Good Morning! I'm Simon Bennett, a 25 year old software enginneer from the UK. I've always enjoyed building projects for myself on the side and teaching developers. When I am not consulting I am working on my SaaS SnapShooter - a DigitalOcean backup server
SnapShooter provides a better and easier way for DigitalOcean users to backup there droplets and volumes. DigitalOcean are very limited in only offering a weekly backend and renation of the last 4. This was not good enough for me at work so I build a system that enables up to hourly. We also backup volumes which DigitalOcean has no backup support for.
Since the launch in Feburary to date, SnapShooter has taken 70,000 backups, managings 2000 droplets and volumes and has 22 paying customers at a MRR of $406.
I was consulting for a company who where managing hundreds of droplets, mostly WordPress and they needed a better way to backup after one of the WordPress servers was hacked. The weekly backup option provided by DigitalOcean was not frequent enough. Data loss cost everyone time and money. I did some research into the DigitalOcean api and realised it was totally possible to provide a better backup system, the idea of SnapShooter was born.
2-5 paragraphs; consider including...
- how you came up with the idea
- how you validated and/or evaluated the idea
- any expertise/background you had in this area
- alternative ideas you might have considered
- your financial/career situation at the time
As I have aforementioned SnapShooter was build to solve an issue we where having at work. We where dealing with hundreds of clients droplets and needed a easy way to keep them all backuped up. One of the main advatages of a whole server snapshot is the ease of confinence, restoring a damaged WordPress server needed to be a breeze.
So I got started in the evenings, while my 6 month old daughter was sleeping between feeds and my partner had gone to bed early to rest. In total it took 7 evenings to get the core of the backup system finsihed and tested and other week to ingergate in payment handing.
I knew my time was limited so was happy the products scope was simple. In the beginning load of features were skipped, no timezones, no daily,weekly and monthly retention polices. Just a simple set how often you want backups, how many old backups you want to keep and go.
2-5 paragraphs; consider including...
- focus on resources: the time, money, and skills that it took to create your initial product
- specifically, include how long it took from start to finish
- decisions you made on scope and features
- how you found the time to do this; working around a job, etc
- where you got the funding to do this
- breakdown of the technology/code you used if applicable
- people and products that helped you out
2-6 paragraphs; consider including...
- the when+where+how+results of your launch, if you had one
- steps to get initial users + how you snowballed that into more users
- if applicable, at least 4-5 data points of monthly traffic/customer numbers, so I can add an interactive graph
- breakdown of your efforts, e.g. cold emails, forum posts, friends/coworkers, advertising, landing pages, social media, newsletter, SEO, press and PR, app stores, marketplaces, partnerships, etc)
- don't just list what you did... also talk about how you did it and why it worked/failed
- growth advice/recommendations for aspiring entrepreneurs based on what you've learned
- for a great example of how to answer this question, check Cronitor's interview: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/cronitor
2-6 paragraphs; consider including...
- explanation of the different ways you make money
- story of how+when you started charging and got early customers
- details of your payment system (Stripe vs PayPal vs etc) if there's an interesting story there
- how much money you're making today
- what's caused your revenue to grow/fall (e.g. pricing changes, new features, new business models, churn, etc)
- tips/advice for aspiring entrepreneurs based on what you've learned here? any good advice you've come across that others should know?
- your expenses/margins, esp. if you're not a pure software biz or you have low margins
- important: at least 4-5 data points of monthly revenue numbers, so I can add an interactive graph
consider talking about…
- product goals, traffic goals, revenue goals, personal goals, etc
- how you plan to accomplish these goals
- any big roadblocks that lie ahead
What are the biggest challenges you've faced and obstacles you've overcome? If you had to start over, what would you do differently?
consider talking about...
- mistakes/poor decisions you made, missed opportunities, bad hiring or tech choices, things you got blindsided by, things that were hard for you to do, things you had to learn, other challenges/obstacles
- the lessons you learned, and how you applied them (or could have applied them)
consider talking about...
- books, products, people, and resources that helped you
- good decisions you made (e.g. product, marketing, etc)
- helpful habits/abilities/skills that you possess
- forces out of your control that helped, i.e. luck, timing, market trends
consider talking about...
- your top tips and learnings; things that might not be obvious
- mistakes you often see other people making
- any books or resources you think people could benefit from
- links to your website, Twitter, blog posts, etc
- a sentence inviting people to ask you questions in the comment section below your interview