8 SaaS Products as a Solo Founder: Andreas Mühe's Bootstrapping Marathon at Ivy Mayhem
Volume #23 of "Happy Bootstrapping" Newsletter
Andreas Mühe has chosen an unusual path: Instead of focusing on one product, he operates eight SaaS tools in parallel as a solo founder. With his company ivy.mayhem, he shows that multi-product strategies can work – even if the price is high.
This is a summary of Episode 134 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).
From Agency Owner to Serial SaaS Founder
Andreas' journey began conventionally: After years as an employed media designer in Hamburg, he founded the agency Stellar Projects in 2020. But his urge for his own products showed early. "I had this urge to build something of my own," Andreas recalls.
The first SaaS product Eniston emerged in 2020 from his own need – a simple wiki software for his community project at the time. Since then, new tools have been added steadily: Inprivy for secure sharing of credentials, FeatureShift as a feedback board, Releases for changelogs, and most recently Deftform, a minimalist form builder.
The strategy behind it? Each tool solves a specific problem that Andreas himself had. He has already discontinued four products – a respectable hit rate for bootstrappers.
The Business Model: AppSumo as Blessing and Curse
Andreas is still experimenting with pricing models. He offers most tools as lifetime deals between $49 and $220. The majority of revenue comes through AppSumo, where he pays a hefty 60% commission.
The numbers fluctuate significantly: In good months, he makes $4,000-5,000 through AppSumo, in February Deftform on AppSumo alone generated $10,000. "The volume makes up for it," Andreas explains pragmatically about the high commission.
The problem: Many AppSumo customers buy out of FOMO and often redeem their codes months later – or never. At the same time, they produce disproportionately high support effort for little return.
Marketing: The Major Weakness
Marketing is Andreas' Achilles' heel. His own advertising campaigns via Google Ads and Meta consumed thousands of euros without significant conversions. He rarely does newsletter marketing:
"When I personally see the unsubscribes and the reasons people give... somehow it bothers me that I'm annoying people."
His solution? Back to AppSumo. When he removed Deftform from the platform, sales collapsed. The dependency frustrates him, but alternatives are lacking. He's desperately looking for a marketing freelancer to take this burden off him.
The Tech Stack: Proven and Pragmatic
Andreas relies on a solid stack:
Backend: Laravel (PHP)
Frontend: Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Livewire
Payment: Lemon Squeezy
IDE: VS Code with GitHub Copilot
He's not a fan of AI tools like Cursor: "When a really big chunk of code is suggested to me on the side, it throws me out of my flow." He prefers to write his code himself – perhaps also a reason why eight products in parallel become a burden.
The Dark Side of the Multi-Product Approach
Support for eight products takes considerable time. "There are days when I really spend the first one or two hours answering emails," he admits. Particularly frustrating: trivial questions from AppSumo customers who bought for a few dollars.
Work-life balance? Andreas works until late in the evening, sports or hobbies don't exist. "Sunday is the only day I try to leave the computer off. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
The many context switches between products are wearing. Some tools lie dormant for months while he works on others. His feature lists? 45 open items for Aniston, 59 for Deftform – "when I open these lists, I somehow get warm. Negatively warm."
Learnings from the Bootstrapping Marathon
Focus beats diversification: Eight products might be too much for a solo founder
Marketing is not a nice-to-have: Without active marketing, the AppSumo dependency remains
Support doesn't scale linearly: More products = exponentially more support chaos
Price experiments are important: One-time payments vs. subscriptions – the eternal search for the right model
Team building is overdue: "I'm actively looking for someone," says Andreas – high time
What I Learned as an Interviewer
Andreas' honesty about his struggles surprised me. While many founders gloss over their challenges, he relentlessly reveals how burdensome eight parallel products are. I was particularly amazed by his aversion to marketing – that someone would rather build a new product than write newsletters shows how differently founders tick.
The AppSumo dependency fascinates me: On one hand, the platform reliably brings customers, on the other hand, it eats up margins and produces support hell. Andreas' dilemma between the desire for sustainable subscriptions and the reality of AppSumo cash flows is a case study on the pitfalls of bootstrapping.
Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.
Over the years, I've connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.