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Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month

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21–30 of 198 posts

Re: Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month

#21
post #7

I guess this is the tool, from OPs submission history: https://m3u-editor.com/

I like the ‘screenshots’ section prominently featured on the homepage.

With the trend toward illustrations and mocked up interfaces it seems like many SaaS companies leave out actual screenshots these days.

To me that’s an important gauge for whether I’m going to have a decent user experience if I sign up (even if it’s just flat screenshots with no explanations)...

Re: Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month

#22
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Last year June, I built a small online tool for me and my girlfriend to manage our IPTV playlist. I bought a domain name and put it online because our IPTV player needed to access it through a URL. A couple of months later, and 7 users found the tool and were actually using it (keep in mind that that's pretty impressive for a tool as not-user-focused as it was back then). So I then decided to spend more time re…

cool. it gives me a lot of confidence to hear these stories :-) Where did you initially "advertised" (I don't mean paid) ?

That's the cool thing, it got its first users without any promotion what so ever. I had used it myself for a couple of months, and only after 2 months I logged into the database and saw these 7 users who simply found it (maybe by URL). They not only registered but were actually using it in the same was as I did.

After that, did post it on some forums, and on the IPTV subreddit, which did give it a boost.

But I have not been posting it anywhere for the last few months now, it seems that the steady flow of new users just keeps pretty constant no and the most active users are the ones who just find it through Google.

Re: Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month

#23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Last year June, I built a small online tool for me and my girlfriend to manage our IPTV playlist. I bought a domain name and put it online because our IPTV player needed to access it through a URL. A couple of months later, and 7 users found the tool and were actually using it (keep in mind that that's pretty impressive for a tool as not-user-focused as it was back then). So I then decided to spend more time re…

What tech do you use? Really like your website btw, friendly, clean and clear

Thanks. It all runs on a Laravel codebase, and the SaaS part is handled by Laravel Spark. UI of the landing page is a template I bought, the dashboard is own tinkering.

Re: Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month

#24
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cool. it gives me a lot of confidence to hear these stories :-) Where did you initially "advertised" (I don't mean paid) ?

That's the cool thing, it got its first users without any promotion what so ever. I had used it myself for a couple of months, and only after 2 months I logged into the database and saw these 7 users who simply found it (maybe by URL). They not only registered but were actually using it in the same was as I did. After that, did post it on some forums, and on the IPTV subreddit, which did give it a boost. But I have n…

may be this is something you can find out and try to put in some more time there. This will improve your userbase. also +1 for organic growth

Re: Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month

#27

Have you thought about increasing your prices by a lot? I'm not the target market but $1 per month for the cheapest plan and $5 per month for the most expensive one sounds insanely cheap to me.

I've definitely considered it, and I use some custom plans for users who exceed the limits of the Pro Plus plan, but I think current prices are alright. Also, keep in mind that these prices apply on yearly plans, and most paid users use monthly pricing, where prices range from $2 to $8.

I like that you've decided that you're charging a fair price. While you certainly might make more money by raising the prices, you'll limit your market significantly.

I know that I use a TV related site (one of the ones for tracking shows), and as much as I'd be happy to pay them $12/year, their cheapest plan is 3 times as much, and I just don't see them as providing that much value to me.

Re: Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month

#28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price elasticity experiments are the lowest hanging fruits for optimizing revenue! We found doing it per country had a huge impact on rest-of-world LTVs.

Please bear in mind that there is a regulation in EU that prices of the same product should not differ based on the country you are coming from (source: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat... , "Price discrimination is not allowed" section).

Which presumably affects and references only EU country pricing, so you need one 'EU price', which can be different from non-EU countries?

I also wonder what the implementation has been (but not for much longer) without a single currency. I wasn't aware of this rule, and as a consumer have certainly seen variation in EUR/GBP rates (across different things that have the same EUR price say but not GBP).

Must be challenging for big product sellers as opposed to service providers too, Amazon (shop) for example.

Re: Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month

#30

Have you thought about increasing your prices by a lot? I'm not the target market but $1 per month for the cheapest plan and $5 per month for the most expensive one sounds insanely cheap to me.

I've definitely considered it, and I use some custom plans for users who exceed the limits of the Pro Plus plan, but I think current prices are alright. Also, keep in mind that these prices apply on yearly plans, and most paid users use monthly pricing, where prices range from $2 to $8.

I like your current prices. When I consider subscribing to something (rarely) I have to weigh something like a $10 / month cost heavily because I can only have a few of those total. But if the service is significantly lower ($1, $2.50 in your case) it's a no brainer. $5 would be in the middle somewhere as definitely easier to accept than $10.

It seems obvious that as a user I would like low prices, but at the risk of being slightly repetitive, what's apparently not obvious to many subscription service providers is that I consider the total price of all my subscriptions, not just the price of their one service.

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