B2B vs B2C for solopreneurs | dstill.ai shared chat

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

(someone): So when you say independently, you mean just by themselves?

Courtland Allen: Not necessarily. So let me zoom out and look at the status quo. If you are, let's say, a software engineer working for a traditional software engineering company, then who is your customer? It's not actually the users who are using the software that you build. It's the company that you work for. They're paying you a salary in return for a lease on your time and your skills. And as a result of that, they care a great deal about how you use your time and your skills, right? They care about what tools you use. They care about who you work with and how you get the job done. They care about how many hours you work. They care about what location you work from, all that stuff, because that's what they're paying you for. Alternatively, if you are making money independently, at least in the way that I'm using it, then instead of selling your time to a company or an employer, you are trying to create something of value and sell that directly to the users themselves. So the question is, why go this route instead of getting a job?

(someone): That's a, that is a great question. Having a job is a great way to secure steady income. So if that's something that's important to you, having a job is a great way of doing that.

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): So there's a lot of, um, objections that you have to overcome, and there's a lot of value that you have to demonstrate on a consistent basis. Other ideas in between, going all the way to the SaaS side, is downloadable software. A lot of people seem to shy away from that, but that's still a thing in a lot of industries for a lot of different purposes. You could call it on-premise or you could do a desktop, but again, a lot of the times those are a single transaction, maybe with some sort of an annual support commitment. There's I mean you could go the e-commerce route if you're creative and you could open up your own storefront Or you could get into productized services Let's say when we're talking earlier where hey, I'm really good at this and I'm really efficient at this But I can't command the hourly rate that I would that represents my efficiency. Well, you could turn that into a productized service so if you're really good at slamming out landing pages and you can do them in under an hour and you think that's unfair because when you charge someone for an hour of your time and And it would take someone else five hours to do what you did. OK, great. Package it up and say, I will build you a landing page for this fixed price. And if you can get it done in an hour, great. You're making up the difference on that margin there. There's also some other things that you can do, like WordPress plugins are something that's often overlooked. I read a stat like 25% of all websites run WordPress.

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): But all of those options there, you're, you're tying your, your income to your time. So there is a, you know, a theoretical glass ceiling that you can only work so many hours in a day, you know, even if you optimize for 24 hours a day, if you could pull that off and be able to bill for every one of those, you know, your income is going to be tied to your ability to work hours. And not only that, let's say that you're super efficient. you're still going to be subject to market rates. So if the market rate for whatever skill set you have is X, chances are you're going to be somewhere in that neighborhood. There's really no economies of scale that you can really get out of that type of thing. Again, it's a great trade-off if you need the security and the consistent revenue But it can be limiting. So if you go to the other side where you start to go independent, the allure I think for most people is, you know, getting control of their time back. So if I don't want to wake up at six in the morning and go have an hour commute to get to work and then stay there for eight, 10 hours, our commute back home, right, and all this, that's usually what a lot of people want to jump on is I want my time back. Doesn't really work that way. But that's what a lot of people want. The other side, too, is, you know, basically not having that glass ceiling there. If I can

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): Well, definitely don't expect that you're going to launch something in a weekend, take out some Google AdWords, and you're going to be crushing 20,000 MRR within the first two weeks. That doesn't happen. And there's a reason that we talk about people who have had something like that happen, because it's abnormal, right? It's an anomaly. So you're like wow they did this and they crushed it yeah the problem is you're not gonna be able to reproduce that they got lucky they did something right they got in front of the right people the right time and they got lucky what you should really expect is i mean it's it's gonna be. It's going to be slow. It's going to be way slower than you could possibly imagine. Getting your first customer to sign up and to actually use it and to pay is going to be a process that I don't think most people are really prepared for, especially when you look at how e-commerce works or any of these transactional sales. You're like, OK, I put this up and people bought this. Yeah, SaaS really doesn't work that way. You've got to go through a grind and you've got to fight for every single customer. In a lot of cases, you're not going to attract people through marketing and get them to sign up at your first pass. Your marketing message, your value prop, other aspects of your marketing site or your onboarding process or your product itself, people are going to shy away from. I mean, a lot of times you've got to go

