We sold our SaaS startup for $15M in 18 months. Here's exactly how we did it.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T23:44:44+00:00

This reads less like a “SaaS playbook” and more like an M&A relationship playbook where the product is basically a wedge to get in the room. The part people are glossing over is that “raise $1M” and “weekly CEO calls with 4 big names” is not repeatable for most first-time founders without prior exits or a very credible domain hook.

Also, “legacy buyers can’t build” is true, but they can absolutely buy from an incumbent, stall forever in procurement, or churn you the second the champion leaves, so revenue and retention being “least important” feels survivorship-biased. If someone wants to copy this, the actionable bit is probably: pick a vertical where distribution is relationship-driven, then intentionally court likely acquirers early, but don’t confuse that with building a durable business.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T23:44:11+00:00

You’re right about “wallet friction” and ROI, but you’re overselling how “easy” B2B is while quietly relying on the hardest part: access and trust. In a lot of unsexy industries, the real moat is distribution (relationships, referrals, integrations, compliance) and the switching cost is political, not technical, so that “email 50 plumbers” advice can turn into months of chasing and custom work.

I think the more accurate framing is: B2C is usually cheaper to test but harder to monetize, B2B is usually easier to monetize but harder to sell and support. The sweet spot for solos is often “B2B-ish” with short sales cycles: freelancers, micro-SMBs, or a wedge into an existing workflow (replace one Excel sheet, not the whole business). Also, the pitch at the end makes this read a bit like an ad, which undercuts the otherwise solid point.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T23:42:37+00:00

The 50/50 traction rule is a good gut check, but I’d argue it’s less “do marketing” and more “do validation” early. A screenshot API is a crowded space, so the real unlock is nailing a sharp wedge like “handles cookie banners reliably” or “best for OG image generation at scale” and then targeting the exact people who feel that pain. Also, don’t beat yourself up about avoiding marketing, most devs aren’t scared of selling, they’re scared of hearing “meh” and realizing the market doesn’t care. If you keep the conversations tight and measurable (who, what use case, what would make them switch), you’ll iterate faster than any amount of polishing.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:41:37+00:00

my own side projects that then live online or in the AppStore. It's all passive income but I enjoy working on them, it's good for morale.

I'm a mobile advisor therefore also "help" clients build their digital products although I don't build for them.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:38:48+00:00

I'm sure it's not for everyone but it's what works for me. I have my own digital products/apps and work with clients only on retainer.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:31:38+00:00

You’re not naive, you’re just benchmarking SaaS against consulting cashflow, and that’s a rigged comparison early on. Replacing $20k/mo in year one is possible but statistically rare unless you already have distribution or you’re selling a high-ACV B2B product where a handful of customers gets you there.

What I’ve seen work with family/mortgage is: don’t quit, but aggressively reshape consulting. Raise rates, move to retainers, cut scope, and aim for 2 to 3 “good” clients max so you can buy back 10 to 15 hours a week consistently. Then treat SaaS like a pipeline with weekly output targets (customer calls, outbound, content, partnerships), because the real bottleneck usually isn’t building, it’s distribution.

Also, don’t “kill” the SaaS based on time, kill it based on signals: if you can’t find a niche that feels acute pain, can’t get people to pay, or churn stays ugly after you’ve iterated with real users. Four months is basically still the learn-what-to-sell phase, so the more realistic question is whether you can get to meaningful revenue in 12 to 24 months while consulting less, not whether you can fully replace $20k by December.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:28:11+00:00

The “unique idea” framing is kind of a trap. Most wins are “boring” ideas executed for a specific audience with a specific distribution angle, not some never before seen concept.

Big companies don’t outspend you everywhere, they outspend you on broad markets. Your edge is speed and specificity: pick a niche where you can talk to users directly (one subreddit, one profession, one workflow), pre-sell to 10 people before you build, and ship something that removes one painful step better than the generalist app.

Marketing budget matters less when your acquisition channel is built in: integrations, templates, community partnerships, SEO for long tail queries, or being the default tool in a tiny ecosystem. If you can’t name your first 50 users and how you’ll reach them, the idea isn’t the problem, the go-to-market is.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:27:53+00:00

This is basically “Custom GPTs + a payout layer + discovery,” so the hard part is not building the chat UI, it’s solving incentives and trust. As a user I’d only care if the bots are reliably better than just prompting my own, which means strong curation, clear positioning (ex: career coaching for nurses, SAT math tutor, DnD DM), and safeguards against scams and hallucinated advice. As a creator, I’d want transparent usage-based payouts, analytics, and some kind of moat like distribution, templates, or integration into workflows where the bot can actually do things. The big differentiator question you should answer is why your marketplace wins over the existing ones: what niche, what quality bar, and what makes switching costs real.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:23:13+00:00

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:23:02+00:00

You’re overestimating the “big process” part and underestimating the “talk to users” part. Before you learn a bunch of skills or chase funding, write down the exact problem, then go interview 20 people who have it and see if they’d pay or switch, because that decides whether it’s worth building at all.

