Launch HN: Satchel (YC S18) – Guides to the Best SaaS Tools
We're like The Wirecutter / Consumer Reports for SaaS, minus the affiliate links / paywall (more on this later).
There's a real information problem in B2B software. Without prior experience, it's hard to know how to evaluate a product, figure out what differentiates it, learn all relevant background, and compare against alternatives. Many times, it's difficult even to decipher what exactly a product does. As a buyer, you're often in the position of having to make a high-quality decision on something you're far from being an expert on. If you're anything like me, you often don't even know what you don't know.
There are plenty of crowd-sourced review sites out there, but they usually all end up filled with 5-star reviews that boil down to "I used X [and only X] and it was good." There is also an abundance of startup tool lists and directories, yet the problem is less about seeing what tools are out there and more about figuring out which one to use.
We're taking a different path, one that others have tended to avoid. We do hands-on testing and write in-depth long-form for each category of tools (with plenty of summaries to make it useful even when skimming), which can't be replaced with code (even though we, as engineers, sincerely wish that weren't the case). We're not reliant on vendors, so we can say what we actually think about a product, both upsides and downsides, instead of being pressured to normalize everything we say around "pretty good."
I see us as fundamentally helping you do something akin to time/information arbitrage. If lots of startups are each spending, say, ten hours doing the exact same research and testing, why doesn't someone spend 100 hours doing that research and then freely distribute the results? Everyone would save time yet get higher quality information.
Right now, we have three longform guides geared towards startups just starting out: store of money (https://satchel.com/store-of-money), incorporation service (https://satchel.com/incorporation), and web analytics (https://satchel.com/web-analytics). We have preliminary results (but not full writeups) for a lot more categories at https://satchel.com/handbook.
We don't expect to support ourselves financially in the same way as The Wirecutter (affiliate program) or Consumer Reports (paywall). Affiliate programs are mostly conflict-of-interest-free when rates are standardized across products (e.g. via Amazon for consumer goods), but are a lot harder to execute properly in a fragmented market like B2B software's. I'm also personally opposed to paywalling our work (I spent a lot of my formative years as a bio researcher, and I'd sincerely claim that open-access was a saving grace). Instead, we think there are ways we can increase the efficiency of the SaaS procurement/purchasing process, and intend to monetize there based on value-add.
We would love to hear your feedback and your experiences with B2B software. I'm personally excited to be sharing this with HN, and I'll be here to answer any and all questions you want to throw my way!
94 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadIt's interesting, because I personally see the idea of commercializing academic research to be well-intentioned, but a bit more difficult than it sounds.
Some more thoughts from a previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753553
One suggestion: for your "ratings matrix" it would be easier to parse if you kept the "our take" section out of it so all of the ranking icons appear close to each other. https://imgur.com/a/PmX1TLu
Totally agree. We took a close look to figure out what made some review sites slimy (and frankly not very useful). It mostly came down to what you'd expect: all reviews are normalized to be generally positive, lots and lots of recommended products, etc. That's why we made a deliberate decision to not go down that route.
> One suggestion: for your "ratings matrix" it would be easier to parse if you kept the "our take" section out of it so all of the ranking icons appear close to each other.
Appreciate the suggestion, I see what you're getting at. Most design issues come back to me, so I'll take a look at it and see if we can't make it easier to compare all ratings at once.
Allow weighting of whats important and whats not, to re-sort the results.
Thanks for the suggestion!
There's also the side of vendor management once you do make a selection. Even a service that manages and negotiates for you. https://www.vendr.com/
Do you have a page planned for https://carta.com/ and the like?
Or talent sourcing? https://gocatalant.com/ https://www.hellogustav.com/ https://www.lever.co/ https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance-websites
Smaller tools as well - https://www.privacytools.io/
Once you get bigger, a single page playbook of all the best choices would be great https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance-tools
I spent ~3-4 hours a few weeks ago deciding what analytics products to buy and I ended up creating a cost/benefit sheet on each option. If you guys existed back then I could have just linked to you instead.
Our first task is to prove we there we can provide sufficient value through objective info, and in helping people figure out which tools to invest in.
