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 150,000 backups, managings 2000 droplets and volumes and has 44 paying customers at a MRR of $834.

I was consulting for a company who were managing hundreds of droplets, mostly WordPress and they needed a better way to backup after one of there 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 on the DigitalOcean API and realised it was entirely possible to provide a better backup system, the idea of SnapShooter was born.

In my excitement to get a working version, I skipped the validation skip of any product other than talking to follow developers who thought it was a good idea. None of these initially interested developers has gone on to become customers. The process of building the prototype did not cost me anything other than a domain, a single DigitalOcean Droplet and my 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.

I took full advantage of how fast developing a Laravel application can be, using the background jobs to communicate with the DigitalOcean API as once a snapshot gets requested it can be a while before the backup was complete. Other than the scripts for creating, monitoring and deleting snapshots it's a basic CRUD application with payment processing using stripe.

My first customer was Justin Jackson from Tiny Marketing Wins and Product People Club as I knew he was using DigitalOcean for hosting the Discorse forum. I emailed him as soon as I launched 11th Feb 2017.

He signed up stright away! I had a little party and almost opened a bottle of champagne. Then nothing, no one signed up for almost two weeks, I got worried that about my lack of market research.

At the start of March, I made some pretty big improvements to SnapShooter mostly with the UI and self posted on ProductHunt on the 2nd of March, It may have been luck or might have had something todo with SnapChats IPO but I ended up on the home page and received my 88 updates and my next 3 customers.

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

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