The Usual SaaS-pects with Ch Daniel

Leo Bassam is an entrepreneur and the CEO & founder of Plutio.

Their Twitter bio reads: "Founder @plutio_app. Roaming the world with an incredible remote team as we pave the way for anyone to start, run and grow their business from anywhere"

Leo's Twitter: https://twitter.com/loaibassam

Plutio's website: https://www.plutio.com/

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://usesignhouse.com/

Chris Do's bio (courtesy of "Web 3 and NFTs for Newbies" Podcast)

Chris Do is an Emmy award-winning designer, director, CEO and Chief Strategist of Blind and the founder of The Futur—an online education platform with the mission of teaching 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love.

Check out Chris' Socials:

Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://usesignhouse.com/

Josh Pigford

Josh Pigford is a serial entrepreneur. He is the creator of Maybe.co, Baremetrics.io, Temper.io, PopSurvey.com, PugSpot, Tiny Farmstead and other little bits of internet stuff. Josh's most recent business is Maybe. Their website reads "In 2021 I founded Maybe where we're helping folks take control of their financial future. I also run Laser Tweets because we all need something ridiculous to do."

——

Links

Maybe Finance: https://maybe.co/

Josh's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Shpigford

Josh's Personal Website: https://joshpigford.com/

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://simple.ink/notion-forms

Rob's bio (c/o Leadmore)

Rob Walling sees himself as a maker and serial entrepreneur. These days he leads with three things: Startups for the Rest of Us, a podcast about bootstrapping SaaS companies, MicroConf, the oldest and largest community for bootstrapped SaaS founders, and TinySeed, the first accelerator designed for bootstrappers.

Rob's Twitter: https://twitter.com/robwalling

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/notion-forms

Rob's bio (c/o Leadmore)

Rob Walling sees himself as a maker and serial entrepreneur. These days he leads with three things: Startups for the Rest of Us, a podcast about bootstrapping SaaS companies, MicroConf, the oldest and largest community for bootstrapped SaaS founders, and TinySeed, the first accelerator designed for bootstrappers.

Rob's Twitter: https://twitter.com/robwalling

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/

Andrew's bio (from their AmA)

Hi everyone,

Andrew here from MicroAcquire! Startup acquisition marketplace!

MicroAcquire helps startups find buyers. Simple as that. We’ll help you start conversations that lead to an acquisition in just 30 days – for free.

When my company Bizness Apps was acquired in 2018 by a PE firm, it was a bittersweet moment. On the one hand, I’d successfully bootstrapped my company to $10m/ARR+ and a life-changing acquisition. On the other, I’d sold something that took years of blood, sweat, and tears to build. Do I have any regrets? Far from it.

I'm here to answer questions about building your own business, bootstrapping startups, marketing, branding, sales, hiring, startup ideas, acquisitions, and anything else related to startups.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/agazdecki

MicroAcquire: https://microacquire.com/

Bizness Apps: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/technology/sd-fi-biznessapps-think3-story.html

Recent MicroAcquire press: https://www.businessinsider.com/microacquire-gets-funding-from-bessemer-to-help-founders-sell-startups-2021-7

MicroAcquire startup acquisition course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjl2Jl5M6-0&list=PLO30Q8WzVLKNAtUHELW4mVikad_K7UF4G&index=14

AMA!

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/

Derrick's bio (from their AmA)

Hey, I’m Derrick Reimer, a full-stack developer. I fell in love with the 37signals ethos back in 2009 and I’ve been bootstrapping ever since. I've built and sold StaticKit (acquired 2020), a toolkit of dynamic components for static sites, Codetree (acquired 2016), a way of managing development tasks across multiple repositories, and Drip (acquired 2016), a lightweight marketing automation tool that grew into a leading automation platform.

A year after writing the first line of code for SavvyCal in March of 2020, it passed $10k MRR and we've been growing healthily ever since. SavvyCal is mostly bootstrapped as we took funding from TinySeed back in 2019, before SavvyCal was a thing. We're a lean team of 3, with a marketer and support specialist in addition to myself, possibly soon expanding.

I also co-host the Art of Product podcast with Ben Orenstein (Tuple co-founder) where we've chronicled our journeys building products the last 4 years. It hasn't been all sunshine and roses, like when I spent a year building a Slack competitor and then shut it down.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/derrickreimer

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/

Spencer's bio (from their AmA)

Hey everyone 👋

Excited to talk about all things startups and creator economy, and anything else.