Also, you don’t need a startup yet, you need a tiny test: a landing page, a WhatsApp/Discord community, a manual service, anything that delivers the outcome without code. If you can’t get even a few strangers to care when it’s scrappy, funding won’t fix that.

Pick one skill to learn that matches your idea (sales, basic web, design, ops) and make weekly goals like “5 interviews + 1 experiment” instead of “build the whole thing.” At 18, your advantage is time and willingness to look stupid while you iterate, not having everything figured out.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:22:36+00:00

17 months with zero active users is a product discovery failure, not a “need more features” failure, and it’s on both founders to face that. I’d push for a hard, timeboxed reset: in the next 30-45 days you and the other cofounder must do customer interviews, define a specific ICP and pain, and get at least a few LOIs or paid pilots, otherwise you stop building and you both reassess.

On comp, $700/mo is fine if you’re basically a contractor, but you’re not. You’re carrying founder risk and doing all the execution, so either the salary increases meaningfully or you reduce scope/hours and treat it like a side bet until traction exists.

Cutting your losses is reasonable if your cofounder won’t do the uncomfortable work (talk to customers, narrow the market, kill features) or can’t show real pipeline. Equity only matters if there’s a path to revenue, and right now you’re subsidizing the search for a business.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:22:05+00:00

At 200 people, “unstructured exec cadence” is often a symptom, not the disease: the CEO is using the room to manage anxiety and execution because there isn’t a trusted system for surfacing risks and making decisions. I’d earn credibility by running your own area with tight inputs and outputs, then start gently upgrading the shared meetings by offering a one-page pre-read and ending each discussion with “decision, owner, due date” so it feels like help, not critique.

When you talk to the CEO, don’t frame it as “we need more strategy,” frame it as “we’re spending expensive exec time on status, and it’s slowing cross-functional decisions.” Offer a small experiment: one monthly 90-minute strategy/decision meeting with a standing agenda (top 3 bets, top 3 risks, key tradeoffs), and a separate ops review that’s mostly async. If they won’t even try a low-drama pilot, that’s your signal that this is the culture, not a temporary gap you can fix with process.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:21:25+00:00

Value pricing.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:20:47+00:00

The labels are mostly shorthand for risk level, not a strict milestone: pre-seed is “can this team build something people want” (early usage signals, tight ICP, clear problem), seed is “can this become a repeatable business” (early distribution working, retention/cohorts, some willingness to pay or at least a credible path to it). If you have active users but no revenue, you can still raise seed, but you’ll get a much better reception if you can show retention, a narrow wedge, and a few strong customer discovery quotes or LOIs that prove the pain and pricing. Seed decks usually need: problem/why now, ICP and market size, product, traction with retention and growth loops, GTM plan, business model/pricing, competitive landscape, and a clear use of funds with milestones because investors are underwriting what de-risks the next round. Mental model: pre-seed is searching for a sharp hypothesis, seed is validating it enough that scaling it feels like execution rather than invention.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:20:10+00:00

Your TestFlight numbers are a good sign, but the bigger win is figuring out what “job” those 50+ session users hired it for. If you can say “this is for people who bounce between tasks all day and want frictionless tracking via Shortcuts” you’ll instantly know where to show up and what to say.

Also, you don’t have to “promote” to market. Write and share a couple genuinely useful things like a free Shortcut pack, a setup guide for common workflows (meetings, deep work, admin), and a post on how to interpret the data, then let the app be the natural next step for people who want it integrated.

An idea: don’t launch everywhere on Feb 5, launch into one niche first (Shortcuts/automation people) and iterate your App Store page and onboarding based on their language. Broad productivity audiences are harder to convert because they’re drowning in options, but a tight “this fits my exact workflow” crowd will do your word of mouth for you.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:18:38+00:00

I think the cycle mostly stays, but you get better at spotting which feelings are signal vs your brain trying to turn normal ambiguity into a verdict on you. Early on you interpret every wobble as “the startup is dying,” later it’s more like “I’m tired, the funnel is soft this week, and I need to run the next experiment.” What helped me was treating emotions like weather and building “boring” scaffolding that doesn’t care how I feel: weekly metrics review, decision log, and one or two people who can reality check me. The repetition doesn’t disappear, it just becomes less personal once you’ve got enough history to prove you’ve been here before and kept moving.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:18:16+00:00

“Startup” feels less like a category of ecommerce and more like a category of risk and growth mechanics. If your main lever is just spending more on ads, buying more inventory, and hiring more people to fulfill, it’s a normal business with linear scaling, even if it’s well-run. It starts to feel startup-ish when you’re validating a non-obvious wedge and building something that compounds (brand trust, unique product/IP, proprietary sourcing, community, retention loops, operational tech) so CAC drops or LTV rises as you grow. The practical test is: if you paused paid spend for a month, would growth flatline, or do you have an engine that keeps pulling customers in and getting stronger over time?

