{"id":238,"date":"2017-10-24T09:47:13","date_gmt":"2017-10-24T13:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog3.canny.io\/wordpress\/?p=238"},"modified":"2023-11-22T11:37:32","modified_gmt":"2023-11-22T16:37:32","slug":"saas-startup-ramen-profitability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canny.io\/blog\/saas-startup-ramen-profitability\/","title":{"rendered":"How we Bootstrapped our SaaS Startup to Ramen Profitability"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s been seven months since we launched our SaaS startup and we’ve reached ramen profitability<\/a>. Canny makes enough to pay for its own expenses and our personal living expenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is far less money than we made working at Facebook, but a huge milestone for our bootstrapped startup. We’ve eliminated one of the biggest risks of failure: running out of money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this post I’ll cover how we got here, and what we’ve learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How we found our burning problem<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I won’t bore you with generic advice. You’ve heard it a thousand times. Solve a burning problem! Make something people want! Great advice, but not super actionable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, I’ll share how we found our burning problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We actually started with a problem of our own, then pivoted to a more valuable one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our original problem<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We followed Paul Graham’s advice<\/a> and started with a problem we had ourselves:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As users, it doesn’t feel like companies listen to our feedback. They’ll say “thanks, we’ll pass it on to the team”, but nothing ever happens. This is demoralizing. Apps are buggy and missing useful features. Fixing them would mean making all software experiences better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"generic-email-reply\"
Sad, generic reply<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We built a community where people could post and vote on feedback for any product, publicly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"product-pains\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Around 5,000 people posted and voted on ideas for several hundred products. It was a neat beta, but retention was weak. It was difficult to get teams to subscribe to feedback about their product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Learning Lesson<\/strong>: We kind of just assumed our problem was valid and started building the product. We should have talked to more people first. It would have saved us months. We would have realized it wasn\u2019t something people really needed or would pay for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MRR<\/strong>: $0 (Oct, 2016)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bigger problem<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We starting talking to a ton of teams about user feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n