A brief bit of bio:

I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life, since my early teens. At 37 years old, I’ve never earned a paycheck from anyone other than myself. This is one of my proudest accomplishments. Co-founded and exited 3 bootstrapped business between 2003 and 2014. Most notably Carbonmade, which was the first online portfolio company on the Internet. TypeFrag — he first VOIP product for video game players — is the other well-known one. Early Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft players will have heard of us. Founded Podia in 2014. This was the first business I ever raised VC for. 7 years later, we’re a 28 person team, profitable since 2019, and the best all-in-one platform for creators today. I’m a bootstrapper-turned-fundraiser. I hadn’t anticipated raising any money for Podia, but something very Silicon Valley happened to me: I met a VC for beers at a beer garden in Brooklyn just to say hi. He wrote me a check a couple days later. 🍻 At the start of this year, I wrote 10 bold predictions for the next 10 years for the creator economy. These are already playing out in the market today. Happy to discuss where this market is heading. Just some random things: I love cooking and living by the ocean. My signature dish is an all-day bolognese with fresh pasta. 🍝 I moved to NYC right after graduating college over 15 yers ago. I grew up in the NYC tech community, having attended the very first NY Tech Meetup with under 20 people there. Been amazing to see NYC flourish over the past 15 years. My number one predictor for a company’s success: persistence. Don’t give up too early! I’m a solo founder at Podia after previously working with co-founders for my previous startups. Bad co-founder relationships kill more startups than anything else. Find early employees who are awesome instead. Happy to discuss the pros and cons.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/

I'm a podcaster, video creator and marketer. By day, I'm part of the Growth Team at Welder. By night, I run various different side businesses.
Indie Bites is my podcast, Striqo is my podcast editing service and Whitstable Craft Co is what I do when I need to get away from the screen.

I love starting and building side projects (maybe too much) and I'll make some mistakes as I go. I like to share my thoughts on my blog, which contains candid updates on my progress, failures and general musings.

I also listen to a lot of podcasts, here's what I'm listening to currently.

The content I produce is fuelled by coffee, so if you're feeling generous you can buy me one here coffee here 🚀

I spend a lot of time on the internet, so send out a weekly (or so) email containing my finds for the week and updates from my blog. If you're interested in marketing, podcasting, technology and building side-projects, then I think you'll like my newsletter

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/

Marie's Bio, thanks to the Life Profitability Podcast

Marie Prokopets has had a “wild ride” of a career. She is the co-founder of tech start-up FYI, recent recipient of Product Hunt’s Golden Kitty Maker of the Year award, former Diageo Director of Tequila, comedy screenplay writer, and avid meditator, crystal collector, and sage burner. In this episode Adii and Marie discuss making career changes, keeping a student mindset, taking risks, and the habits and attitudes necessary for success.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://www.simple.ink/notion-website-builder

Brians' Bio, thanks to his AmA

Brian Dean has been called an "SEO genius" by Entrepreneur.com and a "brilliant entrepreneur" by Inc Magazine. Brian's award-winning blog, Backlinko.com, has been listed by Forbes as a top "blog to follow".

He is an SEO expert and the founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics (SaaS).

Success Magazine has referred to Brian as "the world’s foremost expert on search engine optimization" due to the influence of his blog, which reaches over 5 million people every year.

Along the way, he's helped dozens of SaaS startups get more traffic, trials and customers from SEO and content marketing.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://www.simple.ink/notion-website-builder

Rohan's Bio

Hi I'm Rohan, serial entrepreneur I guess, but as I've been building businesses I've done it through a ton of transparent case studies here on Reddit.

On the SaaS front I started Launch27, a software company focused on small service businesses like home cleaning, lawncare etc. Bootstrapped it to almost $2 million a year and sold it in 2019.

Happy to answer anything on the process.

I'll be here for the next 3-4 hours.

Proof: https://twitter.com/rohangilkes/status/1422247974193688578

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/

James' Bio

Hi everyone! I’m James Gill (@jamesjgill on Twitter).

I started GoSquared in 2006 when at school (aged 15) with two friends, Geoff and JT. See a timeline of our 15 year history.

Having spent over half my life running company, since before the term “SaaS” was common, I have many scars and war stories to share with anyone who wants to hear them.

In some ways, we’ve built ~10 companies but kept our same core team and company all this time.

🐣 What got us started: thinking we could build a better “Million Dollar Homepage”. We could build it, but no one cared.

🗺 What got us on the map: LiveStats (now GoSquared Analytics) – the first real-time website analytics tool.

📈 How we’ve grown: Zero sales. 90% content. Running a blog since 2007. Building a product that doesn’t suck.

🤔 Challenge today: Competing with juggernauts like Intercom, Hubspot in the wider space of growth software with a tiny team.

—— Links 

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/

Jason Fried is the Founder & CEO @Basecamp, the project management and team communication tool trusted by millions.

