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Interview with a early stage SaaS founder

I had the chance to talk with my good friend and former colleague Corey Snipes about his SaaS project. He recently launched Meeting Star, a lightweight SaaS tool to help coordinate tech meetups. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Why did you come up with this product?

It began as a desire to fill my own need, for a lightweight and inexpensive place to manage small local tech events. It seemed like a fairly straightforward set of features, which wouldn’t take long to build and release as a product. (Don’t they always?) I was aware of several other tech meetup organizers who were looking for an alternative to meetup.com (often due to price, sometimes due to dislike of the feature set or UI). I did quite a bit of research last fall and didn’t find any suitable alternatives so I built it.

What do you hope to achieve with this app?

I have a few parallel interests here. I want a tool that’s useful to me as a meetup organizer. I want to leverage my experience building, marketing, and operating other software products — both my own, and for customers I’ve had over the years. I want to add a business line in my portfolio that provides value and makes people happy, while also being financially sustainable. I also run a separate, conference-related application and I anticipate some complementary lift between the two.

How much research did you do before plunging in and writing it?

Quite a bit. You can always do more, of course. I poked around online and found several lists, articles, and discussion threads about alternative platforms. I followed conversations of other meetup organizers discussing the relative merits of various methods. I made a list and tried seven or eight of what seemed like the top contender products. I was looking for a place to run my meetups, though, not specifically looking at competition. But in the end, everything was either trying to be a full-featured community management piece, or was such a terribly crafted alternative that I felt there were exactly zero real usable options for what I wanted to do.

Who is the product aimed at?

This particular [app] was born of my own needs, and I tend toward tech and entrepreneurship meetups. It’s well-suited to tech and software meetups. Those are the people in my network. Those are the meetups I attend and organize, and those are the users whose needs I can most easily identify and meet. Since it’s a reasonably lightweight application, it’s actually well-suited to many different kinds of groups, but software/tech/biz meetups are my focus.

What would make you consider this product a success?

Right now, success is getting ten paying, happy customers and getting things dialed in to their needs. I subscribe to Patrick McKenzie’s wisdom that the first ten customers are critical for turning your idea into something people want to use. And also, for proving it’s not a fluke. If you can get to ten, you can get to a hundred. And if you can get to a hundred, you can get to a thousand. For me, long-term success is a useful, sustainable product that has revenue to turn into improvements, runs smoothly, and maybe also puts a little money in my kids’ college fund.

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You can find out more about Corey, including why he’s moving to Cleveland, at his website.

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