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Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months
235 points by snerual on Jan 23, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 78 comments
Hi, I'm 19yo. I bootstrapped a SaaS in March last year together with a friend (he does sales, I do engineering). Currently we are at 250k ARR and growing fast. (Based in Netherlands).

I'm sharing this because I'm looking for people who went through a similar situation. I went from "coding in my bedroom next to my university study" to "doing technical interviews with senior engineers" and "enterprise sales to c-level people" within a year. I do like to push myself way beyond my comfort zone (it's my go-to strategy for learning new stuff) but sometimes it is quite overwhelming. Sometimes, when I can take a step back, I realize how insane this situation is.

Luckily I have supporting parents and peers, who try to advise where they can, but none of them have experience running a fast growing company.

Anyway. If anyone has had a similar experience, please share. If you know a community/network with similar people, please share.




You're already in one of the best communities there is: Hacker News. Don't underestimate what you can learn just by carefully reading the threads here.

I went from "idea in my dorm room" to interviewing and hiring executives in their 40s and 50s within 24 months. The best lesson I learned is that there are way fewer "rules" than you think, and smart, disciplined, focused entrepreneurs can accomplish way more than they assume. It's reasonable to reflect on your inexperience in order to prevent mistakes, but you should never feel intimidated by it, or let other people intimidate you. The world (and YC's portfolio) is full of "inexperienced" people like you who have built billion dollar companies that disrupted industries and became pillars of the economy.

If you post contact information in your profile, I'm sure at least a few people with relevant experience would reach out and offer to be a resource for more specific advice. I've done that a few times here with mostly successful results.


> The best lesson I learned is that there are way fewer "rules" than you think, and smart, disciplined, focused entrepreneurs can accomplish way more than they assume.

Isn't it like this?

* A great idea can succeed despite mediocre execution

* A mediocre idea can succeed if the execution is great

* A bad idea can succeed (for a while) if you're a con artist (WeWork, Solar Roadways etc.)


Curious as to why you think WeWork is a bad idea?


Thanks, yeah I discovered HN about a year ago and it is a wonderful source of entertainment and valuable information


One thing I noticed is that the YC batch tend not to post or comment much here. Except for hiring and show posts. My guess is that they are heads down working!


> One thing I noticed is that the YC batch tend not to post or comment much here.

They're on BookFace, YC's private forums.

HN is just YC's public ad server.


That's not accurate. BF is great but it's not a parallel HN where a secret world of similar discussion is going on. To overgeneralize a bit, topics there tend to be narrower and oriented around specific concrete situations. A lot of it is about hiring, offices, things like that. There are a lot of Launch posts, especially by startups in the current batch who don't feel ready to go to a bigger format yet.

Actually I think YC would probably like BF to become more HN-like and may find ways to encourage intellectually richer discussion (I've been asked a few times to advise about that). But if YC founders aren't posting to HN, it's not because they're busy participating in an alternative-universe HN. It's more likely as the GP said, that they're busy working—as they should be.


I would caution that Hacker News is both fairly biased towards a developers view of the world, and also often unrealistic when it comes to things outside of technology. As the technical founder the best thing you can do to grow is actually to spend time learning about management and also the non-technical aspects of running a business. I wouldn't rely on Hacker News for these things. Instead look for local entrepreneur round tables or social groups and hang out with the non-technical roles.


Maybe there's been a positive drift in that aspect of the community over the last couple years. Take this thread from last week about GlacierMD:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825917

IMO the discussion was at least as insightful as I'd expect from a top level MBA classroom.


Counterpoint, the threads about parler were a dumpsterfire as HN users around the world tried to create 1:1 comparisons between US current events and BLM protests in the Summer in order to support Parler's complete contempt for both moderation and open debate.


HN is pretty relentlessly negative, and compared to the market in general overindexes on technology/security/privacy and underindexes on distribution/marketing. Some of the top upvoted advice on certain threads (not all) is just bad, usually because it's not pragmatic enough, and should be taken with a large grain of salt.


First off, congratulations. This is quite the accomplishment for anyone of any age.

I started a niche B2B SaaS company with a co-founder when I was 23 (www.gingrapp.com). We sold it off when I was 27 and I stuck around for 2 years after acquisition. By the time I left there were 30+ employees and 8-digit ARR.

I’m currently 30, married with a toddler and semi-retired. The last 10 years of my life have been absolutely nuts and like you I wish I had someone who’d been through it before to talk to. It can be hard to relate with others as a founder. A frequent refrain I encountered when trying to talk with friends/family was that I had “first-world” problems that weren’t worth talking about. Ugh.

First off, I don’t think age matters per se. I’ve known founders in their 40s and 50s to flounder just as often as founders in their 20s, just usually in different ways.