Over an incredible 22 year journey, they have scaled to over 3.5M accounts and in 2020 they went back to being a multi-product company with the launch of their integrated email client & service, HEY.com. Jason is also the co-author of the widely acclaimed, REWORK (but also other books) and has also made several angel investments in the likes of Intercom, Gumroad and Hodinkee to name a few.

Best place to find Jason: world.hey.com/jason  

—— 

Links 

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas 

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel 

My product: https://Simple.ink/

Jason's Bio

Jason is the founder and CTO of WP Engine (http://wpengine.com), the 7th-largest public website host in the world (and the largest that focusses on WordPress), serving 150,000 customers with 1000 employees, both distributed and with major offices in the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, and Australia. As a successful, repeat entrepreneur (Smart Bear, sold 2008; IT WatchDogs, sold 2004), Jason became a founding mentor and angel investor with Austin's top incubator, Capital Factory, in 2009. He has written about startups for more than a decade at http://blog.asmartbear.com; Twitter is @asmartbear.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/

Vlad's bio, courtesy of MakerPad:

Vlad Magdalin is the founder and CEO of Webflow, a company that is working on empowering designers and entrepreneurs to design, build, and launch websites and applications without having to learn how to code.

Webflow has grown to be the platform at the very heart of the no-code movement. You can start building on Webflow at https://webflow.com/

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

My product: https://Simple.ink/

Chris' Bio (from https://chrisfrantz.com/about/)

Work stuff

VP Marketing @ Biteable Founder @ Snazzy, Weld, GAI Exits @ Press Kite, Agency Loft

Personal

Maker of maple syrup, seitan, and countless other hobbies that didn't work out as delicously. Proud dad of 1!

Want to know more? Say hey on Twitter!

——  

Links 

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas 

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

Their bio (from the AmA post)

I'm Hiten, @hnshah on Twitter. Signed up for Twitter in 2006, lucky to be in the first batch of 5,000 users. I tweet about growing startups into businesses and the occasional gif or meme. (example)

Founded three SaaS startups (Crazy Egg, KISSmetics, and now Nira), 150+ startup investments, many failed SaaS products, 18 years later, ask me literally anything about SaaS.

My biggest monetary failure: Back in the early 2000s I lost $1 million trying to start a SaaS company that never ended up launching.

I created a product management course while building Nira with my co-founder. We used to charge $1,600 for it. If you ask me a question, direct message (DM) me, I'll give you an account at no cost to you.

Fun fact about me: I’m obsessed with finding the best content on the Internet using Google. So, I might reply to your question(s) with my favorite link that has the answer.

Pro tip: Search my tweets using Google. Use this Google search and replace [fill in the blank] with your startup question or related keywords. This trick can be used for any account on Twitter.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

Marie's Bio (from the AmA)

I’m Marie.

I spent 10yrs in a career of branding/advertising and went from knowing no programming to launching my first SaaS in a year (if anyone is thinking of switching careers or learning to code, I can highly recommend it!)

Llama Life started off as a side project, something to help practice my coding skills. But it also came from a very personal need. I’d been chipping away at this concept that productivity is “not so much about time management, it’s about attention management”, ever since I got diagnosed with ADHD over 10yrs ago.

Llama Life is a productivity tool that helps you work THROUGH lists, not just make them.

I'm a solo founder and bootstrapped it to around 500 paid customers, and I recently got into the LAUNCH Accelerator which is run by Jason Calacanis.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

 Their bio (from the AmA post)

Hi all, I’m Paul Jarvis.

I’ve worked for myself in tech since 1999. I started out as a freelance designer working with companies like Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Yahoo, Warner Music and even Shaquille O’Neal.

I’ve also written several books, including Company of One, which has been translated into about 20 languages so far.

Several years ago I had an idea: “What if website analytics weren’t ugly and didn’t invade anyone’s digital privacy”. So I spent a few hours in Photoshop and mocked something up, tweeted it, and the tweet took off like wildfire (queue: Fry from Futurama “TAKE MY MONEY” memes). From there, I worked with a cofounder to build Fathom Analytics, which started out open-source (1+ million downloads), and then moved to a hosted, paid SaaS.

📊 usefathom.com

Fast forward to today: that original cofounder left in 2018 and my new cofounder Jack Ellis has been working with me to get Fathom to where it is today: 1000s of customers, profitable enough to be infinitely sustainable and pay us both salaries, and enjoyable enough to work on every day and still love doing it.

Our model has been very similar to my book (obviously the title was never meant be literal, since we’re a company of TWO 😂): question growth, focus on retention over acquisition, and never outspend our revenue.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

Their bio

👋 Who we are

You can find us on Twitter here: Baird Hall, Nick Fogle, Rob Moore

📘 Our Story

I’ll try to be quick about our story over the last 6 years...

u/Nickfogle and u/lofi-baird started our journey in 2015 when we tried to build a community-platform based on audio called uTalk (yeah, they were wayyy too early). Long story short, it didn’t work out and we spun out an internal marketing tool we built into Wavve.co.