This is a bit of a convoluted way to say that we aren't 100% sure on long-term monetization, but we do know it probably won't be wirecutter-type affiliate nor paywall. We fully subscribe to the pg thought process behind this: http://paulgraham.com/good.html. That said, if we can accomplish our goal, we believe we can make money somehow, whether by offering value-added services or something else. Keep in mind that we're software developers ourselves, so we're in a position to build something once it becomes clear where the opportunity is; we're not just review-writers. For now, we're focused on producing as much value as we can by writing useful reviews. Speaking of which, we'd really like to hear what would be most useful to you in evaluating SaaS products!
One small problem: on my 10.5" iPad the table of contents are cut off and I can't even horizontal scroll them into view (despite the fact that the page does horizontal scroll). Even in landscape, the layout isn't quite right. The content itself is viewed no problem, though.
Kudos!
I'll take a look to see if we can't address formatting in the mid-range of window sizes.
Completely agree that The Wirecutter's up-front-ness and monetization is well-aligned with the end customer. Wirecutter's affiliate model works well with consumer goods b/c affiliate rates are mostly standardized (mainly by Amazon), which mostly mitigates conflicts of interest. This doesn't work as well in SaaS because vendors are so fragmented. This means that there would need to be a lot of checks and balances to avoid bias in B2B software. That's why any eventual monetization likely won't look like Wirecutter's.
Once we settle on a way to make money, we'll make it transparent. I'm just being vague right now because we don't know what exactly that is, so we're being... transparently vague :)
I think the main explanation is that YC companies, to a much greater extent than other companies, tend to focus on early-stage startups. As our guides are currently focused on early-stage startups, we naturally see more YC companies represented in the guides.
If anything, I'd argue that we're so aware of this that we need to consciously avoid overcorrecting in the other direction.
There's potentially a misaligned-incentives problem with review sites which themselves do the reviews. The latest episode of the FYI podcast[0] goes through this problem with the founder of Capiche[1] (looks like a competitor of yours) and the founder was explaining how firms like Gartner basically have two sets of customers: The software buys and the software sellers. The software sellers can actually pay Gartner to get in front of an analyst and sell them on their product.
I don't know to what extent this makes Gartner's recommendations less useful, but it seems like it would make it hard for smaller companies to get on the radar. I think the fundamental problem is that the analysts are not actual users of the software.
So I like Capiche's direction, but I dislike the fact that they're a "closed" invite-only website.
[0] https://twitter.com/ARKInvest/status/1261421627717218305
[1] https://capiche.com
At the very start, I wanted Capiche to be essentially Wirecutter for SaaS. We ended up going in a different direction, but I'm super impressed with Satchel's execution here, and as someone who spends a crazy amount of time on this stuff, I learned a bunch of new things reading through the site today.
I really don't want to hijack @fission's launch discussion, but thought I'd just reply to your comment on the invite-only thing: our site will be wide open soon-ish. Just taking our time building a community around high quality discussion (most of which has little to do with comparisons/reviews), but eventually will open it all up. Think of it like Stack Overflow's private beta...just a step in the process.
I think even though we're working in different directions, we share a lot of the same values and see similar issues with the status quo. When (I hope not if) quarantine's over, let's grab a coffee :) — my email's in my profile
1. re: "real" user reviews — right now, we do do this, just in a different way vs. what I think you're thinking of. For all of our guides so far, we've conducted a lot of interviews with founders who've used each product. However, we ultimately synthesize this data, pair it up with our own findings from our testing, and draw our own conclusions.
We think this is close to the optimal way of doing things. We found that sites which rely 100% on user reviews usually hit a ceiling in terms of usefulness, as the reviews are typically on the shallower side, which compounds b/c high-level reviews typically end up talking about the same things, so they're often redundant as well. By getting founder feedback, we're able to get a lot of datapoints to guide our findings and to surface less common issues, but by testing and ultimately writing these guides ourselves, we're able to both spend the time to elaborate on important aspects in depth (e.g. caveats, background info, etc.), while also being able to present info from a bigger picture perspective (e.g. this is how X, Y, and Z compare, etc.). The main downside is that it requires a lot of additional work.
