[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
I am building a web SAAS and being a developer, I want to mostly
focus on development and skip the marketing, pr and other related
stuff, hence I am looking for tools to automate/delegate as much as
possible. I like building products after all. There are so many
great tools and strategies, but almost all of them require you to
have a person or even a team to support it - for example all social
media automation tools require you to prepare a lot of content to
be effective. I can't do that. Do you know any great tools that
are more or less 0 maintenance, relatively short setup and deliver
value? It doesn't have to necessary be marketing tool, but it's
what made me curious. If you know of development, accounting or
whatever other tool please shoot!
Author : ponyous
Score : 139 points
Date : 2021-11-21 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
| bwb wrote:
| AirTable, super flexible and I love it. I created a custom CRM on
| it that should last me for the first year of the business. It has
| made creating workflows for some turk styejobs super easy.
|
| Lemlist - great for automating email outreach. A bit buggy and
| their support is friendly (but doesn't really know how the
| product works and you can never get a straight answer). Still, it
| works 95% of the time and does the job.
|
| Not sure if it helps, but if you approach marketing like a
| product instead of something painful it can be more fun. Hit me
| up direct (bwbbwb@gmail.com), I'd be happy to share more of what
| I've done by building mini products for marketing and might be
| able to spark some ideas that would help you market by building
| some little tools.
| gondo wrote:
| Paddle.com mostly for taxes. Seriously, how are you guys dealing
| with taxes (US or/and global)?
| Aulig wrote:
| Same here - can't imagine what you'd pay in accountant costs
| otherwise.
| jwr wrote:
| I'm in the EU and I have not found a solution that works other
| than a local accounting office. Which works very well indeed.
| But I have a B2B SaaS, so my invoicing side is relatively
| simple VAT-wise.
| XCSme wrote:
| > I'm in the EU and I have not found a solution that works
| other than a local accounting office.
|
| I am using Paddle from the EU, what do you mean it doesn't
| work? You will only receive a single invoice that you have to
| deal with instead of hundreds of invoices from customers from
| various countries with various tax laws, right?
| aqeelat wrote:
| I lot of people mentioned Namecheap for domains. They're great.
| I've been using them for over 6 years now. However, I wouldn't
| recommend them over CloudFlare Registrar anymore.
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/registrar-for-everyone/
| bgrgndzz wrote:
| - Zapier
|
| - Notion
|
| - HockeyStack
|
| - Drip
|
| - GPT-3
|
| - Apollo.io
|
| I would suggest learning how to do marketing, writing down an
| excruciatingly detailed process (on Notion), and then automating
| a part of it while delegating the rest to freelancers.
|
| Though, to delegate as much as possible, you will need a good
| amount of capital.
| ericb wrote:
| Interesting list. Would you be willing to add in edits on what
| you use each one for?
|
| For example, Zapier "moves things between web apps." Is that an
| ETL as a service? What is it E'ing, T'ing and L'ing, though?
| aradox66 wrote:
| Zapier is useful for integrating common tools (slack, drive,
| asana, etc etc) but would not be a good choice for most
| nontrivial ETL, or nontrivial any kind of integration.
|
| Eg, you want a slack notification when a Google form is
| filled out. Pretty painless to set up a zap.
|
| You want to keep a database table up to date with a Google
| sheet. You can do it on zapier, but it's gonna be a pain.
| constantinum wrote:
| Chargebee for subscription/recurring revenue billing. Set it up
| and it runs on autopilot. They do have a "launch" plan to help
| support new startups. https://www.chargebee.com/launch/
| XCSme wrote:
| The tools most useful for me as a solo founder:
|
| * https://paddle.com - Paddle (payments) - selling
| internationally without having to deal with all the local taxes
|
| * https://uxwizz.com - UXWizz (analytics) - built my own private,
| self-hosted analytics platform that provides everything I need
| (stats, event tracking, session recordings, heatmaps, a/b tests,
| etc.) in a single platform that doesn't cost thousands per month
|
| * Gmail - Like it or not, I got used to using gmail to handle
| customer support requests (I use the auto-labeling features to
| keep them categorized) and the SMTP forwarding to send/receive
| emails using my own domain names. I am thinking of moving away
| (for privacy reasons mostly), but it works really well at the
| moment.