The first piece of advice I’d give is that this whole experience will be a roller coaster and you can’t always control what happens next. It helped me to remember that I’m but a passenger on this journey.

I think I’d have a lot more to share with you privately. If you ever want to chat, my email is in my bio. Would be happy to talk further.


>A frequent refrain I encountered when trying to talk with friends/family was that I had “first-world” problems that weren’t worth talking about. Ugh.

Isn't this somewhat true from their perspective? They have just as much difficulty relating the other way


Wow, 8-digit ARR from that niche is pretty amazing to me. The power of specialisation I suppose, but it does make me question what the "right" size of market to go after is to not spend a life chasing the dragon.


Retired at 30. Well done good sir.


Here is a piece of actionable advice.

Join a supoort community in your area. You are looking for something for entrepeneurs in holland ideally. These usually have a price of admission like $300/yr but can be worth every cent

For example, ecommercefuel is fantastic for ecomm sites. Mastermind may have something to offer for your geography. Its going to boil down to reputation and how much you put in too.

You need a forum of entrepeneurs for people that are dealing with the same issues as you: payroll issues, VAT issues, engineering best practices, accounting advice, dealing with fraud, chargebacks, churn prevention, sales , banking contacts, brand registration and protection, outsourcing copy, and most importantly, advice on how to hire key staff

As you can see, its a lot. You need a whole village to figure that out. I am not sure whats out there for EU virtual "villages" for SaaS, but HN may be able to help.

From one entrepr3neur to other: if you dont have a crm already for sales leads, and your sales cycle is not self serviced, try the streak plugin for gsuite.

Good luck.


Forgot the number 1 rule.

Whatever is that you do, make sure you will always have your company to go back to, the following day.

In other words, always search for risks that can wipe you out, and be paranoid about them, work aggressively to mitigate them, even if the risk is borderline zero that it could happen.


Interesting advice. I wonder if those groups are uniquely an EU thing.

I moved out to the Bay Area about 4 months before the lockdown and have been quite underwhelmed by the lack of community around entrepreneurship. I’m not sure if it’s the lockdown itself, the FAANG companies dominating the talent pools, or me just not understanding the dynamics out here.


Thanks for the advice.

Not really familiar with "villages"

About the Sales, here is our "stack": Hubspot free + LinkedIn sales navigator + unlimited minutes on your phone


If you’re looking to grow your sales function you’ve got a good base already. What’s important is ensuring that calls and emails you send to leads and prospects are tracked in your CRM. This’ll help during the sales process and will be beneficial for post-sales support too.


Hi, since someone else mentioned your product's website I looked over it and I'm curious.

As far as I understand students need to install your app and the app requires users to log out and when they log in, it's launched automatically in full screen mode and users cannot escape until they submit their answers.

What if I install your app in a sandboxed environment (like a windows box in a vmware virtual machine)? While the app is in fullscreen mode inside it, I think there would be nothing preventing me from using host machine's functions (like accessing internet via browsers or opening documents). Have you considered these kind of risks?


For those requesting a link to the company of OP, it's this: https://schoolyear.nl/

I assume it's ok that I post this, it was easy to find (2 clicks from your profile snerual)!

Good job, I think it's cool what you're doing! If I may ask: how do you prevent students from cheating on a test by using their phone for example? Or is your service for in-class tests where phones are forbidden?


Anti-cheating software is a fundamentally flawed approach. As remote education becomes more common educators should leave the concept of an "exam" behind and embrace project-based and open book curriculum.


Art school is a series of project-based classes that culminate in a portfolio of original work that the student can showcase, and that system seems to make perfect sense to everybody.

I don't know why other disciplines have been so resistant (forget textbook publishers, I mean the professors, deans, and other administrators themselves.) It's not clear to me there are any reasons to be against it, so perhaps it's simply the inertia of large, bureaucratic, conformist institutions.


We can try to do that for computer science but it wouldn't work superwell because I feel like some fundamentals are core and needed a systematic way of testing


Totally agree, and this kind of solutions only blocks the laptop but the students can use their smartphones to search for the answers.


I feel like the reason there is a demand for applications like this is not to prevent all cheating but to enable the school / Uni to claim that anti cheating measures where used for online testing.

I think the product is really smart.


Here's a counter-advise ( take it as you will ) :

Do not join any communities. You are a 19 year old who is at 250k ARR at 10 months. You are Bella Hadid. You don't have peers here, among IG influencers pretending to be important at 12K followers. It is lonely there, where you are. There's a reason for that.

P.S. You will make it.


This is so true. Lots of pretenders, but no peers.


As a bootstrapped SaaS founder myself: congratulations! This is an unbelievable growth rate for a bootstrapped SaaS. It usually takes many years to reach these numbers. Very happy to see people build sustainable businesses this way — venture funding is not the only way to go!