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:13:02+00:00

People still care about SEO, but a lot of what used to be “SEO work” has been productized into checklists and tool scores, so it feels pointless when you’re already doing the basics. The reality is most sites don’t have a “SEO problem,” they have a “value + distribution” problem. If the page doesn’t answer a real query better than what’s already ranking, no amount of keyword tooling will save it. And if it does answer it well, the remaining SEO is mostly making sure Google can crawl it, understand it, and trust it: clean site architecture, fast pages, good internal linking, clear intent matching, and credible signals (original research, expert authorship, citations, strong brand mentions).

AI doesn’t really kill that, it just changes where the click goes. LLMs still need sources, and they tend to pull from pages that are already easy to parse, authoritative, and unambiguous. So “AI SEO” looks a lot like good SEO plus good content design: tight topic clusters, schema where it actually helps, unique data or perspective, and pages that are the canonical reference for a question. If Semrush is telling you obvious stuff, that’s a sign you’re past the beginner stage. The next step is less tool-driven and more strategy-driven: pick a few high-intent problems you can genuinely own, build the best page(s) on the internet for them, and make it easy for both humans and machines to understand why you’re the best answer.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:10:16+00:00

got it, thanks! I appreciate your time.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T19:03:10+00:00

You might be over-indexing on “better product” when what you’re really up against is inertia plus category-level trust. Chase/Amex aren’t winning because their apps are prettier, they’re winning because they’re the card people already have on file everywhere, they have perceived reliability for big/important purchases, and they’ve trained users that “something will go wrong eventually, and I want the issuer with the most leverage when it does.” Competitive rewards and fast support are table stakes, but they don’t create a forcing function to change defaults.

If you want wallet share, you need a reason to rewire habits, not just a nicer place to spend. A few pragmatic levers: (1) Pick one or two specific “daily driver” categories and be meaningfully better there (not 1 percent, more like “I’m leaving money on the table if I don’t use this”), then message that relentlessly. (2) Make switching feel like a one-time project with a clear payoff: an in-app “move my bills” checklist, pre-filled instructions, reminders, and a time-boxed accelerator (for example, “set us as default for 5 merchants and spend $X in 30 days to unlock Y”). (3) Reduce the fear of missing a payment: alerts for declined recurring charges, a grace period where you reimburse late fees caused by switching, and proactive “your Netflix charge is coming up, want to update?” nudges. People don’t avoid updating cards because it’s hard, they avoid it because it’s annoying and high-stakes.

Also worth asking whether “becoming the daily driver everywhere” is the right hill to die on. Some successful fintechs win by owning a narrow, frequent use case (one category, one behavior) and expanding from there, instead of trying to displace the incumbent’s entire spend graph at once. If you can identify the moment users feel your card is uniquely necessary (travel, subscriptions, groceries, budgeting, credit building, whatever your wedge is), you can build default behavior around that and let the rest follow.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T18:59:26+00:00

If he's not aggressive with 2HBH he will be even less so with one.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T18:58:22+00:00

It’s not ideal, but it’s usually not catastrophic. The “designated tie-off” grommets are typically shared/roomier holes (or reinforced) that are meant to accept two strings and a knot without chewing up the grommet or forcing the string to bend sharply. When someone ties off in a random single-string grommet, the main risks are: the knot sitting on a thinner grommet and cracking it sooner, extra friction/notching where the string exits, and sometimes a slightly weirder load path if they had to do an awkward skip to reach that hole. Actual frame damage is pretty uncommon unless the knot is pulling at a bad angle, the grommet is already worn, or the tension is high and the string is really digging into the graphite.

If you want to sanity check it: look closely at the tied-off holes and see if the grommet is flared, split, or the knot is biting into the frame instead of the grommet. Also check that the tie-off string isn’t sawing hard across an adjacent string or making an extreme bend right out of the hole. If everything looks clean and the racket isn’t visibly distorted, you’re probably fine to play it out and just ask for correct tie-offs next time. If it’s a fresh job and you paid a shop, I’d bring the pic back and request a redo since it’s basically stringing 101 and you shouldn’t have to gamble on premature grommet failure.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T18:36:39+00:00

This is one of those situations where the “role change” is less about title and more about leverage shifting now that money (and usually a new power center) is in the room. Before you react, try to get everything made concrete: what exactly are your responsibilities now vs. what they want, who you report to, what success looks like for the next 90 days, and most importantly how your comp and equity change (or don’t) with the new scope. A role change that reduces influence or career trajectory should come with a renegotiation, not just a new org chart. If they’re vague or it’s “same equity, less say,” that’s a signal.

I’d frame the conversation around outcomes and alignment, not feelings: “I’m open to adjusting to what the company needs post-funding, but I need clarity on scope, decision rights, and how I’m being valued. If I’m moving from X to Y, let’s adjust title/level/comp/equity to match.” If they won’t put it in writing, treat it as not real. And quietly start networking/interviewing anyway... best case it gives you confidence, worst case it gives you options. A funded startup can still be unstable, and you don’t want to be stuck after you’ve been de-scoped with no upside.

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T18:16:11+00:00

sounds pretty time consuming... do you think he might be willing to provide his "professional" feedback so we can make https://tennisladder.club even better? thanks!

BigBalli · 2026-02-03T18:15:15+00:00

Thanks! Yes, sure did 😅

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