|
| * DigitalOcean/Contabo for VPSs for self-hosting everything that
| I need
|
| This is mostly it, I try to stay as lean as possible. Self-
| hosting is pretty easy nowadays and it rarely needs maintenance,
| so I usually prefer it because of the control over the
| product/data and the cost reduction that it gives.
| dt3ft wrote:
| I use a bunch of different tools for https://pdf2qrcode.com but
| I'd like to highlight papercups.io for pre-sale chat/questions.
| Otherwise, stripe for payments and cloudflare.
| igeligel_dev wrote:
| For https://tooltipr.com I am using - tawk.to
| - render.com - No Payments implemented but will use Stripe
| - Namecheap - Google Analytics + Google Search Console
| (Search console is really good)
| dangrossman wrote:
| I've been living off solo SaaS products my entire adult life --
| almost 20 years. These are the only services I pay for:
| * AWS and Cloudflare for hosting * Rackspace for incoming
| email * Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email
| * Namecheap for domains * A merchant account and Spreedly
| for payments * ShareASale to run an affiliate program and
| pay a percentage commission for referred sales * Facebook
| and Google ads
|
| All customers come from ads, referrals or word of mouth. I don't
| do any social media or outbound sales.
| JBlue42 wrote:
| >* A merchant account and Spreedly for payments
|
| Can you explain why you go this route instead of something like
| Stripe?
| dangrossman wrote:
| 1. Stripe didn't exist 20 years ago. A merchant account was
| how you accepted credit cards online before Stripe.
|
| 2. Stripe costs more. I pay "interchange plus" which means a
| small markup over what Visa/MC/Amex charge to processors. A
| debit card can cost as little as 0.05% to charge, but Stripe
| will charge you 2.9%.
|
| 3. If Stripe goes out of business or decides they don't like
| my business, I'd lose my customers. Spreedly is a payment
| gateway agnostic credit card vault that lets me own the
| payment data and switch processors at will. If Stripe became
| cheaper or better in some way for me tomorrow, I could start
| billing my existing customers through Stripe tomorrow just by
| changing one token in my code.
| make_it_sure wrote:
| 3. it won't work quite like that. you'll get tons of failed
| payments, probably majority of them
| dangrossman wrote:
| My gateway has outages a few times a year, and I have
| switched to backup gateways including Stripe on those
| days with no issues.
| gfauchart wrote:
| If you use AWS why would you use Namecheap instead of Route53?
| Even if .com are 4$ cheaper on Namecheap per year. if you have
| one or two domains, I would prefer simplicity of integration
| with AWS over small savings.
|
| Also is Cloudflare better (or cheaper) than Cloudfront ?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I would suggest Cloudflare registrar + CDN + DDoS protection.
| Keep all the backend stuff on AWS.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Better yet, keep it on Lightsail, it has fixed pricing
| plans for containers ($7 per mo), VPS ($3.5), database
| ($15), blob store ($3 per 100GB), and disk ($1 per 10GB).
| Lightsail can _peer_ into (same region) regular VPC as well
| for $1 per 100GB ingress+egress.
| dangrossman wrote:
| 1. My domains all predate Amazon becoming a registrar. I
| registered my first domain in 1997. I register them for 5-10
| years at a time. There's no simplicity benefit in
| transferring and paying more.
|
| 2. Too many eggs in one basket. I prefer to minimize (a) the
| chances of losing an account/asset and (b) the impact if it
| happens. If Amazon drops me, or has a long-lasting outage, I
| can re-build everything I run on another host and point the
| domains there in an afternoon. Not so if Amazon also owns the
| domains and hosts the DNS.
| cweill wrote:
| Can you please write a blog post or book about your experience?
| I'm trying to get into solo SAAS, and this kind of post is pure
| gold for me!
| system2 wrote:
| He has a blog: dangrossman.info
|
| He is an active HN'er. You can also find out more about users
| by clicking their name. Seasoned ones have some sort of
| profile.
| ogjunkyard wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't look at all
| like a blog and/or I can't find a way to find any posts.
|
| Also, that is a rough background with it changing every
| couple of seconds.
| system2 wrote:
| I believe the question to pricing strategy can be found
| in this intro paragraph:
|
| "I'm Dan Grossman, the founder of Improvely and
| W3Counter. In my spare time, I also run Lignin & Light, a
| shop for hand-crafted gifts, with most items made on my
| Glowforge Pro."
