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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?

#121

Post by adamhp »

colinclerk wrote: post #29

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 -…

Bookmarking for my next project. Great website copy. Been looking for an auth0 alternative since they got bought out.

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

#122

Post by is_true »

jmstfv wrote: post #112

> I want to mostly focus on development and skip the marketing Please don't. More often than not, better-marketed products win over better products. It's unfortunate, but that's how it is. > I like building products after all. Most of us do, but you're unlikely to gain any traction without marketing, and after failing to see tangible results, grow resentful towards your project and start losing interest. Been there,…

I learned it the hard way and now I start with marketing and then I write code if I see interest.

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

#123

Post by reydequeso »

jwr wrote: post #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…

i like the way you think, could i contact you for more elaborated thoughts on marketing?

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

#124

Post by lytefm »

KronisLV wrote: post #104
rawoke083600 wrote: post #15

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…

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 b…

> Do we live in a world of walled gardens, where the smaller mail servers would just have their mail be discarded, or something?

Short answer: kinda yes.

Longer answer: Especially if you launch something new (new Domain, only a few dozens subscribers/ transactional mails every day), it's difficult to build up enough reputation such that your mails gets into the customer's inbox - or even delivered at all.

So even if email is included at your webhoster, you'll want to use a provider with whom you can be sure that your emails make it into the inbox.

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

#125

Post by skmurphy »

MarieTally wrote: post #106
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

Second the suggestion for Syften, I have found it very powerful for finding people asking questions in forums that represent a relevant need.

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

#126

Post by mekster »

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…

SendGrid is such a mess, feeling more after Twillio bought it but maybe it is irrelevant.

From their admin site, first time you try to login, it says "Page you're looking for cannot be found" briefly and takes you to the login screen, such a bizarre system and they're not willing to fix. It kind of tells what kind of engineers are working.

They only give you 3 days worth of logs for paid customers, until you pay more for extended log option which is laughable and too late when you figure it out as you need older history and it doesn't even show much like subjects, so it's quite useless.

If I try to keep reloading the activity page to see if the mail went through several times a minute, the page says I'm accessing the page too many times and throttles with a warning page...

Also had weird error saying a receiving end's DNS couldn't be resolved and refused to send to a specific domain which is working perfectly except from SendGrid and the support reply is just so helpless, I gave up on that domain.

And it gets worse if you're under trouble as I had an account whose payment couldn't be made in time due to a problem on our side, emails quickly stopped from being relayed and as we pay it in several days, they say the emails can no longer be sent from the spool, which means they all went in limbo with no return email or anything and that was the last of it and we switched to Postmark.

Bizarre tech, helpless support and definitely not made for care to the customers.

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

#129

Post by aminmemon »

Stripe & 2Checkout - For Payments

ChartMogul - Subscription Analytics

Prospectss.com - Growth Marketing / Lead Generation

GitLab - Code Repository

FirstPromoter - Affiliate Management

TawkTo - Free Live Chat

HelloBar - Exit Intent Popup

UberSuggest Chrome Extension - Keyword Stats directly on Google!

OpalStack - Best Python/Django Hosting

Bubbles Chrome Extension - Providing Feedback on Website

Loom - Video Recording.

Voxer - Better IM Like Voice Communication

Unsplash / Pexels - Free Stock

IPData - Check Geo Location of the user to set pricing & timezone

Amazon SES - Transactional Emails

MailJet - Promotional Emails

PorkBun - Domain

TunnelTo - Local Host Tunneling

Postaga - Outreach / Link Building

SEMRush - SEO Analytics and Link Building Outreach

Growth Runner Daily Google Analytics Report on Whatsapp

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