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!

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.

>* A merchant account and Spreedly for payments

Can you explain why you go this route instead of something like Stripe?

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.

— 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