I built and sold a successful SaaS, published two books, and help founders help themselves. AMA 👇

@seneca_96 Have something worth paying for. Free customers will use your product even if it's hard to use. Paying customers won't. They'll only pay if they spend less energy on both using your product AND making the money needed to pay of it. One of the best ways to get there is to understand your customers' value metric: what number goes up when they make more money. For authors, it's number of books sold. For freelance programmers, it's the number of invoices billed in a month. Find that number, then find a solid threshold between free and paid (first 50 sales free, first 10 invoices a month free, stuff like that). Charge money after they reach this. If no one wants to pay for your product, ask them what you'd need to offer to have them pay.

Wow, thanks Arvid! This is such great advice, appreciate your thoughts and suggestion here. Here's us on Product Hunt, in case you're curious: https://www.producthunt.com/post...

@ben_w1 I might be biased here, but I would suggest learning how to code, if you can find the time for that. If not, sign up for no-code tools and see if you can create a prototype of the product you want to ultimately create. This can be used to attract technical co-founders and potential future customers alike. It's also very cheap and the skills you acquire can be transferred to other spaces in the future. The most important thing: show evidence of your conviction. This is an entrepreneurial aphrodisiac for future customers, partners, and co-founders alike. People LOVE seeing someone building as much as they can even if it's hard.

@joe_glover1 Thanks Joe, that's very kind. It's fun to be me :D And it's incredibly awesome to see so many people on their entrepreneurial journeys.

@_luke You can find it on Gumroad (http://gum.co/embedded-entrepreneur) and you can order it as a printed version by asking your local book store to order it from a Print-on-Demand service by ISBN: ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 3982195764 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3982195766

@kunalmishra If you're not technical enough, you either need to become a tech founder or find one to help you. I'd definitely recommend finding a technical co-founder and splitting the equity with them. I wrote about the potential dangers and confusions with co-founders here: https://thebootstrappedfounder.c... Reaching out to techy people is a good idea. Just make sure you have a convincing argument as to why your idea is worth their time. The more validation you can show, the more likely that someone will find it interesting. I get pitched a lot of projects every day, and I say no to almost all of them. What I want to see in a potential founder is ENTHUSIASM, a great understanding of the problem space, a lot of VALIDATION (pull in the market, competitive alternatives, budgets for stuff like this) and a whole lot of WORK ALREADY DONE. Show that you care about the people you want to help. Show that you have done your research as to how you can turn your product idea into a business that reliably generates money. Show them your (feeble but persistent) no-code attempts at building. Show the evidence of your conviction.

@dinakar I loved seeing our product impacting the real lives of real people. Having customers talking to us in our Intercom chat about how much more time they got to spend with their kids was one of the most amazing things I ever witnessed. Building a business that WE OWNED, something that was able to create financial independence over time, while we watched it's value and MRR grow, was equally amazing. The thing I didn't like was that as the sole technical founder, I was responsible for everything. Maintenance, bugs, customer confusion, integrations breaking. It was all on me. It resulted in a lot of stress and anxiety that I wish I would not have had to suffer through. In the same vein, selling the business, as wonderful as that was, also surprised me: all of the motivation and passion that I found in helping people was gone the moment we sold. I had to painstakingly find a new source of energy for myself, and it took me by complete surprise.

@fernandomtl The best place to find co-founders is in two communities: your personal founder audience (the other entrepreneurs you surround yourself with) and within the community you want to serve. Best if the person you talk to is in both! This might take a while to become apparent. Look for the very enthusiastic people. The helpers, the connectors, the ones who lift up others. Then, talk to them about a partnership. It's scary, but it's worth it. I have written more about this at https://thebootstrappedfounder.c...

@new_user_22867f40a7b39 We had a 30-day trial for FeedbackPanda. Our product was used on a daily basis, which made people invest a lot of time an data into it within that free month. If two months are not enough time to enter the data required for your customers to feel invested, here are a few ideas: - A concierge service, helping them with their data entry. YOU enter it for them, fully or partially, and while you do that, you can build better import systems to speed up the process. First you speed it up for yourself, then you can bake this into the product - Integrations into other services. anything that makes data entry faster or automated is a good idea. Browser extensions and OAuth2-based connections are candidates here. - Internal Data Exchanges between the users of your product. If it makes sense for your business, allow users to share non-sensitive data with each other. That way, they can support each other, build network effects, and allow for user-generated content to add value to each others product usage.

@raphaelchen95 My wisest choice was to try a lot of stuff. Saying yes to opportunities even when it wasn't clear what I'd use them for. I went to university twice and dropped out twice. I have no degrees, but I spent years learning stuff at those academic institutions. I studied computer science first. Then, political science and philosophy. Very much unrelated, but they come together in my writing about building SaaS products for engaged audiences and communities. This was never planned. It just happened naturally. I don't believe in career mistakes. The only mistake you can make is not to leverage your unique skill set. It's at the intersection of all the things you're good at where you'll shine the most. There are few people out there who care about Entrepreneurship, Programming, Empowerment, Social Dynamics of Communities, and Writing at the same time. That's my unique spot. You have your own distinct but equally unique spot. Leverage that!