As an indy founder, how cheap are you?
Database migration complete.
Why did I just spent a week to save $60 per month?
I bill $200+ per hour for my time, so why would i spend so much time to save $60 per month?
And TBH it only took a few hours of my time, and a few hours of Adnan's time.... but i've been sick, and he's moving house, so that was the only coding time we had this week.
Here's why: FastMonitor isn't really making significant recurring revenue yet, and I'm very cheap because I need to build a sustainable business.
Right now I only pay $20 per month to Vercel and $15 per month to Framer, to run FastMonitor.io. I guess if you want to be a stickler, the domain costs $2.5 a month as well. I also paid ngrok because I still think of them as an indy developer...
For email I've partnered with Mailmodo (thanks Zeeshan Akhtar) to help educate on the benefits of AMP emails and bang-on email marketing , and Amazon Web Services (AWS) gave me $25k for servers - so that's where we moved the DB.
... So when PlanetScale decided that they had to charge $60 a month, I decided to move. I probably would have paid $6 or 8 a month for database-schema pull requests... but $60*12 adds up fast when you have a baby product and just a few users.
Maybe I've been in Asia too long, but i really do think that cutting costs at every corner is important, while laying out for the things that really do matter. (framer has the best web publishing experience, and Vercel has the best deployment experiance) and the mindset helps to build a sustainable business.
What do you think? Would you let the little SaaS bills pile up everywhere for your bootstrapped business?
🔥 Roast My Landing Page
I want to make a coupon name. The site I am running now is called PromoPro. I want to create a similar one myself. I only need to pay a small fee for the domain name and server.
Sounds reasonable. Good luck 🚀
Cheap enough to use others' money. A lot of companies are willing to give you tons of free credits to lock you in... but you can't lock me in! I will straight up do the work to move to the next
🔥🔥💪💪💪
I'm super cheap 😅 I won't pay for anything because I don't want to run at a loss. That's not totally working out so well, though, because I still have to pay for a domain and an Apple Developer license 😭. I'm super grateful for free tiers from Cloudflare, Appwrite, RevenueCat, etc. and will be happy to pay for services once I make enough to cover the costs.
At some stages we're all running at a loss, especially as our time shouldn't be counted as free. But TBH, for me, I'm still kind of counting my time as free and it feels like I'm working hard but when I look at the calendar things seem to be taking an awful long time...
Do you have a plan when you'll get to market / be able to break even?
Oh ya, I'm definitely not factoring in my time 😅
My plan is to ship multiple products so I can start bringing in revenue and break even. I just released my 3rd app this past weekend.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🚀🚀🚀🚀 CONGRATS man. Huge win. What is it?
Thanks! 😊 Making apps is like 30% of the work...getting people to download and pay for it is the hardest part 😭
I made an app to log the price of every day products because I never remember if things on sale are a good price or not 😅 (see bio)
I would consider myself pretty cheap... to a fault.
Currently, I'm exploring Apollo as a tool for initiating cold email campaigns efficiently, and I've been thinking for three days about whether to try the premium subscription for a month.
Activating might pay off big time (more traffic to my project and more paying customers). I should just activating it.
@originalmatth @fotoglo Hello Alex, Matthieu
I have just launched a tool to help salespeople scale their outbound campaigns, similar to Apollo, and it seems like you may be interested. It's called Airscale. Here's a tl;dr of the tool;
-Create lead lists (Scrape Sales nav, Apollo, Linkedin, import a file via csv)
-Enrich, clean and segment your lists with 20+ data providers and AI (there's a waterfall enirchment for both emails and phones!)
-Export your lists to your CRM / Email sequencing tool
So even if you stay with Apollo's freemium plan, you could scrape the prospects and import them to Airscale for free. Then you could find the emails, verify their deliverability, find mobile phone numbers - and much more - all within one platform.
There's a free trial and If you're interested I wouldn't mind adding more credits to your account so you can try it extensively. Let me know!
Thank you Victor!
I will look into it.
It slightly reminds me of Clay.
Expect a booking from me in the foreseeable future :D
Great :)
Talk to you soon!
Maybe you should, but apollo and lusha both have free credits... have you used up your free quota yet?
I did not know about Lusha.
Thank you for the heads-up!
I am using an iCloud email (odd), so my main problem now is not being able to send the email sequence from my iCloud email.
The free credits would not solve that :/
Also there are a bunch of other competitors... Worth googling for it - some specific to different target audiences. Who are you selling to?
Oh i see. Well i would suggest its important NOT to use icloud email to send cold email to people you find on leadgen tools like this.
I'm actually about to start - all the pros I've talked to have told me that it's important to send from a separate domain because if you get a bunch of people marking your cold emails as spam, it can affect the deliverability of your personal emails.
FWIW, I am using Mailmodo and Mailjet. Mailjet seems like their liberal free plan is a pretty good option for this.
Thank you!
I will modify according to your suggestions :D
Besides the deliverability of my personal emails, what worries me the most is the lack of rep that I might have if I use my icloud email without separate domain :D
As for the first question, I am selling to owners of 5-10 people businesses.
Right on. If its from [email protected] i think most prospects probably wouldn't take it seriously.
One thing i do pay for is $6 a month for email hosting from google for my domain. I feel like having alex at. fastmonitor.io is definitely necessary for me to close any b2b deal.
It's all about balancing cost-saving measures with strategic investments, especially in the early stages of a bootstrapped venture. Every penny counts when building a sustainable business. Thanks for sharing your insights!
Agreed. Sometimes though I feel guilty spending time to save money. I guess it depends how much…
Go live in the Netherlands. You’ll feel home.
60 USD could be cheap, but also can be super expensive if it doesn't bring in any values or revenue. You have to put the expense in the context of financial budget plan. Us indie hacker often use our judgment or our gut to assess things, not using the actual data. Numbers never lie.
Yeah unfortautely at this early stage i dont have much in the way of numbers. Just a few users and a few hundred dllars in total revenue.