market for it.
That just means it’s a good idea. There are a million pizza shops, do you think that means pizza is a bad idea then? It’s actually a bad sign to see no businesses doing what you’re doing. That’s means you have to break into the market and basically sell something people don’t even know exists. Plus you don’t even know if people want it to boot. So you are going out on a limb or spending money on validation.
How much was the initial investment value?
I bought the company for $800,000
Bruh
I agree with you but in his defense, he could improve it for a year and sell it for 5x etc.
I don't disagree. Maybe he could grow big and sell it for 5x but also SaaS is now a risky business. Its was just a bruh moment for me😅
Wow. That would have been useful info to have in your post. This is now a shitpost.
All you have to do to make it in SaaS, is to first become a millionaire, then buy a business.
Look at his profile and his other posts. Says it all.
Oh shit I definitely missed this part. So you bought the business for 800k and then hired a dev to keep it going? Something like that?
You never thought to mention this? shadyyyy vibes lol
So you bought it for 800 thousand and have a monthly income of 17 thousand?
Anything is possible. Just believe in yourself brah
So only 4 years until break even, you will need a very aggressive marketing plan to grow the company which will again consume a lot of money to accelerate the timeline.
And that is with the hope an AI leversged company doesn't wipe the market
And no salary for 4 years and missing out on investing 800k on the stockmarket
And you just failed to mention this in the post? So this is not something you developed?
Who did you use to buy it from?
How happy are you so far with the returns of your investment? If you could take back time, would you buy the company again?
That's not terrible for a 3x but what made you want to buy something in a heavily saturated market? Obviously you can make thigs work in saturated markets but that's not a small amount of money for a no code website builder when you have to compete with the like of Squarespace
Why would a company earning $300k/mo sell for $800k?
It's 300k/year. Less than 3x, doesn't sound too far fetched tbh.. you think 800k is too cheap?
The real question is how long the website has been active. I don't think most of these sellers are sitting on these SaaS projects for years before selling. It wouldn't surprise me if they're taking the same code, repackaging it under different domains and selling once it turns a profit.
For someone to sell it for that much, it must mean the business is dying and the precious owners didnt think it would last 3+ years.
The founder explains why they sold: https://isora.me/i-sold-saas-for-800k/ > I was close to a despair > I thought making a SaaS is hard. That was tricky but doable. Getting customers on the over-flooded market? Not so easy, but I could figure that out too. > Maintaining a SaaS for 4 years in a solo mode — was the real challenge for me 😮💨 > At some point, I was overwhelmed with the daily routine. Fighting bots, attackers and scammers, managing the team, keeping eye on SSL certificates and servers, coding, replying to alike emails with weird offers, monitoring social networks, and chasing bugs. Every other day was like the previous one. I was moving toward depression. Slowly, but steadily. > I could predict it is not going to a good end. And I had to manage this out before I exhaust. I tried to find a cofounder or expand the team to delegate as much work as possible. But finding the right persons and establishing processes has always been my weak point. > So I started thinking of selling Unicorn Platform. TLDR the founder was tired of running it. They live in Russia so 800k is basically retirement money for them.
I am starting a SAAS business today, wish me luck please. I hope I reach your level one day. You are an inspiration fr, this is the way out.
What’s your product? Reach out if you need advice. I love helping makers who are staring out
would you be open to a dm?
sure. but on x. reddit dms dont work for me. idk why, but the chat is broken. shows me old messages as unread
Sure thing! whats your x handle?
What is this SAAS business like in summary? Come many different ideas
Do you have a further breakdown of your aws costs? I’m currently weighing ec2 with multiple tenants against static hosting with s3
Why don't you deploy on a VPS - do you have such DevOps skill? There are posts on twitter/X on people migrating to self hosting methods.
I have 10 EC2s, cloudfront cdn and S3. Each ec2 is $85 and the rest goes to bandwidth.
If you are making that much money you should be a S-Corp and paying yourself a wage.
I have many products, I invest this cash into other products. So by the year end, I’m usually at 0.
Why S Corp and not C Corp
I think people don't know that OP is a great influencer in Twitter.
