Dmitry Kudryavtsev

"SaaS is Dead" - they say

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:00:00 GMT

SaaS is Dead.

Everywhere you look — be it HackerNews, Reddit, or LinkedIn — they claim that SaaS is dead. Armed with a laptop and $100 Claude Code subscription, even your tech illiterate uncle can build the next Jira. Producing a working product now costs pennies compared to what it costed before the AI boom. But regardless of what they say, I’m here to tell you that they — are full of shit.

You see, I have been working as a software engineer from 2009. Moreover, I was building products (most of them failed), since high-school, and today I still build and maintain some of them. I have been observing many products, and founders, and I came to a simple conclusion: the people who say that SaaS is dead — never actually built anything themselves.

They never shipped a working product end-to-end. Never had to debug a production issue that costed them real money and customers, as opposed to this cost being absorbed by their employer, while they are, generally, protected against personal liability. They never had to charge customers, issue refunds and maintain their merchant reputation, provide customer support — sometimes to very annoying people, do marketing and advertisement, worry about accounting and compliance, etc.

But more importantly, they were never sitting there, thinking to themselves “what the fuck am I doing with my life”, while wondering will they ever be able to make it? Will they be able to wake up one day, look at themselves in the mirror and say “I am proud of what I have achieved”, rather than thinking that all they have managed to achieve was wasting their precious time on a stupid SaaS idea?

They did none of this. Instead, all they had to do is write a nice article titled “SaaS is Dead”.

Software was never the end-goal. Developers convinced themselves that it is, but it never was. The end goal was to build a product and sell it. Make money. Spin the capitalistic wheel. Or simply build a good product and stop participating in capitalistic society all-together.

Most people are not built for entrepreneurship. They simply are not ready to give up their weekends for a prospect of 5% chance of reaching a sustainable profit from their SaaS. The math is right here, and nobody argues with it: it is better to a get a cushy 9-to-5 in tech with pension and benefits, than to pursue solopreneurship / building a SaaS, while making pennies. Even if you land in the 5%, you will be making sustainable profit, with the keyword being sustainable. Exceptions exist of course, but I doubt that if you have a hard time swallowing 5%, you’d be happy to devour sub 1% chance for being exceptional.

And I don’t blame them. I don’t think they are worse people, or that we don’t need them. On the contrary. It’s unsustainable if everyone is an entrepreneur.

There is an epidemic of “lack of doing”. People don’t want “doing”, they want “learning”. They are afraid to act.

We all know that in order to have a healthy life, we need at least two and a half hours of physical activity per week. And yet, most people spend more time finding the best workout routine. People get obsessed with productivity, spending countless hours optimizing their Notion templates, for the sake of completing a task 1 minute earlier than their peers, once every 3 months. And they do the same with entrepreneurship. Instead of going and building, they keep researching or coming up with excuses like “it is no longer viable to build a SaaS”. Where is all the “10x productivity” that we keep hearing about? Where are all the Jira replacements? I will tell you where.

It’s all there, buried in GitHub repos that people quickly created with the help of AI, but when they realized that this was the easy part, and now their sprint has turned into a life-long marathon, now, now they quit — leaving behind a graveyard of slopware. Because they never had it. They never had a reason to pursue entrepreneurship. They were always comfortable with what they had, instead trying to fill the void with each and every new toy our capitalistic society has produced. Everything else is too hard. There is no manual for it. It comes with a shitload of boring work, that people either grind through or contract, for money, to someone else. You need a strong why if you want to pursue entrepreneurship, and no, money is not a good why. And most people simply don’t have it. And it’s fine.

So no, SaaS is not dead. Your uncle, unless he has an unexplainable desire for entrepreneurship, will probably never ship anything. He might create something, brag about it during your extended family gathering, while everyone else will be in awe. But in one year, when you ask him “Hey Uncle, what’s going on with that business idea you had a year ago?”, he will shrug, look you in the eyes, and say… “What business idea?”.

On build in public and indie hacking communities

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 19:00:00 GMT

After failing my first business idea (some context in available in this blog post), I stumbled upon two communities: the #buildinpublic and the indie hackers community. In this post, I want to share my experience about these two communities.

NOTE

I have no intention to discredit or offend any particular individual or groups of people. My desire is only to share my findings about the various communities online for solopreneur/entrepreneurs.

I tried to understand what failed with my first business idea, and what I can improve. Moreover, being a digital nomad back then, I wanted to connect with some other solopreneurs and learn together. This is how I came across two different, but very similar, communities online: #buildinpublic and the indie hackers community.

What are they?

