Four years of running a SaaS in a competitive market

I almost skipped reading the article, thinking it was just another bragging/survivorship bias story. It wasn't. Thanks for sharing.

I want to add another anecdote: I built an app for creating certificates[1]. It was originally a case study for a book I'm writing, so I didn't think much of "target users". But then I decided to make it a real/standalone product. I was struggling to find real users.

Then, just by sheer coincidence, a friend shared his struggle with existing ticket sales platforms. I thought, "Hey, with what I've built so far, it's just like adding another 10% of work" (It wasn't). So I "expanded" the app to become a white-label ticket sales platform[2]. People started using it, and they also use the certificate generation feature ("Your app can create certs for attending events? Sweet!").

I don't know how to distill this into advice, but you get the idea. It's like a South Park meme: Step #1: Listen to users, Step #2: ???, Step #3: Profit!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43483919

[2] https://pentas.id/

What does create a cert for an event mean?

Some associations require their members to attend e.g workshops to collect credits. There's a minimum annual credits you need to collect otherwise you lose membership.

So it’s a proof you attended an event?

If it is how I think it is, then yes, it is a proof that you attended the event.

I'm not sure how it is in other countries, but in some countries (example: Brazil) some courses (like Computer Science) require you to have "additional hours", where these hours can be courses, lectures, etc related to the course.

To prove to the university that you did these courses, you need a certificate "proving" that you participated. Most of the time they are a PDF file with the name of the event, the date and your name in it.