We spent ~$70,000 and 9 months of dev time to put an "Add Domain" button in the @hostifi_net dashboard

Here's the story We're managing over 2,000 VPS instances with 4,000+ domain SSLs that need to be renewed every 3 months (with @letsencrypt)

Over the years we built up internal tools and processes to simplify the SSL management

A friend gave me a deep dive on the sales team structure at a mostly bootstrapped $10M ARR SaaS business

Here's what I learned: There are two main roles:

Account Executive
• Hunts for leads and moves inbound leads
• Closer (does meetings and follow ups)

Business Development Representative
• Hunts for leads or moves inbound leads
• Schedules meetings for AE to close

How do I build a sales team? The response to this was incredible. Thanks everyone!

Here's what I decided to get started with:

• Realized I need to create the sales process before building a team
• Signed up for @pipedrive
• Configured the integrations for Gmail, @intercom, @demodesk, and @aircall

It took me 4 years to figure out how to build a business from $0 to $100K/year in 1 year $0 to $100K/year in 1 year was the easy part

It wasn’t hard to stay motivated because I could see the incremental progress each month

I now own 1,024 public IPv4 addresses which are worth $60K

It took 3 months on ARIN's waitlist and it cost $500

I can do this a max of 3 more times, 90 days between each request

In the end: 1 year wait, $244K+ worth of IPs, only $2K in fees

Here's how First, a brief history -

• 1960s APRANET invented TCP/IP
• 1980 IPv4 formalized with 4.2 billion addresses
• 1998 IPv6 created as a replacement with 340 undecillion addresses
• 2011-2015 All registries exhausted their IPv4 pools
• 2022 IPv4 blocks selling for $60/IP

The buy, borrow, die method of avoiding income tax isn't just for the ultra wealthy

Someone should write a handbook on this topic for the average American and small business owner

Here's what I've learned so far: First, a short intro on what buy, borrow, die is:

1. Buy - or build an asset like a house, business, stock
2. Borrow - When it appreciates, instead of selling and paying income tax, get a loan against it
3. Die - Pass down assets, instead of cash, tax free

I was fired from my job making $95K per year

Now I make $95K every month

https://twitter.com/_rchase_/status/1088904615532417025

I was in Mexico last week with @tylertringas and he asked me if I'm ever going to stop dunking on Sentinel

I said "Yeah, I'm over it"

But maybe it just never gets old to me

This is for everyone who's ever worked for someone who made you feel like you weren't shit 🍻

A hacker submitted a bug bounty to me recently - he was able to send emails pretending to be support@hostifi.com and wasn't blocked due to our DMARC policy

As a result, I spent a few hours getting familiar with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC and was able to fix it

Here's what I learned: First, you can check if DMARC is set up correctly using this site. Mine is working now as you can see:
mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx…

I met with a top 10 VC firm this week.

The call lasted 21 minutes.

Here's how it went...

First 10 minutes: VC
<Heavily scripted introduction about company history and investments including Facebook, Etsy, 1Password and many other well known startups. Makes a pretty far off guess about what my business does.>

Next 5 minutes:

I shutdown our WordPress site today

It generated $1.3M in its 3 year life

Over $100K last month alone!

All processed by @eddwp plugins and some Python code I hastily wrote from my 2 bedroom apartment in Grand Rapids on weeknights while my girlfriend was working second shift... Here's what the original dashboard looked like

I made a million dollars in SaaS 🤑 This is a dream 3.5 years in the making for me.

It began in January 2018 when I read @MJDeMarco's book "The Millionaire Fastlane" and decided I wanted to start a SaaS because I read that it was a great business model.

On my reading list today, thanks @jasonlk:
saastr.com/growth-burn-ra…

If you know of any other recommended reading for growing SaaS from $1M to $10M ARR let me know! It was interesting read, but a very different world

At $1M ARR, average was losing money, burning $1.04M per year

At $1M ARR HostiFi would be at over 50% profit, even after paying my own salary

Average growth was 20%

HostiFi over the last 3 month average is only 7.5%

Who's running the best productized video editing service right now?

Looking for someone I can send boring screen + webcam recorded tutorials to and get back something more pro looking with intro, transitions, outro... maybe output some short clips for social media snippets too cc: @Vinrob!

In 2014 I was in a few hacking forums

I learned more about programming and cybersecurity in a few months than I would later in 4 years of college

I remember talking with the American author of NanoCore RAT and the Romanian author of CyberSeal crypter about their businesses I had purchased NanoCore RAT, it was $25 for a lifetime license, and CyberSeal crypter, $79 lifetime IIRC

When used together, you could build RAT for Windows PCs which was Fully UnDetectable by antivirus programs (FUD)

How I grew @hostifi_net from $28K to $151K ARR in 10 months [January to October 2019] 👇 January $28K to $37K ARR

- Set a goal to get to $100K ARR by end of year
- Was fired from my job, went fulltime on my business
- Applied to investment funds

https://twitter.com/_rchase_/status/1091530983629881344

2 years ago I was fired from my job.

I'll never forget how it felt.

26 years old. I had just bought my first house with my girlfriend. 5 acres, 3 cars, a boat, a cat, a dog. My side businesses were getting traction.

It was a great life.

Then my manager threw a grenade in it.

https://twitter.com/_rchase_/status/1082421530934554624

HostiFi was making $2k/month revenue, only about half was profit.

It wasn't enough to pay the bills, and I had spent my life savings 6 months earlier on the the house down payment.

I only had enough savings left to make the mortgage payment for 3 more months.

Something that I'd like to hack on if I get some time: is there any way we can create an exploit inside of a .unf file? Social engineering required to get someone to restore from it, but once restored, RCE. github.com/zhangyoufu/uni… hmmm

✅ 0 - 10 customers
✅ 10 - 100 customers
✅ 100 - 1,000 customers
⏳ 1,000 - 10,000 customers

I made it to 1,000 customers mostly with short-term sales tactics, and if you're micro-SaaS, maybe you can too

(thread 👇)

https://twitter.com/_rchase_/status/1049794689690406912

Here's the short-term vs. long-term marketing strategies in the article above which we're using today (at 1,082 subscribers)

I put a 🤔 next to things I used to do personally until I hired. Now we both do them manually. Not sure if that counts as short or long-term strategy?

I've been a hobbyist programmer for 5 years and now I'm trying to transition to become more of a professional.

That means I have to learn how to work with a team of developers instead of solo, use OOP (properly), lint, and unit test. All things I've never done before. I met with @nzupan today about it. He's a mentor at @earnestcapital and a very skilled #Python developer.

He looked at my code, told me I'm on the right track with my classes and structure, recommended how I can add linting to it, and suggested a few books to read.

Should you have a free plan for your SaaS?

Here's what I think after serving 2,000 free plan users on @hostifi_net... No.

Slack for SaaS marketing

1. Join Slack communities where your potential customers hang out
2. Change display name to "Your Name (Your Company)"
3. Set up keyword notifications to jump into conversations where you can provide value Twitter for SaaS marketing

1. Open tweetdeck.twitter.com
2. Track relevant keywords, hashtags, and users in your space
3. Join in on discussions where you can add value