interview.md

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

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.

What motivated you to get started with SnapShooter?

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.

What went into building the initial product?

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.

How have you attracted users and grown SnapShooter?

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.

My best channel to attract new customers has been the DigitalOcean community products pages. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/projects/snapshooter-daily-to-hourly-backups-of-droplets-volumes SnapShooter is listed as the 15th most popular project. I also try to be active on the community questions without been spammy, only providing links back to myself when it is relevant to the conversation.

In November 2017, I placed an advert on Laravel News Podcast and got my best ROI result, increasing MRR by $160. The advert cost me $300, so it was only going to take me two months to recover that income.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

As I mainly consult and I have not stopped or reduced my workload revenue could almost be seen as pure profit. I use stripe for monthly subscription collection as this is the easist to setup and my users seem to trust it well.

My biggest expence has been sponcering podcasts and websites the results have slowely paid for themselfs, its just difficult when you spend all of the MMR on one advert and have to wait 2-3 months to recover your investment. I really need to explore different soruces of customer acquisition.

• important: at least 4-5 data points of monthly revenue numbers, so I can add an interactive graph see this cvs has it all in https://gist.github.com/mrsimonbennett/852022c03951c60ce2cf3527f6475ec5

What are your goals for the future?

My ultimate goal is to convert 100% of my income from SAAS projects. I am alot of closer to that than I was a year ago but I have a long way to go. It would be nice to continne my growth with the goal of achiving 20% month on month. Achieving this is going to be a mega challenge, I will have to do everything I can to push the needle forward.

I would like to launch more products, but its hard when you have one product making money and it seems better to double down on whats already working.

What are the biggest challenges you've faced and obstacles you've overcome? If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

The first thing I would have done was charge more, I started way to cheap. In my mind if I charged a customer $1 I would be able to get thousands of users registed and intrested. Increating my prices has been my best move over the last 12 months and the users who pay the organial prices have long churned away.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I have been surounded by other people doing the same thing to be the best helpful method to starting up.

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Jim Rohn

Having people in the same boat as well as people ahead and behind of you in the process is a great way to learn and progress.

What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out?

My simple advice would be to start small, a tweet, a blog post and if your going to make software don't spend to long. Keep your idea small especially if its your first time. Focus on the business goals and forget about the rest for making sure there is a refund process or sending welcome emails, if you can manually do someone don't program it, ship it instead and worry about that when you get sick of sending welcome emails. I still have a collection of 10 mysql queries I use to monitor SnapShooter one day I might build a admin. This is the biggest mistake I see, people worrying about tiny desisions that don't really inpact the business logic.

Where can we go to learn more?

First please go and checkout SnapShooter if your on DigitalOcean and start backing up your servers, if you only have one droplet we provide a basic version.

You can also check me out personally on twitter @mrsimonbennett

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the app, and if you have any questions at all please let me know in the comments below!