SaaS for Coaches & Consultants

Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

Hacker News · 0xmattf · Posted April 17, 2026 · Reviewed September 1, 2026

“I think the biggest downer was when I built the coolest SaaS for martial arts academies. I thought it was guaranteed success, as I am involved in these communities, know a ton of owners. I reached out to all of them. Offered a free setup/trial. None of them cared, or even attempted to use it.”

This one is the entry, built and handed over for free, and nobody opened it. He belongs to the community he was selling to — he says he knows a lot of the academy owners — and that bought him nothing. Read it as evidence against this entry's Low difficulty rather than as demand for it: the hard part is not the scheduling or the payments, it is that a small coaching business will not change how it books its clients even at a price of zero. Three things keep it from being a verdict. Asked in the replies whether he spoke to the owners before building, he answers that he spoke to some of them, that it seemed like they would use it, and then offers bad execution as a guess he is visibly unsure of — so the failure is undiagnosed by the person closest to it. He says the only distribution he tried was reaching out to people he already knew plus cold email, and a reply reads the whole thing differently: these businesses are hard to move once they have picked a platform, so what he measured may be switching cost rather than indifference. And martial arts academies are one shape of this entry's coaches and consultants, not all of them.