What if your SaaS/app is seasonal?
I have a tourism app which gets around ~10k installs/month during the summer season and ~20/month during the winter. Being in a seasonal niche feels like a roller-coaster, and the peak-dead periods are especially stressful.
Anyone else has seasonal SaaS/app? How do you handle the stress? How do you focus on growth?
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I have seen seasonal businesses before. What the owner did was to create a new business with the demand in the opposite season. Then merge the "operations - back office".
I know @spencerpauly had something similar.
Thanks @zerotousers for the tag!
So here's my take on this: Seasonality at first isn't a bad thing, in fact it's actually kinda nice. With some caveats.
I run a seasonal app for cross country skiers. I started this in college and this is one of my first indiehacking "ventures", so here's where the seasonality helped me:
The seasonality forced me to launch quick so I didn't "miss" the first season. This was crucial! And such a huge motivator. An external time clock saying "launch in a month or it's never going out" pushed me really hard. At the time, I didn't have as much discipline to push myself so I needed that.
The seasonality offered a natural "downtime" where I could make breaking changes. This isn't so relevant today, as I'm a more experienced programmer. But, the first off-season I switched my backend from NoSQL to SQL and even took the entire app down for a day to migrate data over. Nowadays I'm smarter (hopefully) so this isn't necessary, but it's still nice.
The seasonality gave me natural "development" and "marketing" cycles. I could focus on one thing at a time which gave me clarity into what tasks I needed to run.
But inevitably the seasonality comes with one con that you touched on well in your main post:
Stress. Followed by boredom.
It's similar to an athlete competing in their sport. The off-season is helpful, but in the end all the matters is your performance during the season. And that's stressful.
Plus, my product is maturing. So now having 6 months to develop new features isn't really necessary. This previous off-season I got bored. I started looking towards new startup ideas. But, then when the season rolled around, my new business was making close to the same as my seasonal one.
This left me a decision: Focus on the seasonal one, or continue growing the non-seasonal one? And I chose to focus on the seasonal app, but it definitely hurt the growth of the other one.
One of my latest apps is exactly this. Just like a campground (another business I'm purchasing) there are things you can do to continue the revenue stream. You have to be creative. Consult. Create a different app that caters to the off-season. Take the time off and travel. For me there's no stress as I love new challenges.
Huh, interesting problem. I mean, honestly I think it's better to not try to fight that market reality. Spend time in the off-season doing what you can. For example,
Maybe even just take some time off, or find an unrelated project to work on in the off season. What I wouldn't do is spend a bunch of time trying to take 20 visitors/month in the winter to 100/month. Seems like a bad use of resources.