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Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

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Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was your service or emails against their terms of use?

>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…

Hope you've learned the lesson to have a disaster recovery plan, and a fallback service provider for the critical part of your business.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#62

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…

>* 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…

+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.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#63

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…

>* 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…

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….

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#64

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…

>* 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…

+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.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#66
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 :-)

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#67
post #19

Paddle.com mostly for taxes. Seriously, how are you guys dealing with taxes (US or/and global)?

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.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* 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…

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….

+1'ing this, it's a narrowly scoped API but it works extremely well.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* 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…

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.

> “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.”

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#70
post #67
post #19

Paddle.com mostly for taxes. Seriously, how are you guys dealing with taxes (US or/and global)?

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.

> 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?

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