I really respect your choice to optimize for balance and enjoyment.

My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!"

Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day!

When I was a corporate engineer, I would get the sunday scaries every week and find any excuse to push back bedtime another hour. But now, I wake up excited and energized to work on a project I love... and maybe someday I'll give myself permission to do that less than 7 days a week.

Anyway, I digress.

I'm so happy to hear your SaaS is going strong after 9 years. Cheers! And here's to 9 more!

He has a twitter thread where he describes Hobbit Software: "Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them. Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub"

https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/112766460393943288

I have a similar style of business, ~10K customers, ~150k users, ~7yrs.

The key points are:

- offer email support, but don't offer phone, video calls or remote support. This works for most people and forces them to properly phrase questions instead of just "jumping on a call" (so you can then effectively train them over the phone, which doesn't scale).

- offer as much self-service as possible

- work at your own pace and it's ok to just not work some days.

- finding a niche is hard, but they can be surprisingly basic. You're just saving someone time, effort, worry etc.

- lean on global cloud services for reliability. Let them do that.

I'd love to just make $1000 / month profit. I don't "need" the money per se, but definitely "want" it. Maybe for no other reason than to just to do it.

I just can't seem to come up with an idea. It has been said/written multiple times "scratch your own itch". It seems that I don't have an itch. If it takes me X-amount of steps or time to do some task, I don't ever look at how to reduce it, I just go with the flow.

In the grand scheme of life I am very satisfied. I don't NEED anything and for that I am grateful. However, I am a worrier and I do worry about the future and retirement (I'm in my mid 50s), specifically healthcare.

Anyway, better quite here and stop blathering on

Absolutely living the dream! Being a sustainable one man SaaS is what I'd ultimately love to be, but not only do I have no ideas about what to SaaS, I highly doubt I'd have the drive to follow through if I did.

Kudos to you, and to another 9 years!

Also I'm stealing the term Hobbit software, talk about comfy.

Massive respect for the no growth approach. We’re different in that we’re a consultancy rather than a SaaS but 14 years into running our “micro agency” (my wife and I). We’ve had plenty of opportunities to take on staff but have always chosen not to in favour of working with trusted freelancers. Net result is an extremely contented life spent living by the sea in Cornwall and a gently profitable business. We'll never be rich but it’s been the right choice to see our beautiful kids grow up in a place that we all love :-)

Inspiring!

How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations?

(In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)

Really intrigued by how he got into this: “I thought I could do it just as well and cheaper,” effectively trading product market fit issues for direct competition.

In a similar boat, a run a few SaaS’s as a one man band. Around 1,000 subscribers. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, being responsible for uptime while you’re sleeping can be stressful, thinking you may have overlooked a massive security vulnerability is constantly in the back of your mind. I wouldn’t trade it for anything though, it’s a very fortunate position to be in.

I also don’t feel the pressure to grow the product features anymore similar to OP. In fact I struggle sometimes now from being overly comfortable and feeling stagnant.

Am in a similar situation running a 1 person SaaS B2C product.

Recently wrote up a similar review post about the fears, failures and successes I experienced over the past year:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...

Pēteris' model with healthchecks.io was a large inspiration for me, and it is the reason why ntfy.sh is following the same model: open source, self-hostable, fun driven development.

Thank you Pēteris for being an inspiration.

This seems like it would be the dream. Work on your own thing and actually be successful at it. Really cool.

How long did it take you to find your first paying customer and which channels did you find to be most successful in acquisition?

I've just launched my own SaaS as a Solopreneur (https://msgdrop.io) and and trying to figure out where to invest most of my limited free time to grow it now.

Healthchecks.io has saved me on more occasions than I care to remember. Simple, effective, and works flawlessly.

I'm really glad to see he's doing well.

I love Healthchecks.

It's open source and easy to set up if you'd like to go that route.

His free tier is more than enough for my self hosting shenanigans and it's been one of the most reliable parts of my setup.

Thanks for posting. It was a great read and reminded me of the old @patio11 year in review posts which i also used to enjoy reading: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software-year...

Do you do marketing as well? I'd assume not based on the no JS-analytics so I'm curious what your customer acquisition methods are, as in how they find out about your business?

Wow, this reads almost as my story. Similar goals, similar time frames, even the hosting provider and the payment processor we use is the same. I have to contact my new-found twin!

This is both inspirational and aspirational! Can the more knowledgeable members of the forum guide on how to find and validate such idea and start with the execution?

The linked email story was also interesting:

https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr...

The author's end solution goes against all common HN wisdom (!)

This is the way things should work. There should be millions of email senders and receivers, not just 32 mafiosas (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, MailChimp, etc).

