Ask HN: When is it time to give up on a side project SaaS?
I think it takes a very long time to grow a SaaS. Think multiple years. I started 4.5 years ago and it took nearly 4 years until I felt fully comfortable. Slow growth is to be expected. My growth curve, in fact, isn&#x27;t a curve at all: it&#x27;s pretty much a straight line if you plot paying customers. It looks better for MRR (monthly recurring revenue, your main metric), because I&#x27;ve been working on raising ARPU (average revenue per user).<p>The &quot;long slow saas ramp of death&quot; is real. Google it.<p>You can supposedly grow faster if you do marketing well. But from what you wrote I&#x27;d guess that you do not do marketing well. My adventures with marketing came down to the following conclusions:<p>* Spending money on ads is basically burning money and does not work for me. (tried Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook ultra-targeted ads, Quora). This became painfully obvious after I implemented my own conversion tracking, because I did not trust their metrics&#x2F;analytics.<p>* You will find plenty of marketing experts all around you, but none of them will work for a commission, which speaks to how much trust they really place in their &quot;skills&quot;.<p>* Since I am a solo founder, I eventually decided that I&#x27;m OK with my organic growth and I&#x27;d rather concentrate on making the product better. This helps in building bigger product value, improves customer retention, allows me to raise the ARPU, and in general works great. I just don&#x27;t get the marketing-pumped stream of new customers. But I&#x27;m OK with that, especially at this point.<p>That said, I think I would expect more than 8 paying customers after a year. My ramp-up in the first year was slow (the product didn&#x27;t have a lot of value back then), but it was quicker. I just checked, and I had 25 paying customers after one year from the first one.