The Usual SaaS-pects with Ch Daniel

 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.

——

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:

💌 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?

——

Links

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

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

Arvid's Bio

Hey everyone,

I'm Arvid Kahl, I am a software engineer, a founder, and a writer.

In 2017, I founded the EdTech SaaS FeedbackPanda with my partner Danielle Simpson. We bootstrapped the business from nothing to $55.000 MRR within two years. At that point, we sold the business to a Private Equity company for a life-changing amount of money.

Right after that, I started blogging about that journey. That blog turned into an online guide, which turned into a book — mostly because people asked me for it. The book Zero to Sold chronicles the FeedbackPanda journey from start to finish.

While all of this happened, I became much more active on Twitter and in other bootstrapping communities. Over time, I gathered a sizeable following, which in turn lead to me writing about honest and empowerment-based audience-building. The Embedded Entrepreneur is my latest book, aimed at founders who want to find their audience and build a business with & for them.

I've worked for VC-funded software businesses, agencies, mid-size software shops, and even bootstrapped a few SaaS businesses.

Ask me anything about starting, running, growing, and selling bootstrapped SaaS businesses, how to build audiences without being selfish, and anything else.

——

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

Links:

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

https://twitter.com/chddaniel