>>1122000
checked.
I'm a saas founder, made one of these threads a couple weeks ago with some info but didn't get much traction, ask me anything.

Are IaaS startups even a thing? I'd imagine the big providers essentially already own the market.

>>1122028

What I don't get about SAAS is that essentially you need to offer a service right? You cannot just be a programmer. You need to have some knowledge about something so that you can write a application to automate that thing and offer it as a service.

So how did you come up with the knowledge base needed for the service you are offering?

>>1122043
you hire people to write the application. it's just like any other software but you just hold the client data hostage on your servers and charge a recurring fee.

>>1122041
yes

>>1122043
Yup. My post last time was mostly focused on how to find the idea and the domain knowledge.
That's the case with any successful company that domain knowledge and business plan trump all. That's why mba's get all the glory and devs are in cubes.
If you want to get into business for yourself, you have to work on all the business skills or you'll go bust.

To summarize my posts, my approach was to search in expanding circles for industries and problem.
1. Do I know an industry that has any problem that are best fixed by technology?
2. if not, does anyone in my circle?
3. if not, what are the main industries in my town? What are well managed businesses that have the money to spend and the skill to build processes around the technology I would offer them?
4. ditto state, county, etc

>>1122083
So yeah, building a saas people will pay for is a lot more about the business plan and domain knowledge as the technology, which will basically be CRUD unless you attack some very high tech industries.
In terms of LOC, most of my stuff is open sourced, then some I bought, then some I wrote.

>>1122028
>>1122083
>>1122089

Thanks for the constructive responses, I have been thinking about a service around a certain niche which has a very large audience however a lot of the current solutions lack certain values here and there that I believe are key to keeping a customer's interest such as a function that's missing or a poor user interface which I believe I could solve.

I have a strong understanding of the industry and know that it is much easier to manage using technology.

In terms of location I'm currently in the United Kingdom and thus in terms of sales in this industry it could be one of the strongest bases along with US.

The main issue I see holding me back I believe would be advertising and selling my product without prior trust of clients. How did you go about overcoming this and what do you believe to be the best medium or combination of mediums of sales assuming this service is one that your average Joe would use?

>>1122028
Also, on another note. What were your greatest downfalls and how would you suggest to circumvent or reduce the damage of these?

>>1122136
There aren't many solutions for building trust: lots and lots of facetime with people. Go to any trade show, social function, chamber of commerce meeting your potential customers attend. I'm in b2b, the first few sales were a pain; it gets easier as I get better reputation and word of mouth starts working for me.

>>1122150
In your first successful B2B sale how did you convince the buyer that your service is what they needed in order to make their business improve and how did you go about answering the question: "So what other companies are using this service and why should I?"?

>>1122161
I had to learn how to talk business. The way to make a sale is to bring everything down to dollars and cents, and ROI.
It's a good way to see if you're on to a good business model anyways, so you should have that material early on. If you have hard data to justify that using your software is going to earn the business money, it's an easy sale.

As far as "what other companies are using it" question, until you have a few sales it's indeed a hard one to answer. The way to answer is to be truthful and instead bring back the conversation to your experience and pedigree. So for the first few businesses, my answer fell back to classic job interview type answer: I've been to that school and studied theses subjects, then made these projects that earned my employer $, etc

>>1122225
Thank you for your responses, they have been really useful.

In terms of employing others; what approach do you suggest taking firstly in finding the correct people to fill the roles (Design, Dev, Marketing etc.) and at what stage do you suggest doing this.

I am able to bring a sizeable monetary investment to this startup however I have seen that quite a few startups are leaning towards offering a share of the final product in return for their time. Do you think the latter of the two is a sensible approach or would you suggest paying the initial employees outright even given the relatively high risk of failure?

Thanks again for your time, it's much appreciated!

>>1122253
Contracting all the way. Define clear deliverables and try to find the right contractors. If the person delivers outsized value and you'd feel comfortable talking to them every day, consider offering a job.
You can offer stock if you want and the person wants, but it complicates things and unless you're taking vc money/looking to exit, they won't be worth much so I wouldn't bother trying to fool someone into taking them :)

I haven't been to that point yet, I'm just about to onboard my first contractor and he'll be working on product management because he has a lot of business knowledge.

That makes me think of an answer to your previous question: you can "buy" reputation. One of the persons on my corporate board is well known in the industry and got some stock in exchange for his experience and reputation.

>>1122333

Okay I will definitely take this into account if it gets to the point where I have to be employing people. I hadn't actually considered the reputation of other employees so that could be a really neat selling point.

I know of course there is a tonne more things I have to take into account if I am to take this idea seriously however your responses have answered many of the questions many of the online articles fail to address so I really appreciate that.

No more questions for now, I will leave you in peace. I wish you and your business great success in the future :)

contractor here, i'm going to be starting to take contracts in march 7th, I just want to satisfy my clients and am strictly business. Willing to work for lower wages since I will be in a harsh situation soon. My skills are PHP/CSS/JS/HTML and I can code up websites decently fast and know the right toolkits to use and such. It feels weird advertising my services on 4chan but why not. I'll be monitoring this thread a bit, if any entrepreneurs want to connect that's fine. My rates are hourly and project-based. I refuse to take equity unless i have done a few jobs with you that were either hourly or project based and I am into the work and behind your vision. Simple as that. I'll make a throwaway if there is any interest.

>>1122143
Haven't had any "downfalls" per se, but definitely had a few scares, here's some advice.
- Make sure to set up calendar reminders every day for the two weeks prior to: corporate tax return, corporate tax filing, ssl certificate renewal, domain renewal
- logs, logs, logs. keep tons of them, so you can piece together anything that happens to fix it in the future and hopefully reconcile data.
- I've had to develop my devops skills a lot more than my software dev skills. the ability to constantly deploy is absolutely invaluable.
- make use of available resources. docracy.com for contracts, company bylaws and stock contracts; legalzoom to incorporate, vistaprint to come up with a unified visual identity for your advertising, and of course the usual open source frameworks for dev. Don't hesitate to buy a bootstrap template, wish I'd done that sooner as I'm not a very strong designer.