I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it.

A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with the pandemic, I had very little motivation let alone travel anywhere. It took me 3 months to do research and plan out the architecture to the last detail.

I looked at some of the B2C bootstrappers offering a lifetime deal and getting success. That's possible because they don't have a huge recurring cost with each customer, but in B2B SaaS, you have a recurring cost with each customer.

But I thought let me add and see how it goes. So added a lifetime deal with for $199. At that time I posted it on Hacker News [2] and it made it to the front page and all the lifetime deals were over in 12 hours. Then I added $299 which got over during the week. So far I made over $9000 and got more than 25 customers.

Even though it might not be profitable in the long run, I got the cashflow and customers in less time and it removed the pressure to chase customers. Now I can focus on the product.

One of the biggest challenges of a SaaS startup is to acquire the first 50 customers. I have seen many startups achieve this over 6 to 12 months, some even a few years. But with this initial business model, I have cashflow for a year which is the best thing that can happen to a B2B SaaS. Lifetime deals can be a powerful way to get initial customers especially when you are getting started.

[1] https://simpleops.io/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23880071