Hashtag build-in-public is not a community per se, but rather a movement. You share your entrepreneurship story and tag it with #buildinpublic tag in various social networks. This allows fellow community members learn from your experience and mistakes, as well as share theirs. The hashtag itself more or less dead on Twitter, since Twitter killed hashtags all together, but a community named #buildinpublic still exists.

Indie-hackers is yet another community of builders who are independent. It’s not limited to entrepreneurship and there are indies in every industry: indie game developers, indie artists, indie musicians etc. Indie hackers, on the other hand, is a community focused more on building side-projects / businesses, and a website named Indie hackers serves as yet another platform for indie hackers to connect. Many people who build solo, without any external funding or raising money, would often refer to themselves as “indie hackers”.

My experience

I don’t remember how I was exposed to the indie hackers / build in public communities, but I guess after doing some reading online, I came across a community of people, mainly on Twitter, that share their knowledge and experience there (at least that’s what I thought they do). So I revived my Twitter account, and started to post my journey. I had about 40 followers, and today I have a bit more than 500. I’ve been posting for more than a year now, almost daily. The amount on knowledge I got from Twitter is close to zero.

Sure, I was able to harvest gems of information here and there, but overall I had to navigate a bunch of attention seeking, repetitive, and irrelevant posts. It’s equivalent to garbage diving — you can, rarely, find a thousand-dollar in garbage bins, but you have to go through a lot of garbage. Most people on Twitter want to sell you their stuff, or post very basic stuff like “what framework do I chose for my Instagram killer”. I had a conversation with my friend, who also tries to build a business, and interestingly enough, he came to the same conclusion. None of these so-called communities, are actually communities — they are more like support groups for people who don’t really want to do the job.

You see, entrepreneurship requires many skills. One of these skills is being able to do proper research. This includes actually searching for information, as well as asking proper questions when you fail to find the required information. But most of the posts in these “entrepreneurship” communities are low effort posts the answer to which could be found in Google/ChatGPT in 2 minutes. “What business do I start”, “how do I collect payments”, “what framework to chose”, etc. You can’t expect to be spoon-fed and be an entrepreneur. The internet is full of information, both free and paid, where you can learn many aspects of starting, and running a business. And in the end, you need to make some moves, even if these moves result in failures.

I recently quit all social media, cold-turkey. There are many reasons, some of them are related to the nature of social media (I posted about it in my other blog link here), but as it relates to entrepreneurship, I just got sick of this “community”. I was afraid to do it, because I was thinking that I would be missing on great ideas, but after weeks of seeing the same content over and over again, I decided that I need to stop wasting time there.

It reached absurd levels where people would post how they bought an air fryer, because another well known indie-hackers bought an air fryer, and how that made them “indie hackers”. People would spend money buying courses and books on marketing, rather than experimenting with ads or SEO. Of course there are people who use their audience to promote their products, and if that works for you, then go ahead. But in my case, my audience is not indie-hackers on Twitter, and from my experience, indie-hackers would rather build their own clone of your tool than pay for an existing solution.

The term “community” was ruined by social networks. And for me, I didn’t see any benefits after being active a year on Twitter, from being in such “community”. Jaen posted this a while ago, and I think it summarizes the indie-hacking community very well:

Starting to identify less and less as an "Indie Hacker" over time.

Feels like these days a lot of Indie hackers:
- complain about "copycats"
- build SaaS starter kits or other useless products for other indies
- spend more time on x talking about building than actually building… pic.twitter.com/rIbLntkHvt
— Jáen ff/sr (@speedrunjaen) July 26, 2024

I can’t speak about the B2B part, but the “virgin indie hacker” is pretty much accurate. Very few people in the indie-hacking community actually build one product and stick with it. Many people jump from product to product, trying to reach the pedestal of “I built 459 projects that failed before finding the one that succeeded”. They don’t share any insights or knowledge, because they are too afraid to experiment and would rather rewrite their “business” from Ruby to Node, to Laravel, to Next.js, etc.

Some people do benefit from social network presence, mainly people who sell information or shortcuts. But I’m not in the market of selling information or code boilerplate, so I can’t seem to justify being present there anymore.

Few weeks ago, I spend a weekend in Belgium with the co-founders of the startup I work at. I spoke for about 3 hours with one of them. A very interesting conversation on society, community, and life in general. When we discussed how strange the current society is, he said something that stuck with me. I had the same feeling for a long time, but couldn’t express it in words, but he did. He said: “I no longer participate in society. I’m there, I do what everyone else are doing, like buying groceries, but I don’t participate in this madness anymore.”

This phrase summarizes well my current position on social networks. I will continue to use them as a vessel to spread my knowledge (such as my blog posts), and maybe occasional short posts of wisdom, but I’m not going to participate in this charade any more. I think there is a reason why people like Derek Sivers, Cal Newport, and many people from Newports book “Deep Work” — don’t keep any social networks, and communicate strictly via email.