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| >* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email
|
| All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST
| SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and my n=1
| experience is that over a weekend they suspended my production
| account without cause !
|
| 1) I've been sending the EXACT same mails and number (less than
| 200-300 a month) to the exact same ppl on their free-tier.
|
| 2) I asked to upgraded to a PAID account to get better
| statistics (opens etc) They came back with saying I'm not a
| good fit for their org and boom disabled my account which is
| used in production ! Was a fun weekend switching everything
| over.
|
| So they were willing to send my mails for 5 years for free and
| after I wanted to give them money to KEEP sending the EXACT
| same mail, they basically said bugger off and my production
| systems were left without an email service !
|
| EDIT1: After searching SendGrid on HN - seems I"m not the only
| one !
|
| I can recommend PostMark - Brilliant service.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| +1 for No SendGrid. I tried using their free tier just to try
| them out and immediately none of my emails were delivering to
| Gmail. Yes, _maybe_ if I decided to go to the paid tier this
| would resolve, but if the free tier is that bad, I have
| questions for the company over why even bother offering that
| tier. (Gmail was actively rejecting the emails due to low
| sender reputation.)
|
| It left a bad taste in my mouth. We now use SparkPost.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| If your business is not nefarious spamming and deliverability
| is important to your use case, then I highly recommend the
| helpful folks at Postmark over all others. Transactional
| email delivery can be a minefield not for the faint of heart.
| Seems easy at first....
| dtech wrote:
| +1'ing this, it's a narrowly scoped API but it works
| extremely well.
| tibanne wrote:
| Second this. Postmark is amazing.
| ab-dm wrote:
| +1 against Sendgrid. They were a pretty good service when we
| signed up with them ~5 years ago (Paid plan with private IP),
| but ever since the Twilio acquisition their customer support
| and technical reliability has gone through the floor.
|
| Postmark is a phenomenal service and I'll be using it for
| every transactional email service I need going forward.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| Was your service or emails against their terms of use?
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| >Was your service or emails against their terms of use?
|
| a) Not as far as we could tell. It's "plain vanilla-
| transaction-emails" - think "JIRA-Like Tickets
| notification" but for Restaurant Maintenance ( product
| page: https://littlebigstats.com).
|
| b) We have send the 'exact' same type of emails (mostly
| password-resets and maintenance-ticket-notifications)
| through them for the last 5 years. So if we were somehow
| against their terms, their process for vetting/detecting is
| not working at all.
|
| Sidenote: Sorry I'm venting now - but was a real crappy
| weekend ! Trying to switch out your email provider and sign
| up for a new one.
|
| It's not just switching out, it's also about getting
| verified (100% agree with this step) by the service
| provider most email service provider can take 24-72 hours(I
| can understand why). Since it was weekend we actually had
| to send out a mail to our three biggest customers in Africa
| (KFC, PizzaHut, JavaHouse) telling them we will be offline
| for 48 hours :/
|
| Even after BEGGING them to enable our account for another
| 24 hours while we are being verified by other providers and
| to get our data off, they outright refused !
|
| We applied to a bunch of email sending services and went
| with the first one that approved us, which was PostMark and
| I had a little chat with them via support and signup-
| process. Was impressed from start to finish by this company
| and their personal.
|
| For reference AWS-SES took a little over 3 days to approve
| us.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Hope you've learned the lesson to have a disaster
| recovery plan, and a fallback service provider for the
| critical part of your business.
| nicoburns wrote:
| +1 for avoiding SendGrid. We haven't had this problem at
| work. But we have persistently hit a bug where if you send
| them two API requests at the same time they will return a
| spurious 403 error for one of them. They seem unwilling to
| fix it (reports go back years). We currently have a retry
| with random timeout configured in our system to compensate
| for it.
