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Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

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Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#51

Post by anonymous344 »

TekMol wrote: post #5

I would like to hear more about how you approach the issue of taxes. The way I understand Stripe Tax is that it will give you a huge list of sales like: $210 paid from a company in the USA $123 paid from an individual in France $300 paid from a company in Japan ... And then you are supposed to do the right thing with that list. Is that true? Do you pass that giant list to your tax accountant and they fill all the cor…

I've tried to make stripe recurring payments once many years ago, but during that time the backend payment api did just not give out any info about the possible tax region. In eu it's a nightmare because of reverse vat...

Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#52

Post by SadTrombone »

nmarinov wrote: post #48
SadTrombone wrote: post #38

This Proxies API service seems to be using AI-generated "This Person Does Not Exist"[1] style profile pictures for its positive customer reviews near the bottom of the page: https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/steve.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer1.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer3.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer4.jpg Makes me question if the customer reviews…

I read the "How to recognize an image of a fake person" section on the site you linked and I'm curious how did you spot that the pictures are fake?

If you see enough of these AI-generated portraits on the Internet you'll start to notice the similarities, especially since This Person Does Not Exist is usually the source for the vast majority of them that I've seen. They're very often used as profile pics by Twitter bots.

The way the person's head is framed in the shot is pretty much identical most of the time and kind of a tell on its own.

Other tells:

- steve.jpg: The skin above the top rim of his glasses has some repetition/distortion.

- customer1.jpg: Distortion in the hair, most noticeable at top left. Mouth looks fake too.

- customer3.jpg: I didn't notice anything significant, but it just looks like an image taken straight off TPDNE. Do "vibes" count?

- customer4.jpg: The teeth merge into each other.

Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#53

Post by nmarinov »

phobotics wrote: post #49
SadTrombone wrote: post #38

This Proxies API service seems to be using AI-generated "This Person Does Not Exist"[1] style profile pictures for its positive customer reviews near the bottom of the page: https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/steve.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer1.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer3.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer4.jpg Makes me question if the customer reviews…

I think this is actually quite common now - where you get permission from a person to use their review of your product but they don't want you to use their likeness. Maybe sometimes it feels a bit much to ask to use someone's review and also ask for a photo of them. It is somewhat disingenuous but I don't think I mind too much if they are legit customer reviews.

When compared to a similar site hosted on the same server[1] the reused pictures and reviews are definitely suspicious[2].

[1] https://teracrawler.io/

[2] see the Our customers feel it section

Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#54

Post by pzrsa »

nmarinov wrote: post #48
SadTrombone wrote: post #38

This Proxies API service seems to be using AI-generated "This Person Does Not Exist"[1] style profile pictures for its positive customer reviews near the bottom of the page: https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/steve.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer1.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer3.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer4.jpg Makes me question if the customer reviews…

I read the "How to recognize an image of a fake person" section on the site you linked and I'm curious how did you spot that the pictures are fake?

I think the image names gives it away more.

"customer1.jpg" and "steve.jpg" lol

Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#55

Post by nmarinov »

SadTrombone wrote: post #52
nmarinov wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the "How to recognize an image of a fake person" section on the site you linked and I'm curious how did you spot that the pictures are fake?

If you see enough of these AI-generated portraits on the Internet you'll start to notice the similarities, especially since This Person Does Not Exist is usually the source for the vast majority of them that I've seen. They're very often used as profile pics by Twitter bots. The way the person's head is framed in the shot is pretty much identical most of the time and kind of a tell on its own. Other tells: - steve.jp…

Hmm, thanks. To me those look like random compression artefacts or poor photo retouching but I get what you mean and they do all look similar.

I guess you can get used to the distortions and the general vibe of the model.

Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#56

Post by arrowsmith »

phobotics wrote: post #49
SadTrombone wrote: post #38

This Proxies API service seems to be using AI-generated "This Person Does Not Exist"[1] style profile pictures for its positive customer reviews near the bottom of the page: https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/steve.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer1.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer3.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer4.jpg Makes me question if the customer reviews…

I think this is actually quite common now - where you get permission from a person to use their review of your product but they don't want you to use their likeness. Maybe sometimes it feels a bit much to ask to use someone's review and also ask for a photo of them. It is somewhat disingenuous but I don't think I mind too much if they are legit customer reviews.

Try googling the names, job titles and companies of the people who "wrote" these reviews. I can't see any evidence that these people (and in some cases their companies) actually exist.

I don't believe that these testimonials are real.

Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#57

Post by have_faith »

SadTrombone wrote: post #52
nmarinov wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the "How to recognize an image of a fake person" section on the site you linked and I'm curious how did you spot that the pictures are fake?

If you see enough of these AI-generated portraits on the Internet you'll start to notice the similarities, especially since This Person Does Not Exist is usually the source for the vast majority of them that I've seen. They're very often used as profile pics by Twitter bots. The way the person's head is framed in the shot is pretty much identical most of the time and kind of a tell on its own. Other tells: - steve.jp…

Another tell is that they often look cropped from a larger image, specifically not from the center. Lenses produce specific distortions towards the edges. It looks like to increase the corpus of images many headshots have been cropped from larger images. This causes the model to learn and replicate these subtle lens effects.

Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#58

Post by 00deadbeef »

nmarinov wrote: post #53
phobotics wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is actually quite common now - where you get permission from a person to use their review of your product but they don't want you to use their likeness. Maybe sometimes it feels a bit much to ask to use someone's review and also ask for a photo of them. It is somewhat disingenuous but I don't think I mind too much if they are legit customer reviews.

When compared to a similar site hosted on the same server[1] the reused pictures and reviews are definitely suspicious[2]. [1] https://teracrawler.io/ [2] see the Our customers feel it section

The pricing is very different, could be some kind of test to see how much people are willing to pay

Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#59

Post by arrowsmith »

nmarinov wrote: post #48
SadTrombone wrote: post #38

This Proxies API service seems to be using AI-generated "This Person Does Not Exist"[1] style profile pictures for its positive customer reviews near the bottom of the page: https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/steve.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer1.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer3.jpg https://www.proxiesapi.com/assets/img/customer4.jpg Makes me question if the customer reviews…

I read the "How to recognize an image of a fake person" section on the site you linked and I'm curious how did you spot that the pictures are fake?

Go to https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and spend a few minutes refreshing the page. There's something distinctive about all these fake faces - I can't explain what it is, but once you've seen enough of them you can recognise the "look" quite easily.

Probably the biggest giveaway is that the faces are all positioned identically in each photo, but there's something else that juuuust quite doesn't look real. Maybe some of the faces just seem a little bit more androgynous than anyone I ever see in real life. There's something about them that sits just on the edge of the uncanny valley.

Re: Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

#60

Post by 00deadbeef »

Aulig wrote: post #34
cweill wrote: post #15

Congratulations on getting your first 100 paying users. Most startups never make a single dollar. How long did it take you to hit that number? Many of us devs want to do SAAS but don't understand what's a reasonable amount of time to expect until we can get "ramen profitable".

It took me around 1.5 years (at first part-time and then full-time) to get to 1.5k-2k€/month with https://webtoapp.design Probably quite long but I had a lot of stuff to set up to get the product automated (and I did barely any marketing, basically just wrote a couple random blog posts for SEO).

Why does your site say:

> It's not allowed for us to publish your app in our own developer accounts

I've published apps for others in my developer account

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