How do you differentiate between persistence or stuborness. I have been developing a SaaS product since 2020 which currently is at 3K ARR with a very slow growth (20% YoY). It's a B2B and are we are still missing a bunch of features to make us on par with competitors. We did survive a couple of competitors that came and go as we still have our day jobs and running it costs peanuts ($$$).
It often feels I should give up but having had customers who used us for years makes me think we have something that one day will make serious money.
How do you differentiate between persistence or stuborness. I have been developing a SaaS product since 2020 which currently is at 3K ARR with a very slow growth (20%). It's a B2B and are we are still missing a bunch of features to make us on par with competitors. We did survive a couple of competitors that came and go as we still have our day jobs and running it costs peanuts ($$$).
It often feels I should give up but having had customers who used us for years makes me think we have something that one day will make serious money.
Are your existing customers vocal about what they love or wish you'd add? Do you know how they found you and what made them choose you over competitors? Is there a niche/segment within your larger TAM with a specific pain point you're solving really well? And how big is that segment?
Either way, if your existing customers don't all come from paid channels, and they're loyal, and you've outlasted multiple competitors, that already sounds like a real achievement to me. My progress was slow for years before things started to really pick up, so don't discount signs of traction if there are some meaningful ones.
Very vocal, we do have a very solid TODO list for another 12 months. They are also quite loyal and number of them are with us for 3+ years and they use software daily (its just a very small customer list overall). I do wonder sometimes why they stay with us given other competitors are much better. We mostly grew through word of mouth and cold emails. I believe we are already solving a fairly niche use case (TAM is few thousand customers in USA) and my idea is to grow revenue enough to go after larger TAM (several milion).
Word-of-mouth growth sounds like a good sign. And depending on your goals, sometimes building a defensible niche business, maximizing ARPU, and minimizing churn can be better than chasing the mass market. Could something like a referral program potentially move the needle?
I completed PhD in the top 5 CS programs in the world.
One of my first meetings to present my topic to my thesis committee had a leader in my field (a world-wide expert in the field and one of the founding fathers that particular area) say: "This idea is bullshit and I can't even bother to tell you why" That was the only thing he said.
Of course, I defended PhD on the same subject 4 years later and other leading scientist and his competitor said the idea was brilliant :D
Would this not make a total sense if you assumed that Ukrainians wanted to get Russians out of Chernobyl and what not better way than having Russian soldiers read news that radioactivity in the area is at all time high? Secondly, a news in the West that Russians are possibly messing up with nuclear infrastructure would only encourage support for Ukraine.
In this context seems like a win/win situation for Ukraine. The might loose some credibility but if a true disaster happens independent inspectors can be flew in on day's notice and take measurements.
Yeah besides that, Russia is very big on fake news and misdirection themselves. It makes total sense to turn their own trick back on them. Remember when they shot down MH17 and fabricated all sorts of fake radar images to pretend it was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter?
And yeah really good idea to scare the shit out of their soldiers to undermine morale. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have had much effect.
The readings from a few sensors really have no importance compared to your civilians being systematically executed like in Bucha.
A number of surveys has been done over the last few years and Polish people have a quite strong views on Russia, opposite to what you think.
In fact, we have the most unfavourable view on Russia in the world... 97% of Poles view Russia unfavourably [1]. There is a reason why Poland took on 1M+ Ukrainian refugees and continues to supply weapons and being major hub for American/European operations.
I took part in GSoC in 2007, it change my whole life. Coming from Eastern Europe and with very little English it exposed me to experienced engineers from Silicon Valley that I would never think to contact. That lead to an internship at NASA a year after, and those references lead to a Ph.D. from Ivy League and a career in AI. That short acceptance letter turned to my life upside down and I can't be more grateful that Google is still doing it for another generation of engineers.
Snap! 2007 was my year too, and yes, it really sparked everything for me.
Very new to the community, my accepted GSoC project was adding some features to an XMPP library. I discovered recently that this library is in use by the Zoom desktop client.
Now, 15 years later, I'm the Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation and our organization is still participating in Google Summer of Code. It's great to have new people in the community, especially the ones for who GSoC is that same spark it was for me and many others, and the ones who stick around long after GSoC ends.
GSoC 2007 was also the year they gave us Karl Fogel's Producing Open-source Software book (he managed to sign every copy!). This amazing instruction manual, combined with the GSoC experience, gave me the confidence to launch my own open-source projects (such as the XMPP server software that powers things such as Jitsi Meet).
I'm really glad that the GSoC programme continues, and hope it will deliver the same kind of impact for new generations of developers and open-source projects.
There is a Polish saying that great Polish literature requires three people to suffer: the main character, the writer and the reader. If all three are suffering book becomes part of the school curriculum.
In Dutch literature it seems that the reader has to suffer while the author describes his newest niche fetish to the reader, usually teenagers in secondary school.
With the (sad?) consequence that many Dutch people never pick up another book by a Dutch author again. If there is one thing that school taught me about Dutch literature is that I want it to die, and I will only read books by foreign authors (especially English) out of spite.
It often feels I should give up but having had customers who used us for years makes me think we have something that one day will make serious money.