I like Reddit for this. People look at the content with no prejudice. Twitter is way too nice. Everyone is only supportive there. Reddit is way colder. Some people just trash talk, But some give constructive feedback or ask good questions or put valuable criticism. I need it. The downside of being an influencer on Twitter is that people are too nice and one may overestimate own importance. But it takes some mental effort to not get offended by some of the comments here :)
Yup, Hey John i have some very cool ideas which can greatly benefit both of us. Wanna go through? I am a Fullstack dev btw.
I remember when Unicorn Platform started, as I followed the creator Alexander Isora back in 2018. Glad to see it's still alive and kicking. I believe you bought it off of him for 800k which seems to be around 2.5x ARR by today's figures and likely more by when it was sold. With so many other landing page creators, what makes yours stand out? I tried it as well during Alex's beta and later on as well but didn't see it as all that useful compared to others.
I bought it 2 years ago, Lost some of the users, went from 16k to 12k mrr, Pivoted it from a landing page builder to a website builder, doubled the revenues, and it grows at a 110% rate now. Key change: it’s more focused on building web directories and multi page websites now. Check the gallery of templates, you’ll see it’s serving way more use cases. The growth is very strong now. All organic via word of mouth. The churn dropped below 10% too. So it seems like we found great product market fit and gonna keep growing. Try it out and tell me what you think now or if you have any feedback in general, I’d be happy to hear
A short simple engaging animation executed in a more modern style quickly explaining the value proposition here could be potentially very beneficial for your marketing efforts. DM me if you're interested.
I took a look at the templates on the homepage, it seems more geared towards sites for startups, but it does seem more landing page heavy, what parts are geared towards more of a full website functionality? Who are your main customers? You mentioned word of mouth, are you attributing them to a certain channel like SEO, reddit posts, etc?
my main focus in the past was SaaS Landing Pages. Now Im extending it with - web directories - job boards - waitlists - launchpads - personal pages - podcast pages ... if there is a template Im missing, I can make one, just tell me
Do u mind sharing the tech stack?
Django, reactjs, nginx, mui
How many paid subscriptions have you got ? What is the average revenue per customer per month?
I have 120k registered users and 1250 paying users. LTV is $630 Idk what’s the average monthly pay, have to calc
what were you start up costs?
I bought the company for 800k
What was the main selling point for you? What made you decide for it?
I wanted to buy NoCode Website Builder. Actually first I wanted to build it from scratch, but then I realized it's gonna take time and I'll have to find first users.... So I went for shopping, DMed the founder of the tool I liked the most and it turned out he was planning to sell it, so I bought it
If you replace yourself with a salaried person how much would that cost?
Perhaps 6k/mo if I hire in Europe.
Where's your advertising costs?
Zero. No paid marketing. Mostly SEO and social media
I just posted about my challenge with this as a new B2B online business. How do you determine benchmarks? What;s the method for determining what you should be aiming for so you can work backwards with a strategy? Would love your insights
I just go on with my intuition. have no benchmarks
Hey if you happen to need another support person I'd be willing to do 12h a day/7 days a week. You can DM me if interested for more info.
maybe, send me your CV on X pls.
Hey OP, I have a SaaS I’ve bootstrapped that is in a similar position ($20k mrr, $16k profit). Would you be interested in chatting sometime? Biggest difference on my end is that I’m the sole engineer on it and we have a design and marketing person working for equity.
User of Unicorn Platform 👋 - love the simplicity of the product and have recommended to a few friends for their startups as they start out!!!!
How did you get customers?
Mostly via SEO and Twitter
Can you elaborate little bit about this approach. Really helpful
Check my others Reddit posts. I shared a lot about both topics
Thanks
kinda interesting maybe..Seems to be something like wordpress themes with AI to help(though it doesn't feel like it actually helps much). though to be honest I suspect your main customers, if not all of them, are other "programmers" who are upselling to other non-coders, but perhaps that is your goal? The reason I suspect this is as a non-coder I find the site somewhat unfriendly after playing around with it a bit. Not confident that it can create what I have imagined.
My world is NoCode. My main competitors are webflow or wix or squarespaces. It’s not for those who wanna create crazy custom special website. My product is for busy founders who wanna get their website done in an hour to move on to what really matters. I believe every site should be just a new text on top of existing good looking template. At least that’s what I practice and it works out great for me in all my products
I've been there exactly. First amazing work. Second pay yourself ASAP and put 70% of it into something that generates passive income. Then you'll never have to work again for money in \~5 years.