I'd be very interested to learn more, things like: is it a B2B or B2C SaaS? What is your ARPU and LTV, are you spending on marketing, and if so, what is your CAC? (I do realize you might not want to share these numbers, just saying that this is what I'd love to know :))


Thanks, I had a lot of discussion with my founder about funding. Until now, I'm happy we did it bootstrap.

To answer your questions: Model: B2B, mostly public educational institutes with 10k+ students. ARPU: would be dumb to shared, but just under the EU tender limit, so sales cycles are reduced to minimum. LTV: That's a hard one when you sell yearly contracts and less than 10months old. But from what we see, schools are very loyal customers. Marketing: Lol, we have a website that we made with a 20$ template. It's all word of mouth and cold calling


> I had a lot of discussion with my founder about funding. Until now, I'm happy we did it bootstrap.

You'd have great luck with rolling seed stage funds like https://shl.vc/ and showcase events like https://mercury.com/raise

If you plan to not go down the traditional (go big or go home) VC route, then, check out these (go slow and go steady) funds: https://indie.vc/, https://tinyseed.com/, https://earnestcapital.com/

(not an endorsement)


Well now I am even more impressed, because I think I managed to sell to two or three universities in the EU, and even there I'm effectively losing money because of all the hoops one has to jump through.

Again, congratulations, I'm really happy for you and wish you all the best.


I work at a university, drop me a line, details in my profile.


Hey there!

I'm from France, 18yo and founded a SaaS with a friend when I was 16 (https://kaktana.com). It's been doing ~$800/month for the last 1.5 years as I had to stop working on it for a very intensive school program (la prépa for the Frenchs). Currently thinking of building a v2 next year when I have more time.

Would love chatting with you, see my page: https://alextoussaint.com


My current sass startup I bootstrap to 20 million arr in 4 years before raising money. This my third software company bootstrapping to millions in arr. Shoot me a message down to give you whatever advice I can and intro you to other people who have been on this journey. Gmail account is Oconnoroisin


You might want to check out MicroConf Connect. I'm a founder of a bootstrapped startup and find the Slack community pretty interesting. https://microconf.com/microconf-connect


Congrats, thats some impressive growth in a short time.

If you want to know what not to do, I'm happy to chat, email in my profile. I've made almost every possible mistake in the last 20 years ;-) Despite all the mistakes my current company is a couple of stages past the 250k ARR and I'm on the right track.

In the end most advice in this situation is not rocket science, like for example:

- reserve time to work on your business, not just in your business

- build a team, not a group of individuals

- leadership becomes important in this stage, start reading on the subject, there is a ton of information available.

And most important, try to enjoy the ride. There is not one big moment you are working towards, it's all the little moments that mather.


I'm probably not understanding something. How is $250k ARR enough to build a team with? I would think you would need to be a magnitude higher at least to support a team off of that, especially if you are bootstrapped and have no cash reserves.


At $250,000 with one tech and one sales founder in place with a stable product and no backlog of required features you could go several ways.

8 killer sales agents. Part salary say: 24k commission 25% of new contracts or

2 killer sales agents. 95k 2% commission or

1 marketing person 75k and two killer sales agents 75k plus 10% commission

50k+ could pay for everything else provided no rent is involved.


I agree that $250k ARR is not an revenue level to build a team around. But $250k ARR in 10 months, makes it very likely that it will be far over $500k in another year.

This means that the next 12 months one of the priorities will be building a stable team to support the growing customer base. Depending on the vision and the pace they widh to grow, this can be focussed on more sales, more engineering, more support, etc.


I see that most of the posts here do not mention the companies that each person founded - I would love to see what everyone has created! Please share your companies!


Wow, this is really inspiring! As a college student under lockdown, building something like this would be my dream. I have so many questions: How do you manage to juggle the responsibilities of school and running your business? What kind of technical expertise do you need? How did you find your idea and gain traction? Do you have employees?


Balancing study and work is REALLY hard (and source of struggle with my parents, which I totally understand :) . We managed to get an office on campus, so it's literally a 3min walk from the lecture hall to the office. Besides that, I was never big on "planning", but now I'm usually planning a month ahead on the uni assignments.

Mainly struggling with expanding the technical team. We have some freelancers, but developers in NL are harder to find than diamond.

How did we find the idea: actually came up with the idea during a meeting with teachers in high-school. They were complaining about the chaos the newly introduced laptops caused during classes. Then I learned the hard way that people that put money were their mouth is are your only real customers (yes, I got screwed over by my high school). Luckily, higher education is more willing to pay.


Email in profile if you'd like help finding developers — I've worked with devs on a number of different projects from places like Ukraine, Serbia, India, and China. Depending on what you're looking for, pay is in the range of $17-$40/hr for most common stacks, at a junior to mid-range level of expertise (I assume you're mostly working in a web-based stack like Javascript, Ruby, or PHP).

