🔗 Four years of running a SaaS in a competitive market

When I played around with the technology that would eventually become OnlineOrNot back in 2021, a quick search showed me that there were 200 listed alternatives to the tool I wanted to replace. I thought most of them sucked.

There are even more today.

Over the years, many more started and shut down a few months later (it turns out running a business in a highly competitive space doesn't make you rich overnight). Others raised VC money or were acquired by a private equity firm, and started their descent into enshittification.

I started work on OnlineOrNot because I wanted to build software that didn't have to get worse for its users in order to maximize shareholder value. In short, it's a self-funded, sustainable business that I intend to run for decades.

It's default-alive, as I keep a full time job so that I can build the business the way I want.

I've published one of these articles every year since starting, and there were things that I "learned" in the first year, that turned out to be total bullshit by the third year. So this article doesn't just look at the last 12 months, but across the entire lifetime of this business.