My email is available in many places, so feel free to reach out. Oh, and if you know any online communities, or in-person ones in The Netherlands, that are focused on real entrepreneurship, please let me know, I’ll be grateful.

What they do (not) teach you about Entrepreneurship in school

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 14:30:00 GMT

2008 was my final high school year. Closer to the end of the year, almost after all the final exams, the school didn’t really know what to do with us. So they decided to instill entrepreneurship ideas in the minds of the pupils. Being a school with a strong accent on mathematics and computers, they decided to invite some tech entrepreneurs. In a somewhat voluntarily, 1-hour session, inside the school auditorium—two people sat on a stage side by side.

To my left, sat Yossi Vardi. Yossi Vardi is the father of, and the investor in, Arik Vardi—one of the co-founders of ICQ. He is a serial tech entrepreneur who invested in more than 85 high-tech startups, and I can’t find a reliable source for his net-worth, but ICQ alone has been sold to AOL for $287 millions in cash back in 1998 (that’s more than half a billion today, adjusted for inflation).

To my right, sat Alex Sirota. Alex is not as known as Yossi, but he founded a browser extension named FoxyTunes—in which Yossi Vardi invested—and later sold it to Yahoo (yes, that Yahoo) for $30 millions.

They kept on talking about entrepreneurship, the importance of believing in yourself, etc. I don’t remember the entire content of the session, but I remember how I felt afterward. I felt that I’m going to be a tech entrepreneur! This was such a strong feeling. I remember that I was dating a girl back then, and she (together with her girlfriends) decided to “skip” this “non-mandatory” session and go home. When we met later that day, she asked me what was the session about, and I did the most businessman face I could, and I answered her “We spoke about tech entrepreneurship”, like I was some important VC, and we just had a board meeting.

I spend the summer break trying to build a link sharing services, similar to digg.com. I’m going to be a tech entrepreneur in the golden years of the Internet. But I failed. I though maybe it’s not for me, maybe I should focus more on college. But then came something big.

Remember the movie “The Social Network” that came out in 2010, where Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg in a story of founding of ~~The~~ Facebook? How he came up with the idea? The two nasty lawsuits between the Winkelvoss twins, and his friend Eduardo Saverin? The saga with Sean Parker, Napster and the “cool billion-dollar company”?

An inspiring piece of cinematography. I re-watched it recently. A story that will truly spark entrepreneurship in every one of us. All you need is an idea and a laptop, the true dream of tech entrepreneurship.

This movie signaled a new era, the era of Tech Entrepreneurs. Movie after movie, book after book, we got a glimpse into the world of big tech entrepreneurship. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Instagram, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Spotify, and more—became big during that period. Names like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Drew Houston, and more—resembled the typical image of a tech entrepreneur. And this reignited my desire to be like one of them.

Except for one little thing: it’s all a lie. Sort of.

The truth

They say that school does not prepare you for the real world. Nor does Hollywood. Dreaming big is important, but your chances of being the next Mark Zuckerberg, or the next Elon Musk, are slim. Approaching zero I’d say. Movies rarely capture the true story, and they tend to omit details in the backstory of the founders. They are an inspiring story of tech geeks who just messed with computers and “accidentally” built a billion-dollar company. They don’t talk about the struggles of raising money, and they ignore the thousands, if not more, of people who tried and failed.

What they do, however, apart from presenting an interesting story, is instilling a false belief. The false belief of “Go big, or go home.” They promote the idea that successful entrepreneurship, especially in tech, is when you raise millions of dollars in capital, and reach a $1B valuation. Which in reality is extremely hard, and never achieved by one person (despite what the movies try to tell you).

But there are many other entrepreneurs. Some of them work in small teams, others prefer to work alone—thus known as solopreneurs. Some raise money, while others bootstrap their business alongside their 9-5 job. Their revenue varies: some make millions, while others have enough to live comfortably. Many of them also fail. In the end, entrepreneurship is hard, and it’s not for everyone.

And yet, they rarely present at panels in schools, or have movies filmed based on their biography. But this lifestyle has way higher chance for success than thinking that you can be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It took me 14 years to change my mind and instead of focusing on a billion-dollar idea, focus on building small, sustainable online business. And it’s only when I left my job, a bit more than one year ago, and decided to travel for some time while building an online business, I’ve realized that maybe that’s what we should teach kids in schools if we want to instill entrepreneurship in them.