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): Second-time SaaS people, they kind of understand things, they have a little bit of an advantage, but there's still that whole product market fit, song and dance that you've got to go through. And there's also the other aspect, there's going to be word-of-mouth referrals, which are A pretty big thing that can help you to grow getting those takes time so starting out nobody knows you well who else uses you people always wanna know that right or why should I use you versus these other guys and you know a lot of times you're gonna go off the recommendation of a friend if you you know you're working you're like hey. What can I use to do this? Maybe there's a recommendation that they have, you're going to go check it out, and you're going to be like, yeah, let's go check that out. It takes time to get to the point where people are going to refer you to people. And so starting out, don't expect much. I mean, just being honest, probably expect zero for quite some time. I'm being serious.

Courtland Allen: Yeah, it's not easy to get the ball rolling. And I think one of the problems a lot of people run into, one of the most common mistakes, is to look at a super successful company and say, I'm going to do what they're doing. When in reality, the things that they're doing now that they're super successful are probably completely different than the things they did when they first started. So when you first start, things are usually, as you said, really slow and hard to get off the ground because you don't actually understand your business yet.

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): So, you know, stepping into this, you don't know much about sales or marketing, right? It took you years to learn how to develop and write code. Learning how to do sales and marketing if you're not a natural at talking to people and learning how to get people's attention and being able to convey things in a language that they understand or shows how this is beneficial to them, that can take years to get really good at as well. So trying to do a SaaS where it's hard to convince people to be charged on a monthly or an annual basis and trying to learn sales and marketing in that environment is much, much, much harder than saying, I'm just going to sell a book or I'm just going to sell this WordPress plugin and trying to learn about sales and marketing that way, I think that's, to me at least, that's the hugest advantage. And you get the feedback of, oh wow, like this worked and I sold something, right? So if you sell a WordPress plugin for like 25 bucks, I mean, seeing that $25, you know, show up is an amazing feeling. And even though your paycheck is probably much, much larger, that $25 is sweeter than your paycheck, I guarantee you when you see it.

Courtland Allen: Right. And another thing that happens once you start generating revenue, even if that revenue is coming from one-time transactions, is that you start becoming aware of all of these potentially valuable business ideas that were not obvious before you actually had a business. So because you're actually selling a product, you're probably focused entirely on how do you generate more revenue? How do you get more customers in the door? How can you effectively increase pricing without driving customers away?

7

#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): So there's a lot of, um, objections that you have to overcome, and there's a lot of value that you have to demonstrate on a consistent basis. Other ideas in between, going all the way to the SaaS side, is downloadable software. A lot of people seem to shy away from that, but that's still a thing in a lot of industries for a lot of different purposes. You could call it on-premise or you could do a desktop, but again, a lot of the times those are a single transaction, maybe with some sort of an annual support commitment. There's I mean you could go the e-commerce route if you're creative and you could open up your own storefront Or you could get into productized services Let's say when we're talking earlier where hey, I'm really good at this and I'm really efficient at this But I can't command the hourly rate that I would that represents my efficiency. Well, you could turn that into a productized service so if you're really good at slamming out landing pages and you can do them in under an hour and you think that's unfair because when you charge someone for an hour of your time and And it would take someone else five hours to do what you did. OK, great. Package it up and say, I will build you a landing page for this fixed price. And if you can get it done in an hour, great. You're making up the difference on that margin there. There's also some other things that you can do, like WordPress plugins are something that's often overlooked. I read a stat like 25% of all websites run WordPress.

