Just because they've decided to share their story so far, doesn't mean they think they've hit the jackpot already and are finished.
Depending on what you decide to do, it can mean any of the following:
- Paying the rent/mortgage and good food on the table. Nothing fancy but you'll survive even in the Bay Area as long as you live together.
- Ability to be picky with consulting clients or invest in longer sales cycles.
- Living in luxury on a beach in SE Asia while you figure out how to bootstrap the business.
All of the above are pretty fantastic imo. Not a finish line by any means but way more optionality than 98+% of the population.
What I'd be curious to learn is your margins, customer acquisition cost, support cost, and churn rate. And how this changes as you go from $5k to more than $5k/mo. This is where most SaaS companies falter.
If you can, you should talk about how you plan to market to reach the larger required revenue rates. This will necessarily require higher customer acquisition costs as your lowest hanging fruit will be quickly exhausted.
These needs for high acquisition rate drives up high customer acquisition costs, which eats at the margins. $5k in revenues is good, but the profits are not mentioned. Going from $5k to $50k will not scale margins linearly. Indeed, the need to multiply customers by 10 will necessarily increase customer acquisition costs (low hanging fruit will no longer be available) and increase overall churn (the "natural" churn rate applies).
If you wanted to make money in consulting, it certainly would be easier to just offer consulting services, and both margins and sustainable revenues would be higher. Perhaps you can use your SaaS app as a consulting marketing tool, but I don't see this app being used that way.
But for a team of 3 people, you can do much better than $5k just selling your time in consulting.
It's not clear how you'll get from $5k/mo (nice side-job income) to $50k/mo (Good bootstrapping income for team of 3) to $500k/mo (ok, now you have a business that scales).
I'm not being critical here -- It's just that SaaS math has me scratching my head wondering if all that work for all those customers with such small amounts to show for it is worth it.
Would you rather service 200 people for a total of $5k a month with 3 bodies to support or one solid consulting customer @ $5k+/month with just yourself to support?
I'd imagine that you'd want more revenue so you can have a business and not just lifestyle income to support one person. Going from 0 to $5k is one thing -- the advice here is good for that. But getting from $5k to $50k, where you need to be to have sustainable business for 3 people, will require much more substantial effort that's not clear you can achieve with these methods. Indeed, it is not even clear what your margins are at the $5k/mo revenue point and whether that will even be sustainable given the amount you'll need to spend on Customer Acquisition, Customer Support, and slaying the Customer Churn demons to retain your necessary high monthly subscription rates. This is where most SaaS companies die -- trying to achieve this necessary transition.