Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders? • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by giorgioz » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 8:01 AM UTC

I have been a solo-founder and developer for the first six years of waiterio.com I also wanted to focus on development and create few tools to automate other processes.

Right now I'm spinning off publicly one of the tools I've created: polyblog.io Polyblog let you create and delegate away a content marketing blog. We are currently in beta and I'm looking for beta testers. I can pass you down my knowledge on hiring a writer on Upwork and almost completely delegate the content marketing blog. Please write me at giorgio dot zamparelli at polyblog dot io

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

#102

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 8:05 AM UTC

I run a curated list(FOSS) of startup tools -https://startuptoolchain.com to serve those who are looking for tools like you. It includes almost all categories and tools recommended in this thread as I add tools from similar threads.

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

#103

Post by lylo » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 9:02 AM UTC

rawoke083600 wrote: post #15

dangrossman wrote: post #4

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…

I would agree, Postmark is wonderful

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

#104

Post by KronisLV » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 9:18 AM UTC

rawoke083600 wrote: post #15

dangrossman wrote: post #4

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…

Genuine question: why not just have your own e-mail server with a bit of automation thrown in, something simple like https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

I can understand something like SendGrid or PostMark for the more complex use cases or larger platforms, but surely for a one man SaaS, the simple self-hosted option wouldn't be out of the question either? Interacting with a mail server shouldn't be too hard either, say, with Python or any other general purpose programming language.

Provided, that the IP addresses aren't blacklisted and that a simple VPN is sufficient. Do we live in a world of walled gardens, where the smaller mail servers would just have their mail be discarded, or something?

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

#105

Post by batperson » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 9:52 AM UTC

bgrgndzz wrote: post #22

- 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.

What's GPT-3 for ?

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

#106

Post by MarieTally » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 9:55 AM UTC

webscout wrote: post #9

— 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

Tally.so offers unlimited forms & responses for free, F5Bot or Syften for tracking mentions across the web, Notion + Super for landing pages

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

#107

Post by alain34 » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 10:01 AM UTC

I've been running https://www.bankaccountchecker.com since 2010 as a solo side project.

These are the only services I pay for:

- AWS for hosting

- names.co.uk for domains

- Paypal to receive payments (I started in 2010 and at this time stripe was not really an option in the UK)

- Twilio for inbound voice, which is $1 month to get a phone number

These are the used services with a free tier or totally free:

- A dev/ops stack that I am really familiar with

- Cloudflare for DNS management and SSL certificates

- sendgrid for smtp outbound emails (- names.co.uk for inbound emails (mail lite with 100mb mailbox) that I import in my own database (new saas product coming soon actually)

- Telegram for event notifications

- Crisp Chat

- Google Analytics

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

#108

Post by ponyous » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

motoxpro wrote: post #82

exolymph wrote: post #76

> 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.

Yeah that sounds like "I don't want to run a business"

You read too much into it. I am happy to do research and talk to customers. I just want to minimize marketing and PR.

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

#109

Post by dbbk » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #7

JBlue42 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* 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. Spreedl…

> If Stripe goes out of business or decides they don't like my business, I'd lose my customers.

I don't think this is true, Stripe always work with you to move customer data to another provider

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

#110

Post by joij2oi332 » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 10:12 AM UTC

giyokun wrote: post #91

at https://www.oomnis.com (small startup), we mostly use Zoho One. One solution that does: CRM, cloud storage, docs, digital signature for contracts, book-keeping, password managers, marketing automation, support website, website hosting, remote assistance, chat, web conferencing, subscription management and more. Pricing is per employee which is GREAT for a 1-3 people startup. Apart from that, we deploy on Azure VMs…

Zoho makes such horrible low-quality products. Last time I tried their email service, no matter how many times I mark something as non-spam, it will still always be marked as spam.