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#013 – How to overcome the biggest challenges to your online business with patio11

Indie Hackers

(someone): And you have no less of a right to that pie than the other business does. So, B2W, the other business has a competent professional in the room who is already negotiating in behalf of their interests, so you need to too. And since there is nobody in the room on your side except you, if you're a solo entrepreneur, you need to be the person who is kind of aggressively going after your own interests. Because if you are a wallflower, people will happily walk all over you and not even realize they're doing it with it, because that's kind of the nature of business-to-business interactions.

Courtland Allen: I think what strikes me the most in what you said about charging the rates that you did and charging by an elongated time period, like by the week, so you can redirect the conversation in terms of the value you're providing to the business, is that it's directly parallel to selling a product or service as an entrepreneur. One of the pitfalls I think a lot of people fall into, and if you're an early-stage entrepreneur, you're just getting started, it's worth watching out for, is not really understanding why people are paying for what you're paying for, paying for what you're building, what you're selling, or why anyone would use it. But what Patrick just said is effectively, you need to think in terms of the value that it provides to them. Ultimately, what you're building should be solving some sort of crucial or valuable problem for them. And I see this problem all the time in the Indiactis Forum when people come online. and share a landing page that they've thrown up, and it doesn't talk at all about why customers might want to use it.

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen: So I think a lot of people jump too quickly into starting a SaaS company when they don't really understand the alternatives, and they haven't looked into the alternatives. And they don't understand the benefits of the alternative approaches One thing I see a lot among developers specifically is that they say, well, OK, what is the point of me having my skills as a programmer if I don't start a software business, right? If I just start a blog or an e-book or a course, then it's like my software development skills are going to waste. And that's not actually true, because if you compare yourself to somebody who's not a programmer, and they try to start any of these businesses, well, there's all sorts of ancillary tasks besides your main product that you actually have to take care of to start any sort of business. And if you're a developer, a lot of times you can provide a website that's faster, or sleeker, or more reliable, or you could automate all sorts of time-consuming tasks using your skills. So it's important not to underestimate the degree to which your skills as a programmer, assuming you are a programmer, can help you, even if you don't start a software business.

(someone): Yeah, I would say on top of that, one, you have a huge cost savings, right? So someone who's not a developer who needs to hire a developer to do any of these things is going to have to pay for that time. Developers aren't cheap, and that can stop a lot of people from being able to go and do an online business because they can't afford to hire a developer to build it out.

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#005 – How the VC Business Model Co-Opts Entrepreneurs' Visions with Bryce Roberts of Indie.vc

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen: It seeps into the everyday culture of your business. You mentioned the culture of a loss of control, having more expectations and more oversight, a little bit of loss of independence. versus a company that maybe raises one round of funding or is bootstrapped and they have more of a focus on cash flow from day one and on sustainability, what other disadvantages do you see among companies that are funded by VCs that the companies in your portfolio might not have and might not be hindered by?

(someone): That's a good question. I mean, you know, I think it's probably less disadvantages, but the thing we hear, you know, consistently from our founders and the bootstrap founders we work with is they have this overwhelming sense of freedom. that they really aren't beholden to anybody, that they can build their company on their terms, that there's no playbook or archetype that they have to fit into. And I think there's a lot of freedom and flexibility that comes from that. I think companies as a canvas to express your values, to express who you are, I think we lose a lot of that in a world that values conformity to a relatively narrow set of business metrics that Silicon Valley really embraces and encourages. It certainly comes with trade-offs, right? I mean, I think the thing we're recognizing is that it's kind of like what pain do you want to feel, right? It is more painful at the beginning to get a business up and running and cash flow it, start to break it even, start to become profitable, start to grow along those lines. But the reality is it's

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): Right. Yeah, absolutely. And most everyone doesn't talk about the early stage, right? It was so long ago, they forgot about it. They don't think it's relevant. They're embarrassed by it, or they're just super jazzed about their current success. And it's that early stage expectation that can make or break you. starting out and you're like, well, hey, why am I not at, you know, 10,000 MRR after the first month? Well, I mean, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it. Like full-time is their job, right? They wouldn't be trying to do it on the side. But to go off of what you were saying with the sales, I mean, there's another aspect that a lot of people don't realize. Sometimes if you're targeting a certain market, you just, you can't reach them online. or you can't do it very easily through marketing. People aren't really searching for solutions in your space. Pretty much the only way to make them aware that you exist is to reach out to them one-on-one and say, hey, I know that you work in this type of a role within this type of a company and we do this for people like you. It's not like they're going online and they're doing searches for these types of things where you can capture them through SEO or you can write some really clever article that's gonna catch their attention. Sometimes you just got to pick up the phone or you got to send an email just to get in touch with these people.

