I’m at 21 paying customers and I still can’t tell if this is actually working
I’ve been bootstrapping an email hosting service for custom domains. Mostly small agencies and one-person businesses that don’t want to keep paying Google Workspace per user.
Right now it’s:
21 paying customers
88 domains
169 inboxes
No churn yet, but honestly I don’t think that means much. The oldest customers have only been around for a few weeks.
The part I’m struggling with is that I personally onboarded almost %20 of every single customer.
I helped with explaining DNS, migrated mailboxes, fixed weird Outlook/Apple Mail issues, answered messages on weekends, etc.
And it works. People seem to really value having an actual person help them move their email.
But obviously this doesn’t scale very far.
I could automate most of the onboarding, but then I’m also automating away one of the main reasons people choose a tiny provider like mine instead of Google/Microsoft.
I’m also not sure what number I should even care about at this stage.
21 customers sounds tiny.
169 inboxes feels a little more meaningful because one agency can start with 4 inboxes and eventually have 30 or 40. So maybe customer count isn’t even the right metric for this kind of business.
And “zero churn” sounds nice but I haven’t even reached the first annual renewal yet, so I’m basically ignoring it for now.
People have told me a lot that email hosting is a terrible market to enter. Mature, commoditized, low margins, huge incumbents, support heavy.
Maybe they’re right.
But 21 companies paid for it, so there’s at least something here. I just don’t know yet how much of a signal that is.
For people who have built B2B/infrastructure-ish SaaS before: at what point did you personally feel like “ok, this is actually working”?
Was it number of customers? retention? expansion inside existing accounts? something else?
Source: r/SaaS · by /u/Taniai_