2. re: Gartner + incentives — I believe that you identified the problem correctly, but misattributed the underlying cause. Gartner's incentives are misaligned b/c vendors who pay have an edge up on those who don't, for reasons you correctly identified. Importantly, this is not isolated to Gartner — in fact, the incentives are just as misaligned for a lot of the 100% UGC review sites. For those sites, if a vendor pays, they're allowed to cherrypick their own users to invite for an "organic review." If the vendor doesn't pay, then their rating will be relatively lower b/c it becomes much harder for them to get their best users to write a review on the site.
So in general, the problem isn't caused by whether you're a UGC review site or write guides yourself — it's caused by, well, whether or not you're doing something slimy to make money.
Edit: Oh, and I just saw that you mentioned Capiche at the end. I just want to say that none of this comment is directed at them — I sincerely think that they're passionate, motivated founders who deeply care about doing good for the startup community.
They also seem like they might have more proven business models, which is important when you're relying on it for a core function of your business. The last thing you want is some fresh startup that craters and forces you to scramble to find and implement a replacement when they fail to close their next funding round and need to shutter things.
1. Older companies tend to have wider footprint of real world use in various contexts thereby having a wider "body of work" for objective analysis and review.
2. There is switching cost when you get the 'thank you from the incredible journey" email or blogpost. So it is important to have companies that are self-sufficient and aren't at the risk of being acquired and shutdown which new companies are much more prone to.
PS: It is acknowledged that new companies most likely have fresher takes on old problems but you should also cater for their negatives enumerated above.
There's definitely value and opportunity that can be found in using the newest tech from the freshest companies. You can often find great value from their pricing, better UI, improved results, etc.
So my comment was in no way meant to bash using a startup. It was meant more to point out that there's a double-edged sword here by focusing on startups as there are real risks and trade-offs.
First off though, I want to clarify that the money market fund is typically not operated by the org. The GMMF choices for SVB are managed by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, etc., for Brex it is BNY Mellon, etc. You really only get self-operated funds for larger financial institutions, e.g. Wells Fargo or Fidelity. Therefore, many of these products act as a software layer over some existing bank/fund/etc. I believe we explain this distinction in the article. There are some caveats, but this is the general gist.
But onto the meta-observation: given the current economic climate w/ depressed treasury rates, we've recently received a lot of questions about higher-yield options, specifically re: CDs which are currently hovering around 1.5%. These are from well-known, well-respected startups who presumably don't need the cash and don't need to deal with the high overhead and illiquidity of CDs. I think that this really demonstrates the survival instincts of later-stage founders being carried forward from their early days, and the fact that startups are functionally live optimization machines, not just at a product-level, but as an entire organization. It seems to us that the best startups eke out every advantage they can — with all respect to the nature of the power law, these small differences, in aggregate, might make or break the entire company.
My colleague just wrote this explainer detailing how money market funds work and how one should go about selecting one, in case it's helpful - https://medium.com/@mikedombrowski/are-money-market-funds-th...
Full Disclosure: I'm the founder of InterPrime (yc w19). We provide treasury management services and bring the treasury tools that big companies have been using for decades to Startups, SMBs, Non-profits & Investment Funds. Happy to chat and help anyone with questions on these topics.
I believe we've also done a good job of this in our current guides: we discuss LegalZoom and lawyers in our incorporation service guide (even though bonafide startup incorporation services themselves are relatively novel), and for our store of money guide we even went so far as to stick our money into Fidelity (the definition of old school) to get a cash management comparable.
Our event-based analytics guide doesn't have any old school evaluation, but that's because event-based analytics tools, in the grand scheme of things, are really quite a recent development.
Small nit: dashes over underscores on URLs and looks like you don't have metatags properly set (Facebook, Twitter etc)
Edit: decided to throw in some redirects instead, should work well.
How do I now trust your analysis on the "big three" tools when you haven't nailed the basics of the OG Google Analytics?
For now, however, we're mainly focused on making ourselves useful for early-stage companies. Certainly something we're thinking about however!
Amazing copywriting here. I’m sure this deeply resonates with many people in tech. I’ll be looking forward to your service expanding its coverage on many more SaaS providers and their offerings.
Edit: I had a quick look at your site. I wonder if targeting a smaller range of reading duration could help. Right now it’s all the way from a shorter 12 minutes to a really lengthy 38 minutes, which seems like a huge variation to me. I get that some services will need far fewer words than others. I like that the summaries are all short enough, and help decide whether to read the full article or not.