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen: So I think a lot of people jump too quickly into starting a SaaS company when they don't really understand the alternatives, and they haven't looked into the alternatives. And they don't understand the benefits of the alternative approaches One thing I see a lot among developers specifically is that they say, well, OK, what is the point of me having my skills as a programmer if I don't start a software business, right? If I just start a blog or an e-book or a course, then it's like my software development skills are going to waste. And that's not actually true, because if you compare yourself to somebody who's not a programmer, and they try to start any of these businesses, well, there's all sorts of ancillary tasks besides your main product that you actually have to take care of to start any sort of business. And if you're a developer, a lot of times you can provide a website that's faster, or sleeker, or more reliable, or you could automate all sorts of time-consuming tasks using your skills. So it's important not to underestimate the degree to which your skills as a programmer, assuming you are a programmer, can help you, even if you don't start a software business.

(someone): Yeah, I would say on top of that, one, you have a huge cost savings, right? So someone who's not a developer who needs to hire a developer to do any of these things is going to have to pay for that time. Developers aren't cheap, and that can stop a lot of people from being able to go and do an online business because they can't afford to hire a developer to build it out.

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): Right. Yeah, absolutely. And most everyone doesn't talk about the early stage, right? It was so long ago, they forgot about it. They don't think it's relevant. They're embarrassed by it, or they're just super jazzed about their current success. And it's that early stage expectation that can make or break you. starting out and you're like, well, hey, why am I not at, you know, 10,000 MRR after the first month? Well, I mean, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it. Like full-time is their job, right? They wouldn't be trying to do it on the side. But to go off of what you were saying with the sales, I mean, there's another aspect that a lot of people don't realize. Sometimes if you're targeting a certain market, you just, you can't reach them online. or you can't do it very easily through marketing. People aren't really searching for solutions in your space. Pretty much the only way to make them aware that you exist is to reach out to them one-on-one and say, hey, I know that you work in this type of a role within this type of a company and we do this for people like you. It's not like they're going online and they're doing searches for these types of things where you can capture them through SEO or you can write some really clever article that's gonna catch their attention. Sometimes you just got to pick up the phone or you got to send an email just to get in touch with these people.

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): Having a job is a great way to secure steady income. So if that's something that's important to you, having a job is a great way of doing that. The downside to working a job is it might sound a little cynical, but you know, you're, you're basically owned, right? They tell you when to show up, what you can and cannot do. It's someone else that's going to determine how far you advance in your career or within the company and what your pay will ultimately be. Again, it's a trade-off. If financial security is important, having a job is a good thing. So there's actually some steps in between having just a regular job and going all the way of going independent online. One of them would be doing consulting or contract work or freelancing or whatever the cool term is nowadays. That's a little bit closer towards the independent route. but it gives you a little bit more of the financial security in terms of you're still working for a company or maybe a handful of companies that are paying you for your time to help them do something that they're trying to achieve. And, uh, that's also a good way of doing it. It's, there's a little more risk involved because if you can't find a client, you're, you know, you're not going to get paid. Or if a client decides all of a sudden to drop you or your services, then you're scrambling, trying to figure that out. But all of those options there, you're, you're tying your, your income to your time.