One year of solopreneurship

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 19:40:00 GMT

A little bit more than a year ago, I quit my job due to burnout. I, then, embarked on a voyage in Central America with a simple goal in mind:

Focus on my mental health
Focus on my physical health
Build an online business

Little I knew that starting an online business is not as easy as it seems.

A quick recap

I did a 6-month overview here, so you can go read it as well, but here is a quick recap. I built 6 different products while nomading for 6 months in Central America. By the end of 2023, I moved permanently to The Netherlands and got a full time job. Few weeks ago, I started to get domain expiration emails from Namecheap. The same domains that I bought about a year ago for my first projects.

Out of the 6 products that I’ve built, 3 died. The two books are still selling, however the sale volume went down significantly. I attribute it to the tech recession. Remote or Not is kinda cool, I’ll admit it, but I don’t really know what to do with it. And I’m still exploring growth opportunities for JustFax Online.

The struggle is real

I went a long way. From a software engineer with “build it, and they will come” mentality, all the way to “I don’t care about tech that much anymore, how do I make money?” I started my journey with “let’s build a cheaper alternative to LaunchDarkly.” And so I did. But nothing happened.

“Oh. There is this thing called marketing”—I thought to myself. And so I started to delve deeper into SEO, marketing, and audience building (drop a follow by the way: Twitter/Mastodon). I’ll talk more about the pros and cons of indie-hacking, and #buildinpublic communities in a different post, but I have witnessed a lot.

I have witnessed how dreams shatter. How people disappear. I would follow someone on Twitter, see all the progress they’d make, and then, one day, poof—they are gone. Some, simply stop posting. Who knows, maybe they went silent. Others, just shifted their focus to a new job, and are no longer interested in indie-hacking. And I started to hate this term, indie-hacker. But that’s a topic for a different post.

And so yeah, the struggle is real. I often see newcomers on various online communities that post something along the lines of “It’s not a serious project, I just want to make $1-2k/mo from it”. My friend! $1-2k/mo is a lot of money. And it’s damn hard to get there. Sure, luck plays a major role, although many will disagree with me.

Should you start? I don’t know. I’m not your dad. You can, but chances are you will quit. I’ve been doing it on-and-off for 14 years, and I’m far from being Ramen profitable.

I’m not gonna lie, but it was way easier during the first 6 months. Sure, I was burning cash reserves, but I was working all day, (almost) every day. I wrote 2 books, launched 5 products. Success comes from trying and failing (and a bunch of luck), so the more you build, the closer you get to success.

I would definitely not recommend you quitting your job if you don’t have a good amount of savings to sustain your unemployment. Some people do it, and I think the chances for success are higher, simply because psychologically you don’t have a choice. With a full-time job, your brain is kind-of “well, maybe it’s Ok if you quit, you still have your job that makes money”. Shut up, brain!

But it’s possible to do it as a full-time employee, and even have a life. I’ve built a routine where I train 5 times a week, spend time with my wife, work a full-time job, and able to work on multiple side-projects. Sure, I’ve sacrificed a lot. My social life is practically non-existent, partly because I’ve migrated to a new country, far away from my family and friends. I don’t play video games, or watch TV-series.

Many people online ask how is it possible to juggle all of these things. Well, it’s not possible if you are not willing to make sacrifices. But everyone wants everything. This is why many quit. They realize that making $1k/mo is not as easy as they make it sound, and they are not willing to sacrifice things, or make changes to their lifestyles. I don’t blame them, to each their own. Being an entrepreneur is not the holy grail for everyone.

But it is for me. Although deep inside I have a feeling that once I’ll achieve my goals, there will just be something else to strive for. And then, the once unattainable goal of becoming an entrepreneur, will just become a routine.

Until then, see you on this blog.

I spent €200 on Google Ads so you won't have to

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 17:00:00 GMT

If you remember, in one of my past blog posts, I was talking about the fact that I want to try running ads for JustFax Online. In general, I don’t like ads. Something in the advertisement industry repels me. However, as I mentioned in that blog post, for some products running an ad campaign can actually benefit. And so I spent €200 on Google Ads, so you won’t have to. Let’s see what happened.

Segment properly

The first time I ran the campaign, I did a mess. I targeted multiple countries, with multiple speaking languages. This led to a lot of irrelevant clicks.

I wanted to target the US region, as well as some non-English-speaking countries. So I created one campaign, in English, and set the target audience to US, and few other countries who speak English and non-English. This turned out to be a bad decision as it’s preferably better to segment the audience with different campaigns. Not only it lowers the cost (more on that in a moment), but also generates clicks that are more likely to convert.

Second thing I didn’t take into account, is that the same keyword, but with different target audience—will have a different cost. This is why it’s important to segment properly.