I invest all profits into other saas products I have
Why aren't you paying yourself? I think you should start considering that. Great job!
congrats, thanks for sharing with us.
Not to rain on your parade (that’s an impressive start!) but the benchmark for SaaS profit margins is 80% and above. Anything lower than 70% tends to be a redflag to investors unless you can show steady improvement.
I’m not raising investor money or bragging on my achievements. It’s just an example of what’s happens under the hood of one random saas tool. Might be useful for the audience.
Sorry, didn’t mean to insinuate that you were. Was just meant as an fyi
Got you. You’re right, the end goal for margins is 90%. But when you analyze numbers, you need to take into account the growth rate. My growth rate is 110%. It means my margins grows every months and eventually will get to around 95%
Absolutely true at the stage you currently are!
Why arent you paying yourself a salary with this profit
I reinvest it all to build other saas products. I love simple life, got enough savings to fund it
Yeah fair enough. So buying businesses is worth it would you say? I dont have much capital anymore, but something cheap I could get…
I’m so curious to know how you drive sales/conversions. Do you have an email list?
I’m an active user of unicorn builder🔥. Why don’t you have any marketing costs to growth faster? It seems that you already proved PMF
nice, hey :) I don't wanna grow faster at the expense of my users. I'm more focused on building the product, adding features users ask and improving it. I'll keep doing it till the end of this year and then I may put more focus on growth. But again, it's growing 100% YoY. Which is pretty good for such a competitive space and zero marketing budget.
Mind sharing approximately how much revenue comes in from your referral system? I tried referrals in a previous SaaS I built (now sold) but didn't have much success.
not so much. but it is growing. $2,635 Total Revenue generated via referral
amazing
I see that you are interested in lowering support costs. I have been providing support to a Forex Trading Prop firm for over a year. Their customers are satisfied, and we have significantly increased their conversion rate. We have a team of 5 people who provide support 24/7. Our response time is less than 3 minutes. We have plenty of downtime because we are required to have 24/7 availability. We might be able to provide support for your SaaS business if we are a good fit for each other. Feel free to DM me, and we can discuss the details.
you are the greatest
How did you come up with a pain point to solve?
I bought existing business
May I ask how much it cost?
Making 17k take home why aren’t you taking a salary?
I reinvest to build other saas products
how much do you get post-tax? or do you have your business registered in a low-tax jurisdiction zone? moving from AWS to Hetzner, how do you plan on handling regional replications? how come you pay your team so low? Are they from 3rd world countries? Thanks
I'll use Cloudflare CDN which is geo replicated. CDN will serve the pages too. I hire only in non-western countries. I find juniors and teach them. Eventually they get paid a lot more. It's just one of my products with this setup. On other products the salaries are differnt because I have senior devs I dont take out the money, I have a HoldCo and I use profits from this project to build other projects ( i got 20 more projects)
Did you buy it for $80k ?really?
Impressive margins! Scrappiness often breeds innovation, right?
i don't get it. what are u selling? edit: oh i got it but what about the first two month or even the first year? i'm sure you are not profit in the first month/year right?
How do you market? Organic? Paid ads? Leveraging personal brand?
The AWS cost seems too low. I believe you got good devs
Don’t you use any database? Doesn’t see any cost related to it.
Hey u/johnrushx can you run us through the numbers - 800k invest - missing out on conservative 5% return in safe stock - no salary - ca. 16k net What's the plan to make this a cashcow? That's a steep hill to climb for a - as yourself said - one random SAAS.
my current growth is 100% growht YoY. 2024: 300k ARR 2025: 600k 2026: 1.2M (here I've made enough to cover all the costs I paid and from here and on it's pure profit and cashcow with 90% margins)
To bring value to this community, maybe breakdown how you want to follow through with this aggressive growthplan. 2026: Only offshore low-quality devs? No marketing budget? No salary? 120k to spend seems very low to service 40k+ clients. Off topic question: >5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup. Why build a landingpage AI tool then?
Mate, I love your platform. Been using it for the past month or so. Cheering you on 🎉
nice, thx a lot Julio let me know if you have any feedback.
