{"id":2713,"date":"2018-02-03T12:23:09","date_gmt":"2018-02-03T18:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=2713"},"modified":"2018-02-03T12:23:09","modified_gmt":"2018-02-03T18:23:09","slug":"interview-with-a-early-stage-saas-founder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2713","title":{"rendered":"Interview with a early stage SaaS founder"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

——-<\/p>\n

Why did you come up with this product?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It began as a desire to fill my own need, for a lightweight and inexpensive place to manage small local tech events. It seemed<\/strong> 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. <\/p>\n

What do you hope to achieve with this app?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a> and I anticipate some complementary lift between the two.<\/p>\n

How much research did you do before plunging in and writing it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Who is the product aimed at?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What would make you consider this product a success?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right now, success is getting ten paying, happy customers and getting things dialed in to their needs. I subscribe to Patrick McKenzie’s wisdom<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

——-<\/p>\n

You can find out more about Corey, including why he’s moving to Cleveland<\/a>, at his website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,33,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","category-useful-tools","category-web-applications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2713"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2716,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2713\/revisions\/2716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}