Think about acquisition cost

When users started to flow, I got so happy! I had orders, made refunds, improved the system. But I forgot one small thing—I pay more per click than I make from converted customers.

This motivated me to try and lower the cost as much as possible. Since I don’t operate on a recurring subscription model, this means that I either need to have a very tight budget, or explore other channels of customer acquisition. Speaking about budget…

On daily budget

I’m not entirely sure how the whole advertisement system works, but from what I understand you bid for ad placement. This means that Google, and other ad networks Google work with, will determine in real time the highest bidder for a particular keyword/search term. If you win the bid, your ad will be placed. This means that your daily budget is not set in stone, and your CPC (cost-per-click) is not constant.

For some days you will pay more than your daily budget, sometimes up to 2x more, while on other days you won’t reach your budget. Same goes for CPC. Some clicks will be more expensive than others.

What Google does guarantee is that you won’t pay more than your daily budget times 30 days, per each month. So if your daily budget is €10, you won’t pay more than €300 per month. But it’s not evenly spread among the days. Some days you might get more traffic and pay more, while other days you get less traffic and pay less. So just keep an eye on it.

One more thing about daily budget. I was experimenting with different daily budgets ranging from €20 a day, all the way down to €2.5 a day. It’s important to note that every time you change your budget, Google does bid strategy adjustment. It takes anywhere between 3 and 5 days, and during that period your bid strategy is not optimal. So make sure to let it finish the strategy adjustment before jumping into conclusions. This is indicated in the status of the campaign.

1 out of 10 out of 100

Now, lets talk about conversion. My current click-through rate (CTR)—the amount of people who clicked on an ad as a percentage of total impressions—stands on 8.5%. That’s roughly 8 click per every 100 impressions.

My conversion rate is hard to tell, because I didn’t actively track conversions. I can dissect the traffic and make assumptions which will lead me to about 5% conversion rate. This means that out of 100 people who clicked the ad, only 5 made a purchase.

If I round the numbers a bit, out of every 1000 people, I got around 100 clicks, out of which I got about 5 sales. This means that my conversion rate from impression to purchase is 0.5%. It’s a bit lower, as I’ve heard of 1% number, but it depends a lot on how optimized the campaign is.

Campaign optimization

Google has nice tips to help you optimize your campaign. Some of them are useful, while others are just annoying (like the advertiser verification, which I never completed, and I doubt it affects the placement strategy). I would put attention to things like: keywords, titles, and descriptions.

I never had a perfect 100% campaign score, but I was around 82% most of the time. Keep in mind that more keywords is not necessarily better. Remember, your ad is not shown every time someone hit a keyword you are targeting, hence you might spend your successful bids for low performing keywords. It’s better to focus on fewer keywords, but ones that have bigger potential to drive sales.

Another tip is to pay attention to trademarks. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but when I tried to target keywords like “fax with paypal”, I got a warning that some of my ads are limited due to trademarks in the ad description (in that case: PayPal). So keep an eye on that, and make sure to remove keywords that might limit your ads.

In addition to all that you can also set up ad schedule. If you target the US, you might want to target US waking hours, instead of wasting your budget on a 3am guy who accidentally clicks your links while searching for “jet max”, but misspells it with “just fax”. The example is made up, but you get the point. Your goal should be to play with the parameters as you go, in order to squeeze the maximum from your daily budget. Monitor your campaign, analyze the data, and iterate.

Summary

I was terrified to start with Google Ads. When I first saw the recommended daily budget, it was around €300 per day, which means around €9,000 per months. As a bootstrapped solopreneur, I don’t have that money to blow on ads. But even if I did, I’m not sure whether it would be the best use for that money. This brings me to two lessons:

You can have a daily budget that is 10 or even 100 folds less than what Google recommends. It will drive less traffic, and less sales. So don’t afraid to start with less.
Ads are not for everyone. When you get into ads, you need to think about the LTV (lifetime value) you will get from your customers. My SaaS is a one-time use: people come, send fax, and go. They might return, they might not. If I make $4 per fax, but it cost me €10 in ads to acquire that customer, I’m loosing money. If, however, you operate on subscription model, or sell a very expensive product—your LTV might be way higher, and the cost of ads might be justified.

Oh, and the interface for Google Ads is terrible. It’s so bad, that I honestly don’t understand how people use it. And it’s not only Google Ads, I peeked at Meta Ads as well, and the interface is terrible as well.

One last thing. Google Ads is not the only place where you can advertise. More platforms exist such as: Meta Ads (which includes Facebook and Instagram), Reddit Ads, and even in Google Ads you can target different products such as Search, YouTube, etc. It’s important to understand where your target audience is. I doubt that people who want to send a fax online, hang out on Instagram, but if you sell a physical product, or a digital “guru”-like course—Instagram might be more suitable for you.