|
| I've previously had good experiences with SparkPost.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Yo ! Ja definitely getting a anti-customer/customer-is-
| always-wrong vibe !
| [deleted]
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| After Donglegate, I had already put them on my blacklist. Now
| I see that my suspicions that it was just the tip of the
| iceberg came out to be true.
| nomdep wrote:
| Agreed, they (used to?) hire the most incompetent developer
| evangelists
| 0des wrote:
| > "Somebody getting fired is pretty bad," I said. "I know
| you didn't call for him to be fired, but you must have felt
| pretty bad."
|
| > "Not too bad," she said. She thought more and shook her
| head decisively. "He's a white male. I'm a black Jewish
| female. He was saying things that could be inferred as
| offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy
| for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down's syndrome
| and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would
| be different... I've seen things where people are like,
| 'Adria didn't know what she was doing by tweeting it.' Yes,
| I did."
| AlbinoDrought wrote:
| In my experience, the shared SendGrid IPs have poor sender
| reputation too. Many bounced transactional emails because of
| blocklists.
| droobles wrote:
| I aspire to be in the same boat you are - kudos to you!
|
| Are the majority of your products physical or digital
| ecommerce? Or a subscription based automated service?
|
| Edit: Looks like you have a great analytics framework, found
| your blog from another comment. Thanks for sharing your stack
| with us.
| chrisdalke wrote:
| Big fan of using DigitalOcean droplets instead of AWS for hosting
| simple backend APIs. A few perks:
|
| - Fixed pricing, very predictable billing
|
| - No CPU throttling vs. EC2 instances
|
| - Bandwidth included in the cost of the droplet
|
| I've built a few projects with Netlify hosting a React frontend
| and DigitalOcean running an API server for the backend/database.
| A single DO droplet can scale far beyond what I've used it for,
| especially when combined with a SPA that offloads much of the
| processing to the users' browser.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| DO is awesome but the UI has been degrading constantly.
|
| Why the hell does DO need to change their UI so often? There
| are so many bugs to fix. Stop reskinning it please.
| niftylettuce wrote:
| I built https://forwardemail.net to save money and time on email
| hosting/SMTP.
| [deleted]
| jwr wrote:
| Here's some advice from someone who has built (and currently
| lives off) a steadily growing and profitable solo SaaS business:
|
| Here's what I use and what I think about it:
|
| * Hetzner for servers, and use bare-metal ones, the speed and
| memory per dollar advantage over things like AWS is so large it's
| not even funny.
|
| * Cloudflare for hosting domains and running your DNS (great).
|
| * Braintree for subscription billing. It's not good at all, but
| Stripe is _significantly_ more expensive and doesn 't really get
| me that much more (it still can't handle EU invoicing with SAF-T
| export and its idea of invoicing is very US-centric). If you look
| at Stripe pricing and you are not in the US, look carefully: they
| will not deposit USD into a non-US account, which means they will
| hit you with currency conversion fees and poor rates. Add up all
| the fees and rates and you end up with 5.4% (last I checked).
|
| * No ads. I stopped burning money on them after implementing my
| own tracking and finding out that I get exactly 0 signups through
| ads (tried Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora).
|
| * Linear for bug tracking. Fantastic tool.
|
| * ProfitWell for tracking your subscription billing metrics.
|
| * I still pay for Sendgrid, but I'd recommend against using them.
| They will send your E-mails from the same servers that their
| spammer customers use, so you will get plenty of rejected mail.
| No way to get around that unless you pay them big $$$ for
| dedicated IPs etc -- it's a form of ransom, really. I send
| transactional mail myself, and for newsletters I'm looking for
| something better.
|
| * Clojure + ClojureScript for software. Use a single language for
| both client and server, use the same business logic code for
| both, minimize line count, minimize programmer effort. An obvious
| bet for a solo founder.
|
| * Ansible for managing your sever clusters, terraform for quickly
| spinning up experimental environments, and don't use AWS or
| heaven forbid Azure for those, use Digital Ocean which makes
| things really simple and saves you lots of time. Vultr is good,
| too.
