Making your first dollar from a SaaS project
To share our experience (we sell SAAS in financial services): our first solution took us 6+ months of development (one person) to get our MVP launched and another year to get people to use it actively without active outbound selling (that is to say it was sold but we had to hold your hand the whole way through).<p>Some thoughts: internally we consider the &quot;V&quot; in MVP to encompass not just what is the minimum you need to do to solve a problem but the minimum to solve a problem (worth solving) at a level someone is willing to pay you for the solution. That often is more extensive than a traditional MVP which is why SAAS solutions require so much up front development. Consumers are not fond of subscribing to services and businesses don&#x27;t like beta products.<p>A couple additional thoughts as we now actively sell 4 SAAS services:<p>- to be successful in SAAS you need to build something people need. They say there are two types of businesses: painkillers and vitamins. If you&#x27;re a vitamin you are 20x more likely to fail than a pain killer. The value prop is just too hard to communicate and people&#x27;s attention spans are too limited 
- the more you understand the user &#x2F; workflow &#x2F; domain the better. I realize this may sound obvious but I do my best to pay forward the mentorship I received and I am shocked at how often I come across people trying to solve other people&#x27;s problems as an outsider.<p>- with the exception of notable billion dollar startups we all love and read about daily, I believe the dream of &quot;build it and they will come (register, put in their credit card and bam you&#x27;re done) is just that, a dream. Yes organic growth is real but all my buddies who have successful SAAS companies spent a ton of time and effort selling them before that organic growth kicked off. This could be an east coast vs west coast thing as my network is hitting niche workflows but worth sharing regardless.