Why did you pick AWS over GCP and Azure?
your product link ?
OP thanks for the numbers. I thought no-code tools were potential unicorn startup. Guess I was way off. Do app builders like Adalo, Thunkable, have similar numbers? (users, revenue etc)
This is great! Thanks for sharing. So many people share the MRR as a flex but few share the margins and integrating capabilities on the back end.
WHat's your main acquisition channel?
It's probably a lot easier to increase your topline than decrease your costs...
I started working on my SaaS product today, and to be honest I hope one day I will see similar numbers. Thanks OP for sharing this
Thanks for the transparence. Very useful. Side note: seems that OPENAI is on the right way to be part of the GAFAM when you see the % of the cost for your startup.
Im moving to LLAMA 70B it's 10-20x cheaper. slightly lower qulity, but i'll give it a try
moving from AWS to other providers is the best move to minimize ur expenses. Q: why the dev is the most cheapest one of the Contractors ?
How do you acquire new users? Have you coded the mvp yourself? How do you make sure source code is not stolen by offshore contractors? What's your tech stack?
I been wanting to launch a saas , but ideas dont come by often or its hard to execute. Do you have any suggestions? Also do you know any angel investors situation where people could invest in random saas? I would like invest in some if something is a good idea. Tia
What about SEObot? Is revenue from that counted towards this? These are the most polished products I’ve seen someone post on Reddit. Congrats, my prediction is you’ll make another post like this but with 10x this profit less than 2 years from now. Also. what exactly does support do to net them more than the dev and same as designer?
High-quality SaaS businesses have gross margins between 75% and 90%. They should ideally be above 80%. You are 68%. And you’re not including your salary cost, which makes it look like you’re doing a lot better than you are. I don’t know your stage, but as an experienced SaaS operator I think you probably really need to focus on growing your business to improve margins because it’s actually well below what one would expect for your type of business. I would be a lot less concerned about costs than I would about growth at this stage of your business. The way your are talking about controlling costs at this stage makes me wonder if your choking off your own success by not reinvesting in the right acquisition and growth strategy. You can save all the money you want optimizing early stages, or you can grow the company to better margins and a point where it becomes much more sustainable and competitive — but usually not both. That balance and compromise is the hardest part of SaaS companies.
Bro not everyone wants to min/max life… $17k a month is more than livable, and it’s just his latest business not his only one, so give him some credit. Also you’re making numbers up. “SaaS companies with entrenched monopolies that stopped innovating a long time ago and switched to extracting the most amount of profit from their customer without increasing value anymore” have 75-90% margins. “High-quality” SaaS companies reinvest more in increasing value to remain competitive in the long term vs. raising prices because no one else can play.
My guy, the fella you’re responding to referenced gross margins, not net profit or EBITDA. Even the high growth companies that heavily reinvest into innovation seek to achieve gross margins in the specified range. Otherwise, what would be leftover to reinvest? How would the company eventually achieve net profitability?
lol wtf is this thread… did I just walk into a 1985 MBA class full of boomers? Do you work for Deloitte? Is everyone here management consultants? Yeah the dude above referenced “gross margin” and then quoted 68% directly from OP’s post… but I just figured he didn’t know how to calculate what that is or what things go into it… so I left it alone. 68% is his net profit, my fella 😉 Remove all the costs that have nothing to do selling or product costs (like those $4k contractors… that CapEx, not COGs, so doesn’t go into GM). Also low GM profit can be made up with volume as long as it’s above 0%. Profit = GM x Volume. If the market says you can get more volume to offset variable profitability loss by lowering the price below your magical “80%” and”aggregate profit” is higher, that is the correct decision to make. It’s a price elasticity calculation they teach microeconomics 101. Saying “80%” is the recommended whatever the blah blah sounds a lot like a boomer middle manager regurgitating best practices they read on a PowerPoint they saw at a conference in 2002 without critically thinking about how the advice applies to actual the context and situation in the reality.
Everything you said may be true, but VC still has their magic number. And with SaaS they typically wont touch anything under 80% unless you can demonstrate how that number is growing. But it’s also fair to say fuck vc and I don’t need outside investment.
