The ones prior, I either closed down or rolled into the next SaaS.
My first SaaS, it did OK but wasn't really taking off. When I started my 2nd SaaS I closed down the 1st one and rolled all that code and it's customers into my 2nd one.
My 2nd one I had a partner. After a couple of years things didn't work out between us, so I closed that down too and rolled the ideas, code, and customers into my 3rd one.
etc, etc, etc.
So by the time I got to my 6th SaaS, it was pretty much the evolution of the all the SaaS behind it. Some of them did run by side by side at the same time, but the majority were versions of the prior SaaS rolled up into it.
I typically build everything myself, at least to the MVP. In some cases I have built past that myself too, in others someone else has helped build past that.
Getting to MVP, it is possible.
You might have overlooked that I have been building things online since 1998-ish. I started with HTML and quickly got into Perl and PHP/SQL, etc all before 2000 rolled around.
The same thing happened with marketing too. By 2000 I had already been buying PPC clicks from GoTo and manipulating pre-SEO by adjusting listings on DMOZ and Yahoo Directory.
I was doing millions on Facebook ads in 2008 as a top affiliate. I was bulk emailing to millions of emails in 2010. By 2013, I had forced Google to push out the Payday algo update for the SEO stuff I was doing.
Later I was handling the marketing budgets for Alibaba, John Deere, Virgin Group, and TeamViewer.
You start wrapping all that experience together and you find building out systems, marketing, and other stuff just comes 2nd nature to you. What might take someone a full week to do, I might get done and be confident about in 1 day.
Yes, it still takes time. But getting something to MVP might take me 2 weekends and since all my SaaS have been in the digital marketing industry, throwing my new SaaS into my existing SaaS customers and where they hang out is pretty much "already done". Managing the business, well that's not too hard either since a lot of the code, customers, and industry are related.
Even if I was building things in different fields, like Elon Musk.. I think I could pull it off too though.
All this experience means you:
1. Skip a lot of errors and mis-steps.
2. Already have frameworks in places for code, marketing, business, etc
3. Have confidence to make choices that you otherwise might stumble on or delay
4. Have answers to the most routine questions and how to answer them
Sometimes. Many times I have just kept it to myself.
Sometimes I bring on a partner.
Sometimes I hire a VA to delegate to.
Thanks
OMG thanks for the detailed answer, connected a lot of dots for me,
Now I can model you properly:--)
Inspired by your info, my idea right now is to build a kind of MVC platform where
I have everything deployed and can test MVCs fairly quickly for users,
idea -> build -> deploy -> see how users react
then once I get something good, will double down on it.
Tech stack: Java/Kotlin, Angular, Heroku, PostgreSQL
Marketing stack: direct response marketing (funnels, webinars, etc...), YouTube and LinkedIn content, paid ads
BTW is there a way to find out about your consulting services other than PM
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