a few days ago, I got my first paying customer for my SaaS.
$70.
I know that's not a lot of money, but honestly, seeing that payment come through felt pretty crazy.
I've been trying to make a SaaS work for almost 2 years now.
Before Announcify (my current SaaS), I built PDFQuizGen.
I got some traffic, people signed up, but nobody paid.
Eventually I moved on and started building Announcify.
Announcify is a changelog tool for SaaS companies.
The idea seemed pretty simple.
Help companies show users what they've shipped without having to build their own changelog system.
I spent months building it. GitHub integration, Linear integration, AI-generated changelogs, analytics, custom domains, different widget layouts, etc.
The problem was that I was spending way more time building than talking to people.
I'd tell myself I needed to finish one more feature first.
Then another one.
Then I would look at the analytics and see that barely anyone was visiting the site anyway.
At some point I realized I was probably just hiding behind development because it's easier to sit down and code than to actually find people and ask them to use something you've built.
So I started doing more marketing and talking to people directly.
That's how I met the person who eventually became my first customer.
He was building a CRM in Canada and signed up for Announcify.
He actually used it and started giving me feedback about what was missing for his use case.
There were a few things he needed before he was comfortable paying for it, including a Linear integration and some security improvements.
So I worked on those. I didn't know if he would actually pay when I started building them, so I asked him directly. He said he would.
A few weeks later, I finished everything and sent him a message. a few days ago, he paid. $70.
That's the whole thing.
There wasn't some huge launch that suddenly brought hundreds of users.
No viral tweet.
No Product Hunt #1.
No crazy growth hack.
It was basically one person who had a real problem, me talking to him, and then actually building what he needed.
And honestly, that's probably the most useful thing I've learned from the last couple of years.
I spent a lot of time worrying about traffic, SEO, landing pages, features, pricing, and all the other things you're supposed to worry about when building a SaaS.
But getting one person to actually care about the product taught me more than all of that.
I'm still very early.
One customer obviously doesn't mean I've figured out SaaS.
But after months of seeing $0 in revenue, having someone actually pay for something I built feels like a pretty big milestone.
Now I just need to do it again.
And then again.
If anyone else here is stuck at the people sign up but nobody pays stage, I'd honestly recommend talking to those people before building another feature.
I wish I'd done that much earlier.