If you like this kind of content, I share my progress on a semiregular basis on Twitter and Mastodon, so consider following me there as well.

6 lessons from building 6 projects, while nomading for 6 months

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 17:00:00 GMT

Six months ago, I boarded a one way flight to Costa Rica. A month prior to that, I quit my job after being burnt out. My apartment lease ended, I sold almost everything I own, and packed the rest into a backpack and a suitcase.

I had a simple plan: slow travel, work on my mental and physical health, and build a sustainable online business. I didn’t have a job, and was relying solely on my savings. This gave me all the time I need to focus on the above goals.

With time, from Costa Rica I moved to Guatemala, and then to Mexico. And after exactly 6 months, at the beginning of December, I boarded my last flight in 2023 for a permanent move to The Netherlands, a country to where my wife and I—relocated. I want to give you a short overview of my projects, and what I learned from them.

Disclaimer: I actually launched 8 different products. However, 4 of them can be put in 2 categories, so in total I launched 6 different product categories, each with different mindset. Felt like I need to clarify this, in order to avoid comment on the somewhat, misleading title.

Lesson #1: Build it, and they will come—is a lie

After landing in Costa Rica, and taking the first few days to adjust to the time difference, eventually I got to work on my first project: SilentFlip. I had the idea for SilentFlip in my head long before I decided to quit my job and nomad. The rationale was simple: take an existing product and build a copy that targets a different market. In my case, I wanted to build a remote feature toggling service that will target solopreneurs and small startups. Existing solutions are targeting big enterprises that can afford to pay per seat, which many solo builders can’t.

After spending some time building the MVP, and doing the landing page, I finally bought the domain, and shared the launch post on LinkedIn (where I’ve been somewhat active for the past 1.5 years). I got a modest amount of views to the post, and some small amount of likes. The landing page had no option to purchase the product, and instead I was collecting emails based on the desired price tier (I had 3 tiers).

My Post about SilentFlip on LinkedIn

I got this tip from Tim Ferriss’s book—The 4-hour work week—where he recommended setting up a landing page where you would collect customer intentions to buy the product. The idea behind this is that you don’t want to spend time developing a product if you can’t really sell/market it. However, looking back at it, I believe this is a wrong approach. I’ll cover this in a different lesson below.

But back to the original lesson. I, like many technical founders, believed at that time in the “build it, and they will come” mantra. I learned the hard way that this is not how it works. Unless you build a unicorn, there is a big chance that every market you will try—is saturated with competition. And when people search for a remote feature toggling service, there is a high chance they won’t land on my landing page.

In the end, nobody cares how perfect your product from a technical viewpoint, and this is what many technical solopreneurs/indie-hackers don’t get. You can build a product in a saturated market, and get customers, as long as you don’t just throw it in the void an expect people to magically find it because “it’s written using amazing technology!”

My Mastodon and Twitter post about "Build it, and they will come"

Lesson #2: Don’t build communities

Like a good indie-hacker, after seeing no traction from my first product, I ditched it and launched not one, but two, different products: Artisan Brew Coffee and PetAway.

Artisan Brew Coffee is a community for coffee lovers. Not the Nespresso type, but rather the pour over type. I got this idea after visiting a coffee plantation in Costa Rica, and as a coffee lover, decided to launch this community.

PetAway is a “scratch your own itch” type of product. Since I didn’t plan to come back to my home country, but rather wanted to end up in The Netherlands—my wife and I had to take our dog with us. And if you ever travelled with pets—you know what hell you need to go through. So I launched this community together with my wife in order to share knowledge for travelling with pets.

And here comes the second lesson: don’t build communities.

When you build a product that does not need a community, your success depends on two things: the quality of the product, and how widespread it is (read: marketing). It doesn’t matter how many people bought this product yesterday. As long as you are able to attract new customers, you will make profit.

With the community, on the other hand, you depend a lot on the members of the community. Nobody wants to be a member of a community which doesn’t have any members. So you are stuck in a catch-22 scenario: you need members for your community, but in order to gain more members, you already need to have members. There are ways to overcome this such as creating lots of content, or even fake profiles, in order to attract initial members. But it’s just another thing you need to take care of, in addition to moderating the community. And as a solopreneur—you already have a lot of things you need to take care of.

Lesson #3: Make sure to have a business plan

My two next products were LibrePress.io—an “own your content” type of newsletter distribution platform, I even wrote a blog post about it; and Remote or Not—A list of all companies by their remote and work-from-home policy. Both of them “failed” because I didn’t have a solid business plan.

