I've posted before and never share any specific details.
I run a small one-person business in a niche industry selling a 'widget'. Profitable from day 1, pays all the bills but is not the sole income.
Got started by seeing a need in an adjacent industry and building the product. I do everything myself: dev, qa, support, everything. It's not too bad at this size, and I can probably scale and continue on my own at 10x the demand.
Word of mouth keeps things rolling so far and recent trends haven't impacted me much.
Someone else posted and I second, spending (wasting?) time on the "stack" instead of the product offering or marketing is easy to do and rarely benefits things. It's hard to do things like advertising or product refinement which I don't find interesting.
In my own blue-collar version of this [i.e. starting my own residential electric service after an IBEW apprenticeship, licensed] W-o-Mouth was gold. I never advertised, not even from day one. The second I walked into local builders'/realtors' offices, my services were in demand and kept busy by turning out good work.
I will warn anybody thinking that running ANY kind of business is some kind of "luxurious relaxed mocha bong latté," I just want to warn you that you will work very difficult situations, with increasingly-difficult customers, the higher your hourly / contract rate becomes — there is a "sweet spot" that I would recommend not surpassing, and you'll know this when awakening to dread, daily for months.
Re: your last paragraph: definitely "feature creep" is not a user generator nor retainer [i.e. do not bloatware your simpleware!].
I've started as a developer and now "CTO" at one of the leading companies in its' niche. I've created several widgets (except chat ) which I'm itching to reassemble as SaaS. Is your widget self service or requires you to implement for customers?
I run a small one-person business in a niche industry selling a 'widget'. Profitable from day 1, pays all the bills but is not the sole income.
Got started by seeing a need in an adjacent industry and building the product. I do everything myself: dev, qa, support, everything. It's not too bad at this size, and I can probably scale and continue on my own at 10x the demand.
Word of mouth keeps things rolling so far and recent trends haven't impacted me much.
Someone else posted and I second, spending (wasting?) time on the "stack" instead of the product offering or marketing is easy to do and rarely benefits things. It's hard to do things like advertising or product refinement which I don't find interesting.