> I had a quick look at your site. I wonder if targeting a smaller range of reading duration could help.
This is something that we tried to deal with through the overall summaries, the rating matrices, product summaries, etc. I completely agree that it'd be overkill for everyone to read a super long guide, which is why we added those components. However, we also wanted to ensure that if a reader wanted to go in-depth into the reasoning/background/justification behind something, we would have the information right there.
Granted, it's not perfect yet (I've spent a lot of time responding to emailed questions with "actually, we discuss that in this paragraph/section/sidenote/etc.", so there's clearly room for improvement on our end), but we're working on it! Any suggestions on this front would be super helpful, actually.
Some minor quibbles though.
I'm not getting any younger, and I find that the non-white background combined with the light weight of the font hard to read (Windows/Edge Chromium). I can't put my finger on it, I can't tell if it's the readability of the font itself or simply the weight. Text is a little easier to read on the purple background for the Summary section for some reason.
As a sanity check, I hopped onto the Wirecutter, which I frequent a lot, and they have a non-white background, but the serif font they use for the body text is a little heavier and much easier to read for my aging eyes.
For the Analytics article, I think adding screen grabs would help break up the monotony of long streams of text, and give people an idea of what the UI looks like for the product(s). One of the first things I look for on any SAAS landing page are screenshots, so I can see what the UI looks like. Adding screen grabs in your reviews would save some time for me.
I'm really interested in digging in a bit deeper, as you've expressed some thoughts we haven't heard before, and I'm hoping to improve the site more.
> I'm not getting any younger, and I find that the non-white background combined with the light weight of the font hard to read
This is interesting. The text color is #000, and the background color is #fafafa. This is a higher contrast ratio than the wirecutter, hn, etc. Since the purple background is easier to read on, it might be that the text is actually too high-contrast. It probably doesn't help that our font is a bit on the narrow side. I have a couple of ideas on how to fix it, but don't have a great idea on how to test it.
> I think adding screen grabs would help break up the monotony of long streams of text, and give people an idea of what the UI looks like for the product(s). One of the first things I look for on any SAAS landing page are screenshots, so I can see what the UI looks like. Adding screen grabs in your reviews would save some time for me.
This is particularly interesting for me to hear. Would you be willing to elaborate a bit more on how exactly you use screengrabs in your decisions? In my personal experience (emphasis on personal), screengrabs don't provide much value because they're mainly used as feature demonstrations.
We try to take an approach where we don't focus on the features, but rather the overall impact in aggregate (e.g. we won't focus on who has the best funnel analysis, but will ask who has the best core analytics functionality). We strongly believe that this synthesis approach is more useful, but it also means that features overviews are lower priority.
However, I'd be curious to know how you use them, as it sounds like you get value from them beyond just feature understanding. With a better understanding of how you use them, we can go back and get screenshots that best fit the kind of value that you get from them.
I think the stroke of the font is just too thin, or maybe it's the font's letterspacing as well. As far as sites go in general, my eyes struggle with reading the text on Satchel in particular. It could also be Windows' rendering of the font. I see that you're using Avenir Next? For what it's worth, it looks a little bit better on Firefox for Windows. Edge Chromium and Chrome look the same. I opened up the inspector and changed the body color to #fff and it is an improvement.
The contrast in numbers might be better than HN or the Wirecutter, but I find that HN's font and the Wirecutter's font easier to read. In short spurts, the font is somewhat fine, but because reviews are so text heavy, it becomes harder to read.
Keep in mind that all of this is highly subjective and based on my personal vision.
For the screenshots:
It's hard to explain, but I want to see how stuff is organized on the screen, etc. And while I would like to say looks aren't important, I'd be lying if I said that stuff didn't matter. If you are reviewing multiple products, I definitely want to see comparative screenshots for the same function. What would be even better would be short animated gifs showing how navigation work between apps.