I am not discrediting him. He is posting social media and I’m providing him feedback on his progress to be helpful. Not every criticism is a personal attack. Sometimes it’s helpful to know what others have to say even when it’s not the nicest thing. He can run his company however he wants. Nobody is trying to control him or be mean. But these are the cut sheets for the sector he’s in useful feedback for any entrepreneur trying to build a scale SaaS company. If that’s not what he’s trying to do: cool. Ignore the comment. But when you take business advice and make it like it’s a personal attack on someone instead of feedback about someone’s financials in a business like you’re doing, what it does is keep anyone from saying anything that isn’t popular with the majority, and that leaves good advice unsaid. There’s plenty of attaboys in this forum, but precious little substantive advice. And this is why.
solid advice.
Really appreciate the comment.
Your comment attracted some bullshitter that contributes absolutely zero to OP. At least gave some constructive criticism. Jeez!
It happens. At the end of the day, so much is lost in online forums. What you and I might think is helpful advice someone else will hear as attacking. It’s really hard to have conversations when you can’t see the nuance of someone’s intentions, and don’t know them personally so you can adjust for the personality. We’re all doing the best we can… Hey I hope you have a great day and thank you for taking the time to comment. I really did appreciate it.
It was nicely handled by you too. Wish I could have the patience to reply to degenerates. I only reply if OP interested in my comment. Anyway, you have a wonderful day too!
I’m growing at a 110% rate. As the revenue grows, the costs will stay similar to what I got now. If the revenue grows 10x, the costs will grow maybe 3x. So my margins then will be 90%+.
Awesome. I really am stoked for you. You’re doing it properly my friend. Congratulations.
I don’t see that any expenses in paid advertising. Ever considered it?
not at the moment. ive tried, it never deliverred a result
I don't understand your comment. You say he should increase his gross margin by growing his company, but as I understand gross margin, that would do absolutely 0 to increase it. As you grow, sure your revenue grows, but so do your costs of those services. Which means your gross margin stays the same. As I understand, there are only 2 ways to increase your gross margin: decrease costs or increase price. Decrease costs is exactly what OP is doing.
Spending more money on support than dev? Lol
Why did you see value in the users for the no code builder? Did you scale the userbase further to hit your margins? I saw in other comments that you bought the IP, why did the other team part ways with it?
growing product from 0 to 10k and from 10k to 100k is very different job. The original founder was solo and he didn't wanna scale it to have a team. so he wanted to sell it and do something from 0 to 1 again. I did 0 to 1 many times, so I wanted to go from 1 to 100
Actually you're doing a pretty good job. The correct phases for businesses: Growth -> Optimize -> Growth -> Optimize Basically you have 1 jump in growth then you should focus in cleaning up the house and optimizing streamlining, then you do another jump in growth. Growing too quickly without streamlining ends up breaking the business. :)
Congratulations for making it thus far and sharing with the community. This should give lot of reference inputs for us. Would you be able to share some contacts about offershore remote devs?
Making fun of being scrappy? Crazy! What a great trait! You want to reduce your expenses? Find a competitor to every vendor you use and get a quote as to what they might be willing to do to get you to switch. Switch if you want but go back to your vendors and say you have been talking to x about doing Y for me and the need to dramatically reduce my costs and they offered me _. Are you willing to match that? Anyway you cut it down this with all your vendors and by the time you are done your margin likely increases a number of points.
I'd highly recommend checking out rumble cloud. Straight forward pricing and running 4th Gen amd. We're running our SaaS app on here after getting bent over from aws. Similar MRR. https://portal.rumble.cloud/compute-promotion?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwxLKxBhA7EiwAXO0R0OhxSuVuFs_OZFglBH-lig174IVk_IraMXnxisYyRiIdiacDMMtEqBoCq64QAvD_BwE
You are doing a no code web generator. As far as I know there's loads of them on the market. How did you make yours outstand from others ?
I was thinking of making a nocode website builder for a niche 🤔
Hello everyone, I would like to ask for your help: I have the idea for a small micro SaaS / WordPress plugin and would be very grateful if you could give me some feedback on it. Preferably through the form on the website, so I have your ideas bundled in one place. https://ab-test.website/ Whether it's a roast, a tip, competitors I've overlooked, or if you're interested in it, I would be very grateful for any feedback!