LibrePress was born out of idealistic motivation: I’m a big believer in owning your content, and I wanted a newsletter platform that focuses on distribution without caring how you create the content. The idea was to distribute RSS feeds, or upload markdown files. I wanted to switch my newsletter to it, soon after launch. However, what I failed to take into account, is the running cost. Given the amount of newsletter readers I have, and the pricing for the hosting+email provider—I would end up in a range of $15-$20 per month, just to distribute my newsletter. This is too expensive for me at the moment, given the fact that currently I pay nothing (in monetary terms), and other services exist that charge less. Obviously, if I had paying customers, that would make it more cost-effective to switch, but I didn’t even come up with a pricing plan for LibrePress.

Remote or Not, on the other hand, was born out of my endless side-project ideas list. At the time of building it I was searching for a job with a strong preference for hybrid or fully remote policy, and couldn’t find a reliable source of such information. While I still maintain Remote or Not, it failed on two fronts: it’s a somewhat community based product (I depend heavily on contributions); and it didn’t have any clear business plan. It doesn’t have enough traffic to put ads. I didn’t want to charge job-seekers in order to get access to the information. As for companies, I’ve added a form for a company representative to reach out to me and provide official remote work policy for their company, with the intention to charge companies in the future. So far, no company reached out.

And, speaking about pricing plans…

Lesson #4: If you don’t charge, you don’t make money

Sounds obvious, right? But so many indie-hackers, including myself, ignore this lesson. There is this mental barrier to charge money for something. The moment you reach this milestone, you start to question yourself: am I good enough; is the product worth it; what if nobody buys it; etc. But the truth is, and circling back the advice from Tim Ferriss’s book, if you don’t charge—you don’t make money.

Collecting emails is not the same as collecting money. People are way more willing to sign up to alpha, beta, closed releases, and any other free services. But the moment they need to pay for something, it’s a completely different mindset. Tim’s advice was focusing more on physical products, where you have a high cost of manufacturing. In that case yes, I think it’s better to set up a fake shop, but guide the user through purchase flow, to clearly identify people who are willing to pay now, rather than collect emails of people who might pay in the future. But when you build a digital product, the cost of which is nearly zero, you need to charge money from the get-go. Otherwise, you are building a pet project, and not a business.

And it took me almost 4 months to realize it, and eventually launch JustFax Online—a super simple, e-fax solution. It was the first product I finished from A to Z. It had a working MVP, and I was charging money from the start. So far, JustFax and the two other products I’ll talk about in the next lesson, are the only products that make me money.

And coming back to the previous lesson, JustFax online was the first product where I actually had a business plan. I created an Excel spreadsheet and calculated different cost scenarios of operating such service: how much would I pay for sending the faxes, how much is the infrastructure, how much should I charge, etc.

My Twitter post, also available on Mastodon, about calculating the price for JustFax Online

Lesson #5: Think about distribution

Looking back at SilentFlip, Artisan Brew Coffee, PetAway, LibrePress, and Remote or Not, the reason they failed—is lack of distribution channels. Distribution channels can be advertisement, but it also can be a personal brand. And this is what happened to me when I launched my two books: Technical Writing for Software Engineers - A Handbook and From Applicant to Employee - Your Blueprint for Landing a Job in Tech.

Both of my books are available on Gumroad, which is a marketplace for digital goods. And while marketplaces and app-stores are a great way to distribute your products, they are, like anything else, saturated with content. There is a way to succeed on marketplaces/app-stores, but this is a topic for another blog post. Most of the sales of my books came from this blog, my newsletter, and my social network presence (Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn).

I started to write my first book after the “failure” of Artisan Brew Coffee and PetAway, and at that time I started to be active on Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn (where I’ve been active, but mainly promoting my blog). Being active on social media is a good distribution channel. If you are consistent, share quality content, and try to engage with the community—you essentially get “free” customers. The #buildinpublic hashtag is filled with solopreneurs and indie-hackers that are building products and sharing their experience.

But the problem is—you need to know your audience. If you are branding yourself as a software engineer, like I do, it becomes easier to distribute products targeting software engineers. And I saw it with both of my books. As I’ve said, most of my sales came through Twitter/Mastodon and my blog. However, if we look at JustFax—the target audience is not software engineers or indie-hackers. And while I got great feedback from both Twitter and Mastodon about JustFax, most of the sales didn’t come from these platforms.

And this is why it’s important to think about your distribution channels. Moreover, what worked for one product, will not necessarily work for another. This is why with JustFax, I’m focusing more on SEO and organic growth, and considering experimenting with advertisement.

Lesson #6: You only fail when you quit, or in other words: consistency wins

Few days ago I had a chat with my friend. He is also an indie-hacker who is trying to build a side-business. We talk once in a while and share ideas, and revelations. During our call, we were talking about consistency, and I came up with a great analogy.