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): and start to get that feedback, but expect that everyone's going to go meh when you show it to them out the gate. Unless you've really nailed it, in which case kudos to you, but that's not really how it works. It can take you a solid year just to get initial traction and to get it built up to a point where it's the kind of money that you're probably looking for. You're probably talking two to three years in a lot of cases, especially if this is your first go-round. It's not something that just happens overnight. It takes a lot of work, a lot of refinement, a lot of feedback. Once you've done it a few times, you might get better at it, but you're always going to have to go through this product-market fit, a little song and dance. You can cook up whatever you want in your head. If people don't see how it solves a problem that they give a crap about that they're willing to give you money for, it doesn't matter how awesome it is, you know?

Courtland Allen: It's demoralizing to hear no over and over. I think a lot of the things you talked about are very interesting because they create kind of these self-fulfilling cycles that make your business a lot less likely to succeed. So for example, let's say you're a perfectionist. Let's say you're super you know, nervous about people not liking what you've built. And so you just don't show it to anybody, because you don't think it's ready yet.

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#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): The other side, too, is, you know, basically not having that glass ceiling there. If I can Sell something and it doesn't cost a whole lot to make so digital goods and what not like software and I could sell that over and over and over again well, then I can make a lot of money that way because the theoretical limit would be the size of the market that I could capture and I think the final one would be there's a separation in that model. There's a separation of time and money. So it's, you know, if you choose not to work an hour, in theory, you're still making money, right? Or I could work one hour and make more money in that hour than just doing a straight exchange, like you would with an employer.

Courtland Allen: Yeah, I think that sums it up perfectly. Especially what you're saying toward the end really hits on some of the advantages to making money online as a developer. Because if you're a developer, you can write code. And code, obviously, can continue working when you go to sleep, hence passive income. And if you write code that works online, then your target audience, the market of people who could buy what you're selling, is humongous. There's billions of people on the internet. Even if you only target a small percentage of that, that's still probably millions of possible customers. So you stand to gain a lot more than you ever could if you're trading, you know, eight hours a day for whatever services you can provide.

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#013 – How to overcome the biggest challenges to your online business with patio11

Indie Hackers

(someone): And you have no less of a right to that pie than the other business does. So, B2W, the other business has a competent professional in the room who is already negotiating in behalf of their interests, so you need to too. And since there is nobody in the room on your side except you, if you're a solo entrepreneur, you need to be the person who is kind of aggressively going after your own interests. Because if you are a wallflower, people will happily walk all over you and not even realize they're doing it with it, because that's kind of the nature of business-to-business interactions.

Courtland Allen: I think what strikes me the most in what you said about charging the rates that you did and charging by an elongated time period, like by the week, so you can redirect the conversation in terms of the value you're providing to the business, is that it's directly parallel to selling a product or service as an entrepreneur. One of the pitfalls I think a lot of people fall into, and if you're an early-stage entrepreneur, you're just getting started, it's worth watching out for, is not really understanding why people are paying for what you're paying for, paying for what you're building, what you're selling, or why anyone would use it. But what Patrick just said is effectively, you need to think in terms of the value that it provides to them. Ultimately, what you're building should be solving some sort of crucial or valuable problem for them. And I see this problem all the time in the Indiactis Forum when people come online. and share a landing page that they've thrown up, and it doesn't talk at all about why customers might want to use it.

18

#013 – How to overcome the biggest challenges to your online business with patio11

Indie Hackers

(someone): And you have no less of a right to that pie than the other business does. So, B2W, the other business has a competent professional in the room who is already negotiating in behalf of their interests, so you need to too. And since there is nobody in the room on your side except you, if you're a solo entrepreneur, you need to be the person who is kind of aggressively going after your own interests. Because if you are a wallflower, people will happily walk all over you and not even realize they're doing it with it, because that's kind of the nature of business-to-business interactions.