|
| That's it for tools, I think. But there is one thing I found more
| important than tools: I believe you should disregard most "common
| knowledge". Do not follow the hype. Read HN comments _very_
| critically: most people here are not in your situation. You need
| to optimize for different things than most HN readers. You are
| responsible for everything, including the bottom line of your
| business. So think for yourself. Don 't jump into something just
| because lots of people write about it (ahem, Kubernetes). Don't
| do something a certain way just because it's current fashion
| (ahem, microservices). Don't use services just because most
| people do (ahem, AWS and Stripe). In each case, consider each
| service/tool carefully in the context of _your business_ , your
| metrics and your requirements.
|
| In my case, I am primarily optimizing for my time. But not only
| -- I am willing to do some things manually (invoiced billing with
| wire transfers) or use a lower-tech provider (Braintree rather
| than Stripe) when it makes financial sense.
|
| You mentioned PR and marketing -- I also thought I would need to
| hire people, run campaigns, etc. I listened to all the podcasts
| and conference talks about marketing tools and strategies. And
| then I realized that most of these people do not run my type of
| SaaS -- in fact, most of them make marketing tools for marketers.
| It's a huge echo chamber. I found out that with limited content
| marketing (e.g. writing articles from time to time) and "organic"
| spread, I'm getting a consistent number of signups. Could I get
| more? Yes, very likely so. But at what expense? Would these
| customers stick around? And would I be able to onboard and
| support them? So here again, think for yourself.
|
| Unless of course your business is the same as everybody else's
| and you are building another tool for drip email campaigns,
| conversion tracking, idea voting, etc :-)
| krisgenre wrote:
| How about privacy and terms pages? does one need a lawyer or is
| there a SaaS service to generate one?
| BadCookie wrote:
| Shopify has these for free, but the wording (not surprisingly)
| is aimed at an e-commerce use case, so may not fit what you
| need exactly.
| worker767424 wrote:
| I recently stumbled across healthchecks.io. It's a one-man SaaS
| that does cronjob monitoring.
| XCSme wrote:
| Oh yeah, that's good, I use it to monitor a database backup
| cron.
| DataCrayon wrote:
| For PlotAPI (https://plotapi.com) I'm using:
|
| - FastAPI for the SaaS itself
|
| - WooCommerce for the accounts and subscriptions
|
| - Nikola for the gallery and feature demonstrations
|
| - FreeAgent for handling all the tax obligations (UK)
|
| I've been checking out Ghost CMS recently. It's looking great so
| far for content and subscription management.
| devteambravo wrote:
| https://startuptoolchain.com/
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Personally:
|
| - Google Cloud Run (or anything that can run docker)
|
| - SendGrid (but use SMTP only for easy migration)
|
| - Google Workspace (Office/Notion are also cool but I just don't
| use them often)
|
| - Mainly Go with Python for scripts
|
| - PostgreSQL
|
| - gRPC/Protocol Buffers for API servers
|
| Where possible I try and take on as few dependencies on big cloud
| services, and always use standard gateways. It makes moving
| around much easier. Other stuff mentioned here is quite good, but
| I'll especially recommend https://IndieHackers.com
| blopker wrote:
| IndieHackers looks great. How can I get an invite code?
| Cilvic wrote:
| Messaging courtland@indiehackers.com and mentioning HN worked
| for me. My account is too fresh to have invites.
| Pandabob wrote:
| Does IH require an invitation now?