Imagine you play a game. I grew up playing Dungeon Siege, so I’ll describe the setup from it. You are spawned as a peasant in burned down village. The entire kingdom is infested with evil creatures such as orcs, and the only hope to save the kingdom from evil force—is you. In this village, behind a burning house, you find a pitchfork. You take it and go kill your first two orcs. And get your first level-up to level two where you can assign skill points.

But then you quit the game, and the next time you relaunch it, you don’t start where you’ve quit—you start from the beginning, with the pitchfork behind a burned house, on first level, with both orcs alive, and zero skill points to assign.

This is how it works if you are not consistent. Every time you quit, or start a new project—you start from zero. Yes, you prefect some craft. I, for example, can build landing pages in less than a day now, because I built 6 of them. But only with JustFax I was able to get to a new level, unlock new abilities and knowledge. None of my other products reached a point where I had to take care of customers, collect payments, deal with bug fixes, focus on ads and SEO, etc.

If I had to start over again today, I would focus on one product for as long as possible, taking into account all the above lessons about community, distribution, and charging from the start. The moment you switch to a new product, and indie-hacker (myself included) like to switch often, you don’t start from the same point you left your last project—you start from zero. Yes you have prior experience, and starting over will be faster. But if none of your products reached a phase where you need to focus on SEO, you can start 100500 new products—but you won’t learn about SEO.

This is why it’s important to stay consistent. It’s perfectly fine to quit, and start a new product. But it’s only when you go through the whole journey, starting from idea, to product, to launch, to marketing and distribution, to taking payments, to fixing bugs and doing customer support; only then you are allowed to quit and start a new product. Otherwise, you risk running the same 100 meters of a marathon over and over again. Which is fine, if you want to be the fastest runner of 100 meters. But if you want to finish the marathon, you need to stay consistent.

I remember how scared I was before launching SilentFlip on LinkedIn. You get all these thoughts: you are not good enough; nobody needs it; you will just embarrass yourself. And I had the same feeling with every other product I launched afterward. It goes away little-by-little, but if you don’t share your work out there, you won’t succeed. No matter how stupid you feel, just share it.

Final Words

These were amazing 6 months. I’ve acquired an enormous amount of knowledge, and most importantly practical knowledge, which worth more than every theoretical knowledge you get. In addition to that, this has been a great time to cure my burnout and restart my career. I’m still analyzing everything from this trip, and planning to compile it to a few more blog posts, so stay tuned.

I would like to use the final words as an opportunity for self-promotion.

If you ever need to send a fax online, consider giving JustFax online a try. I’m open to feedback, so feel free to reach out to me.
If you are a software engineer who want to take your career to the next level, you need to be able to write technical documents. In that case, consider getting my handbook: Technical Writing for Software Engineers. It contains all my knowledge regarding technical writing.
If you found yourself laid off from your job; you want to switch to a new job; or you want to get into tech—consider getting my and my wife’s book: From Applicant to Employee: Your Blueprint for Landing a Job in Tech. It contains my and my wife’s (Senior Talent Acquisition, Technical/Executive Recruiter, and Career Coach) entire knowledge about technical interviews, how to pass them, and how to prepare. We used tips from this book in our recent search for a new job.
If you are interested in starting a side business, but don’t have ideas or ability to build your own product—I offer SilentFlip and Artisan Brew Coffee for sale. You can buy any part you want: domain, website, potential leads. I’m open to sell LibrePress.io and Remote or Not as well, as I don’t have much time to work on them. Reach out to me (email, or social networks), and let’s discuss it.

And as always, consider subscribing to my newsletter to never miss an update from this blog. Follow me on Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn—where I share a lot about software engineering, as well as solopreneurship, indie-hacking, and building in public my projects.

Dmitry Kudryavtsev

"SaaS is Dead" - they say

On build in public and indie hacking communities

What are they?

My experience

What they do (not) teach you about Entrepreneurship in school

The Social Network

The truth

One year of solopreneurship

A quick recap

The struggle is real

I spent €200 on Google Ads so you won't have to

Segment properly

Think about acquisition cost

On daily budget

1 out of 10 out of 100

Campaign optimization

Summary

6 lessons from building 6 projects, while nomading for 6 months

Lesson #1: Build it, and they will come—is a lie

Lesson #2: Don’t build communities

Lesson #3: Make sure to have a business plan

Lesson #4: If you don’t charge, you don’t make money

Lesson #5: Think about distribution

Lesson #6: You only fail when you quit, or in other words: consistency wins

Bonus lesson #7: Share it with the world

Final Words