LinkedIn recruiting is your friend here, especially in places like India, as you can post jobs for very low INR prices as compared to recruiting in the West or in more affluent countries.


Not surprising to hear that the work-study part of the equation is one of the more difficult ones - but good job on getting it down! May I suggest hiring college students to do the technical heavy-lifting? In my limited experience, I've seen motivated college students routinely hammer out high-quality work in tasks such as code maintenance, testing, etc for half the pay of a full-time software engineer.


So happy about this thread and the increased presence and support of European techies on HN. It's about time.


Entrepreneurs' Organization has been incredibly helpful to me. I've been a member for six years now - it changed my life. It's not cheap, but well worth it if your local chapter is well run.

https://www.eonetwork.org/


Happy to chat anytime, email is in my profile. We’re going to hit £1m ARR this year and I’d love someone to chat with too.

It can be a weirdly lonely place at times.

Im UK based so TZ should work well, plus I’m a frequent visitor to NL (Pre CV) so it would be great to chat over a beer when we can.


Hi. Knappe prestatie. I’m from Amsterdam, 31. Don’t have a Saas but a fast growing e-commerce business (€660k last year). Recognize your feelings. If you feel like it, send me a line at info@pedicuremotoren.NL.


250k ARR might seem like a lot, but once you pay taxes, insurance, etc adding more than a handful of employees is going to dwindle what you're actually taking home. This is where having a degree counts and/or understanding how much work scaling is really going to take.

Incredible work, but also remember you are certainly not the norm. Be humble, acknowledge that your work has paid off and try to give back to any communities that got you to where you are today ;)


Talk to Ives and Bas at CodeSandbox. Very similar situation — Dutch college students whose side project took off. They raised venture funding.


MicroConf is the longest running community for bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founders. Also check out the sister podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us.

We started both of them a decade ago to connect folks in your situation to one another (as a multi-time bootstrapped SaaS founder myself).


Over the past year and a half, we just went through this — growing more than 10x from $60K ARR. Our focus has been building a sustainable work-life balance for ourselves and our team.

Happy to share learnings and just be there as a sounding board if you need it. Email in bio :)

Congrats on the progress!


You're in the right spot – IndieHackers is a pretty great community for this kind of stuff too!


From Amsterdam, dev and founder before, looking into setting up Saas, would love to have coffee


But how do I reach you :) ?


I am similar -- I took a small boostraped venture to $1.3m ARR in about 3 years. To this day i almost spend $0 marketing. Email me so we can connect or whatsapp somid3 /\-at-*_- gmail ^dot& com or +1 five-1-zero 499 5497.


Btw, congratulations! my venture is also a saas digital only


Lekker bezig hoor!

Not a founder myself, so no tips on that. Not super clear what your website does (if it's the one in your profile).

If you're ever looking to security / pentest your platform reach out to me. For the rest good luck and keep it up!


Hey Man, I love your post and its really inspiring. I would love to know how did you came up with the idea. what was your process like when finding the problem you tried to solve with your SaaS solution


If you would like some advice I am more than happy to connect. I've written books on SaaS selling and SaaS customer success, and if nothing else know a lot of folks in the space.


Hey there, I'm founding a SaaS in the Netherlands also. Congrats on your success! Would love to chat sometime and build a community, you can DM me on Twitter (@j4yav).


Check out Indie Hackers (https://indiehackers.com), it's a great community I've found.


I find that amazing that in a crowded SaaS market you can still find opportunity everywhere, yet alone making a SaaS that makes money a $250kARR.

Where do these people find ideas?


sheer dumb luck. Any business canvas drawing hipster telling you otherwise, is BSing you (I think)


You are far wiser at 19 than most founders I've met in their 40's.

Some of the best business advice I got was from pitching VCs. Even if pitching is not what you want to do now, it might be useful to open lines of communication and suss out who you may want to work with in the future.


Haha thanks for the reply. And congratulations!


Pay attention to real problems, even small problems, that businesses have.

A real problem is something that costs them money or prevents them from earning money.


OP, maybe you should talk to someone like Pieter Levels or gumroad founder


Relative offense here, OP is like the kid cools in school that actually didn't blow up 10 year later and stagnating.


Don't lend family and friends money and expect it to be returned.


I don't have much to say besides Congratulations!

Yes, it's insane (and I've been to less overwhelming situations). But hey, if people were perfectly rational and risk-averse nobody would start anything.

Interested to know more and see where it ends up, alstublieft.


What is your startup?


I checked your raytracing JS stuff on Github, would you use (.e.g. Rust) Web Assembly for browser raytracing?


Care to share your website or what your company does?


Can you please share the link to your saas?


indiehackers and reddit are also great communities

Best of luck and share some tips with us




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