There are endless counter-examples on HN advocating against hosting something as simple as email yourself, see: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=self-host+email

This has been my dream for the last few years.

I'm making progress as I am also acting as a fractional CTO for a few start ups where I only took equity and only used my platform. All the companies are going to migrate off at some point, but they found market fit and are staffing up full engineering teams.

Over the next few years, I'm going to continue just having fun building. However, I have a few verticals that I plan to launch in and start figuring out marketing for that is... reasonable.

I wouldn't be surprised if he 2x his price and wouldn’t have much churn.

Increasing your pricing is the #1 way to grow revenue and weed out customers who abuse customer support.

https://healthchecks.io/pricing/

With that being said, he clearly knows what he’s doing - don’t take advice from strangers :)

Congrats.

Same with me. On my one year mark as a one person saas with 123x.dev . Helping Monday and Atlassian customers with custom apps.

Very cool to see, thanks for continuing to share updates!

It's refreshing to see one person or small teams happily prioritizing work/life balance over the never ending treadmill of profit and growth.

Finding what "enough" means to you is hard, holding that line over nearly a decade of success is even harder.

If the author is reading - what was the nonsensical Python exceptions that went away after hardware upgrade?

> Web servers upgraded to Hetzner’s AX42 (AMD 8700GE, 8 cores). On the old machines, saw a few nonsensical Python exceptions. A kernel update and a reboot didn’t fix it. Rather than messing with hardware troubleshooting, I upgraded to newer, faster, and more efficient machines.

> Database servers upgraded to Hetzner’s EX101 (Intel 13900, 8+16 cores). I was setting up new database replicas after an outage and failover event and took the opportunity to upgrade hardware.

Does anybody know if this setup is containerized? I have to say, I love that this is running on dedicated servers. I don't know how many times I burned myself out trying to setup infrastructure in AWS for personal projects only to accumulate a significant monthly bill and nothing substantial to show for it.

Thanks for the great writeup and inspiration. Nothing much more here to add, but I like the idea of hobbit software that you presented and the fact that you stick to what you want to do. It's a great thing to see someone not search for growth at all costs.

I've tried creating a few one-man SaaS's in the past and have always struggled to get customers to visit (let alone try it out and pay), any tips from people here who have had success? Thanks :)

You are such an inspiration.

The explanation of why you became a solopreneur - because you didn't want to manage or be managed is simple, yet incredibly insightful. All the best!

Living the dream, man! \o/

Just wanted to say how much I appreciated self-hosted version of Healthchecks.io. It's so simple, it feels almost magic. Keep it up!

If anyone wants some one-man-SaaS ideas, here's a few which I desperately want. Somebody please build these and let me know! I already have my own startup so I don't have time to build these other ideas.

- A cheaper and simpler version of visualping.io, they used to be really good but now they're too expensive and enterprise-y. Would be easier and better with AI.

- AI-based email assistant which instantly brings up the entire history of contact I had with a person (even if they used a different email or sent to a different inbox) and can quickly be used to draft replies based on that history and a set of canned response templates. Note that I don't want a full email client, I want to use my own email client, I just want an assistant that is plugged in via API/whatever. Yes I've already tried all the alternatives in this space like Mailbutler/Spark/Superhuman but they're all crappy and force you to be locked in to their client.

- An Apple TV/Android TV app for the Anki memorization app. Lots of people have made successful Anki plugins and little hardware devices and made good money, like AnkiRemote.com. TVs are extremely well suited to laid-back studying and memorization, so you could easily promote this within the Anki student community if you made one.

This is inspiring. Whats the channel that works consistently well for your traffic?

It all sounds very... healthy :)

Are there any solutions for one-man SaaS to handle payments from enterprise customers? I'm assuming that the preferred mode of payment here is through wire transfers after some kind of PO process.

How did you come up with the idea for your SaaS? I would love to start my own business on the side, but I don’t feel like I really have any ideas that would generate revenue.

This is super inspiring, thanks for sharing. I hope I'll get inspired one day, as you were.

Sorry if that was shared elsewhere, how did you market your product?

I always wondered why Dead Man’s Snitch didn’t keep their app up-to-date. Seems like this area has a decent amount of competition!

Good to see simple services generating 5 digit revenue! I would have liked to see a breakdown of expenses per month and profit though.

Hacker News is filled with thousands of inspiring stories. This one is simply the best for me.

This is the DREAM.

Congratulations! This is awesome!

That’s the dream

Congrats!

love this!

I wish the best for OP but I really wonder if advertising your one-man-SaaS to the wider world is a good idea. Especially on a forum like HN where competent people are few clicks away from stealing your idea.

Inspired beyond belief. Personally I'd rather commit suicide than work for the slave drivers at apple and google who screwed my life over then gave me jobs proving their guilt.