Courtland Allen: I think what strikes me the most in what you said about charging the rates that you did and charging by an elongated time period, like by the week, so you can redirect the conversation in terms of the value you're providing to the business, is that it's directly parallel to selling a product or service as an entrepreneur. One of the pitfalls I think a lot of people fall into, and if you're an early-stage entrepreneur, you're just getting started, it's worth watching out for, is not really understanding why people are paying for what you're paying for, paying for what you're building, what you're selling, or why anyone would use it. But what Patrick just said is effectively, you need to think in terms of the value that it provides to them. Ultimately, what you're building should be solving some sort of crucial or valuable problem for them. And I see this problem all the time in the Indiactis Forum when people come online. and share a landing page that they've thrown up, and it doesn't talk at all about why customers might want to use it.

19

#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): Second-time SaaS people, they kind of understand things, they have a little bit of an advantage, but there's still that whole product market fit, song and dance that you've got to go through. And there's also the other aspect, there's going to be word-of-mouth referrals, which are A pretty big thing that can help you to grow getting those takes time so starting out nobody knows you well who else uses you people always wanna know that right or why should I use you versus these other guys and you know a lot of times you're gonna go off the recommendation of a friend if you you know you're working you're like hey. What can I use to do this? Maybe there's a recommendation that they have, you're going to go check it out, and you're going to be like, yeah, let's go check that out. It takes time to get to the point where people are going to refer you to people. And so starting out, don't expect much. I mean, just being honest, probably expect zero for quite some time. I'm being serious.

Courtland Allen: Yeah, it's not easy to get the ball rolling. And I think one of the problems a lot of people run into, one of the most common mistakes, is to look at a super successful company and say, I'm going to do what they're doing. When in reality, the things that they're doing now that they're super successful are probably completely different than the things they did when they first started. So when you first start, things are usually, as you said, really slow and hard to get off the ground because you don't actually understand your business yet.

20

#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): Well, definitely don't expect that you're going to launch something in a weekend, take out some Google AdWords, and you're going to be crushing 20,000 MRR within the first two weeks. That doesn't happen. And there's a reason that we talk about people who have had something like that happen, because it's abnormal, right? It's an anomaly. So you're like wow they did this and they crushed it yeah the problem is you're not gonna be able to reproduce that they got lucky they did something right they got in front of the right people the right time and they got lucky what you should really expect is i mean it's it's gonna be. It's going to be slow. It's going to be way slower than you could possibly imagine. Getting your first customer to sign up and to actually use it and to pay is going to be a process that I don't think most people are really prepared for, especially when you look at how e-commerce works or any of these transactional sales. You're like, OK, I put this up and people bought this. Yeah, SaaS really doesn't work that way. You've got to go through a grind and you've got to fight for every single customer. In a lot of cases, you're not going to attract people through marketing and get them to sign up at your first pass. Your marketing message, your value prop, other aspects of your marketing site or your onboarding process or your product itself, people are going to shy away from. I mean, a lot of times you've got to go

21

#009 – Breaking Into Bootstrapping Your Own SaaS Business with Clifford Oravec of Tamboo

Indie Hackers

(someone): So someone who's not a developer who needs to hire a developer to do any of these things is going to have to pay for that time. Developers aren't cheap, and that can stop a lot of people from being able to go and do an online business because they can't afford to hire a developer to build it out. So you get a save on that, you know, right? If you can do it yourself, right? But I think I would add One of the biggest reasons to do something that is not SaaS to start out is, in my opinion, most SaaS's don't fail because of the underlying technology. I'm sure you could find me one or two examples where it couldn't scale or this or that and the other. But I mean, most of the times, if people are like, I'm going to go build a SaaS that does this, they can go and build that. That's not really the problem. The problem is there's a lack of business experience or there is a broken business model, right? Those are really the things that Or, you know, product market fit, which I'd throw into lack of business experience. And those are the things that usually cause failure, right? By getting out and doing a smaller thing like a WordPress plugin or an info product or product type service, you're getting the experience to learn how to run a business with something that's easier to sell than a recurring subscription, right? So, you know, stepping into this, you don't know much about sales or marketing, right? It took you years to learn how to develop and write code.