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Ah, that must be new. I'd give you a code but I want this
| account to stay pseudonymous and don't know how I could
| share. Please do ask around here though.
| blopker wrote:
| That would be amazing, thank you. I've made an anonymous
| Google form you can send it to me through. It works in
| incognito, you don't have to log in anything. I don't get
| any information other than what's typed in the answer: http
| s://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdIusHNqZX-p5lAewZO...
| worker767424 wrote:
| I like Protobuf, but think that for the volume most operations
| deal with, you're better off with how well-support and
| understood HTTP is.
| exolymph wrote:
| > I want to mostly focus on development and skip the marketing,
| pr and other related stuff
|
| You're most likely doomed tbh. Talking to customers is essential.
| bengale wrote:
| > I want to mostly focus on development and skip the marketing,
| pr and other related stuff, hence I am looking for tools to
| automate/delegate as much as possible.
|
| You should really look at finding a cofounder with those skills
| then. Every situation is different so I won't say it's impossible
| but you're going to find it exceedingly difficult in my
| experience to skip that stuff and build a successful business.
| joisig wrote:
| Quuu Promote is a kind of content promotion on autopilot, but
| then first you'd need some content, could hire a content writer
| on Upwork or via an agency for that.
| ianberdin wrote:
| I do this things for 10 years. Right from the start of commercial
| development. I suggest to read SEO books and use this as a main
| source of customers as I do. You will get what you want: better
| focus on the product.
|
| - Crisp (best website chat, email campaigns).
|
| - Namecheap.
|
| - Cloudflare (speedup website loading around the world).
|
| - Postmark (transactional emails).
|
| - Uploadcare (come on, save days on image uploading/cropping
| features).
|
| - AWS/DO.
|
| - Amplitude analytics - the best of the best thing for SAAS
| products.
|
| - UI libraries like bootstrap, but better use something well
| integrated with your framework. Don't reimplent.
|
| - Use boring tech stack, which you are know as your five fingers
| (it'll keep you months).
|
| - IDE by JetBrains.
|
| - Stripe (save days on connecting billing for fair price).
|
| - Books: Lean startup (foundation), Think and grow rich (don't
| give up), Steal like an artist (a vision).
|
| - Forum: IndieHackers (it'll motivate you).
|
| - Notion for docs, tasks, plans, ideas.
| pid-1 wrote:
| I am thinking about creating my own SaaS. Do you happen to have
| an invite?
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| +1 PostMark !
| altdataseller wrote:
| How does Amplitude compare vs MixPanel?
| ianberdin wrote:
| 1. Mixpanel is super expensive.
|
| 2. Mixpanel is slow as a hell in a real world apps. I'm not
| joking. You can wait by 15 seconds to load one page.
|
| 3. Amplitude is 10 times more flexible and intuitive.
|
| 4. Amplitude is free completely. 100 000 000 events included.
| Mixpanel gives about 5000, maybe a bit more, just for testing
| purposes.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Good to know, thanks for the info. So you accomplish
| everything with just the free version? Or do you pay for
| any additional features?
| ianberdin wrote:
| Amplitude gives enough for free. They charge a lot from
| enterprises.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| I was searching for something like Zendesk + CRM, because
| Zendesk's is a little expensive for me. If you know one, please
| mention it. If I can send it important events from the app like
| (creating a project, subscriptions) it would be perfect.
| ericpauley wrote:
| We use Teamwork Desk for our small business. It works great for
| 2 or 3 people handing tickets (I'm sure it would do fine for
| me), and the new Stripe/custom integrations they offer make it
| easy to use for billing.
| webscout wrote:
| -- Netlify + GCP for hosting
|
| -- Twilio for anything Messaging
|
| -- Stripe + Paypal for payments
|
| -- Biztoc.com for finding content to post
|
| -- Plausible.io for analytics
|
| -- Paperform for forms
|
| -- Bear.app for documentation
| system2 wrote:
| You are using very new platforms. Have you had issues with more
| established ones?
| colinclerk wrote:
| We'd love to help with your user management at https://clerk.dev
| - stack-agnostic Sign Up, Sign In, and User Profile Management -
| oauth and 2fa included out of the box
|
| Others:
|
| - stripe.com Atlas for incorporation
|
| - vercel.com for easy frontend deploys
|
| - render.com for easy backend deploys
|
| - pilot.com for taxes
|
| - stripe.com for subscriptions
|
| - sendgrid.com for email
|
| - orbit.love is good for tracking community growth
|
| - discord for actual community conversation
|
| - best marketing for us has been word-of-mouth, thankfully driven
| just by doubling down on product and support
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-21 23:01 UTC)