We lucked out while searching for engineers on Upwork and found u/robmoo_re, who would later become an equity holding partner in Wavve and a fellow co-founder in our new companies.

5 years later, Wavve.co hit 145k MRR and was acquired by CalmCapital.com.

Over those five years, u/lofi-baird also started Zubtitle.com (which he still runs and does 114k MRR) and @nickfogle became a founding engineer at Casa. We all also started Duplikit.co.

Most recently, we built a suite of internal tools as a way to reduce churn across all of these SaaS companies. It worked so well that we packaged them up and released them as their own product, Churnkey. We now help other SaaS companies cut churn by deploying optimized cancellation flows.

You can check out a few articles that explain our journey with Wavve.co below.

StarterStory
Wavve: Making $76k a Month Turning Podcasts into Videos
Nathan Latka
Nick's personal blog entry on the sale of Wavve
Wavve acquired by Calm Capital

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

Chris Messina: inventor of the hashtag, product therapist. #1 Product Hunter

In 2007, Chris invented a little thing called the hashtag, galvanizing popular social revolutions & forever changing the world. He’s been living on the edge of social technology for over a decade, designing products & experiences for Google & Uber, co-founding a conversational social AI company (YC’18).

Chris created movements both online & offline & acted as a catalyst for change in large & small organizations. In 2004, he helped organize the grassroots movement that propelled Mozilla Firefox to its first 100 million downloads. In 2005, he co-organized the first BarCamp & then popularized the unconference event model to over 350 cities around the world. In 2006, he opened the first coworking spaces in the world, giving rise to a global movement.

He spent a year as a digital nomad, travelling & speaking all around the world and now finds himself back in the Bay Area, focused on coaching makers and founders on how to nail their launches on Product Hunt.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

Their bio

Hi, my name is Francesco.

My co-founder Fabrizio and I have been creating products on the Internet for the past 3 years.

It has been a bumpy ride with many ups and downs, but lately, Mailbrew’s and Typefully’s growth has started to compound and we are blasting past some milestones that seemed HUGE as recently as 12 months ago:

$12,000 MRR with Mailbrew
$3,000 in pre-sales for our new product Typefully

💌 Mailbrew lets you unplug from the Internet with a personal daily newsletter.

🐦 Typefully makes you grow on Twitter by crafting tweets and threads in a distraction-free editor, scheduling them, and (soon) analyzing how they impact your account growth.

What made it work for us?

Crafting products with an insane level of quality
Building an audience on Twitter by being an open startup.
Keeping our heads down and improving our products every day.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

Their bio (from the AmA post)

I'm Hiten, @hnshah on Twitter. Signed up for Twitter in 2006, lucky to be in the first batch of 5,000 users. I tweet about growing startups into businesses and the occasional gif or meme. (example)

Founded three SaaS startups (Crazy Egg, KISSmetics, and now Nira), 150+ startup investments, many failed SaaS products, 18 years later, ask me literally anything about SaaS.

My biggest monetary failure: Back in the early 2000s I lost $1 million trying to start a SaaS company that never ended up launching.

I created a product management course while building Nira with my co-founder. We used to charge $1,600 for it. If you ask me a question, direct message (DM) me, I'll give you an account at no cost to you.

Fun fact about me: I’m obsessed with finding the best content on the Internet using Google. So, I might reply to your question(s) with my favorite link that has the answer.

Pro tip: Search my tweets using Google. Use this Google search and replace [fill in the blank] with your startup question or related keywords. This trick can be used for any account on Twitter.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

Timestamps + transcript, by @RohanKochhar.

A Twitter thread with notes+lessons from this AmA, made by Elisheva Marcus (@Elisheva Marcus)

——

Justin's Bio

Hi, I'm Justin Jackson.

I started in tech relatively late: I was 28 years old when I switched from the non-profit world, to working for a SaaS startup (2008).

The week I started, I discovered Getting Real by 37signals, and it changed my whole perspective on building a business.

After 10 years of building an audience, podcasting, blogging, and experimenting with other digital products, I finally launched a successful SaaS product with my friend Jon Buda:

🎙️ Transistor.fm – podcast hosting and analytics.

Starting in 2018, we documented our whole journey on the Build your SaaS podcast.

We launched August 2018, and by August 2019 both of us had quite our full-time gigs and were working on Transistor full-time. 🙌

Today, Transistor does millions in annual recurring revenue.

Throughout the whole process, our focus has been the same: building a small, calm, profitable company.

——

Links

Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel