Title: I'm working on a web startup with a partner and I'm just feeling unsure of whether whole SaaS thing <i>really</i> works.  Maybe it's because I'm personally reluctant to pay for stuff online, but I feel like some of my enthusiasm for this thing is waning because I'm doubting whether anyone really pays for anything.<p>I mean, I've read all the success stories about the YC companies and other web startups, I've read the "Autopsy of a web app" article that the Particletree guys wrote (awesome, btw).  But I would love to see more numbers, as well as hear success stories from others, no matter how small.<p>To be blunt, though, I have a hard time believing that people will really sign up and pay for this in the numbers that we need.  Our service isn't that expensive, starting at about $20 / month, and we need about 500 paying users to be "ramen profitable".  But once we get to several thousand users, things start to get really interesting.  Is that at all realistic?<p>I know it's heavily dependent on the market, what value we add, etc, but to give you an idea, our target market is primarily small companies, tech startups, bloggers, and others with a strong online presence.  Probably a little smaller than the market for something like Basecamp, but similar in nature.<p>Bottom line: is it unrealistic to think that we can get 5000 users paying $20 / month?  I know this is an unrealistic question to ask without more info, but I'm just trying to get an idea of what the upper limit of realistic expectations is.  If a company like 37 signals only has 2,000 paying users for Basecamp, then I don't feel great about our chances.  But if they have 200,000 paying users, I feel better about it.  I just literally have no idea of what's realistic in terms of the size of a paying userbase.  I know that others will be reluctant to post their numbers, but perhaps you can post them under a different account name or something?  I would absolutely love to know how many paying users you have.  Help a fellow entrepreneur out here :-)
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