Oh, another thing I noticed. Your Consumer Reports style icons in the Ratings Matrix are great, but when I hover over them, I don't get a tip as to what they mean. IIRC, CR puts a legend for the icon on top of the pages that use those icons.
re: screenshots — I think I see the point you're trying to make. We'll get something up and running and see how it works.
re: tooltips — just pushed something to add them
For live chat, I started on Drift, and then I got really tired of their buggy iOS app. I saw that you also mentioned their history of engineering issues in the handbook, and I've personally experienced a lot of these issues. I switched to Intercom, and they've been much better. However, I'm still very disappointed in the iOS app, because I can't tag any messages. This is a critical part of my workflow, because I use a new tool called Savio (http://savio.io) for tracking feature requests and customer feedback, and they have an integration with Intercom that relies on message tagging. Otherwise, Intercom has been great on desktop. (Except for a really annoying issue with Turbolinks, because the Intercom widget "bounces" on each page load. I've reached out to their customer support about this.)
For project management, I was originally using Trello. Then I briefly tried to use Airtable, but that didn't work very well after a while. Then I had a great product management consultation with the founder of Savio (Kareem Mayan - highly recommended by the way! https://www.reemer.com/). He helped me get set up on Clubhouse.io, which has been awesome. I've also really enjoyed having a "feedback triage" layer in Savio, so that I'm not just adding every idea directly into my todo list. My only issue with Clubhouse is that I wish there was an easier way to add a new task directly from each column in the kanban view, similar to Trello's "+ Add another card" button.
For product analytics - This is a bit embarrassing, but the option paralysis has been so bad so that I just didn't make any decision at all. I was just using Google Analytics on every page and tracking a few events, but "Evaluate Heap vs Mixpanel vs Amplitude" has been on my roadmap forever, and I would read Quora answers and try to figure out which one I should be using, but then I would just give up. Also everything is extremely expensive! But anyway, thanks to your article, I finally set up Heap analytics! But here's one thing I couldn't find any answers for - should I be adding Heap to all of my pages (including landing page, documentation site, blog, etc.). Or should I just add it inside the application, only for signed-in users? I was thinking that it would be nice to get more visibility into how people are reading the docs, because I'm working on a developer tool where the documentation is a critical part of the onboarding process. And I definitely want to know if someone signs up after reading through the docs. But on the other hand, maybe I don't want to track all anonymous users, because if I blow past their free plan limit then $500/mo is extremely expensive. Oh, so maybe I actually want to use Amplitude!
I already ran into a free plan limit with FullStory recently. I wanted to start tracking a page that was getting a lot of traffic, because there was a bug that was really hard to reproduce. I accidentally blew past the free plan limit and couldn't use them for the rest of the month, because their paid plan started at 5 figures per year.
I started on Bench.co for bookkeeping, and they were great for a year, but I could start to tell that they weren't the best choice for a SaaS business. They also referred me to an accounting service that hasn't been very good. (It's been very hard to get a response from them, and I actually still have no idea if they've even filed my taxes for 2019. I think I might need to sue them soon if I don't hear anything.)
So I moved to Pilot.com this year, and they've been awesome! It's so much nicer to have my books in Quickbooks Online. I'm planning to start using Flightpath Finance at some point (
Gartner, etc are all very much the paywalled exclusive access and strict control of reports that OP mentions.
What's not mentioned is that even with their incredible amounts of funding how difficult it is to do an evenhanded analysis of these truly complicated systems.
It's honestly just tough categorizing these things properly so you can get decent comparisons. Case in point Notion is on the front page today, their big selling point is that they can more or less do what would take half a dozen other more specialized SAAS to do. How do you slot them in against those?
Edit: case in point about categorization being hard: the 'web analytics' list is really about 'event analytics' (per the article) - which is fine but you still need web analytics services as well.
Put shortly, this is the exact same company that YC invested in back in S18. The product may be different, but the underlying company (in the legal sense) is the same.
When a startup pivots, they usually have two options: 1. shut down the company, return money to investors, and start afresh; or 2. continue with the same company, just with a different product. You'll hear varying opinions on the "right" way to approach it, but in general, YC startups usually take the latter option as YC is generally of the mindset of investing in the founders rather than the idea.
This is why Retool, Brex, Segment, GOAT, etc. are considered YC companies, despite completely changing what they were working on (the latter two substantially after demo day).
I think you really need to do a lot more interviews with people that have been users of these products.
1. On whether or not FRB should be in the list — we certainly think they should. Based on the founder surveys we sent out, we found that FRB was quite-well represented across the startup community (and I think that your datapoint adds to that finding). Our inclusion of a company/product is not an endorsement, but rather a result of what we think would be useful to test for the community. In this case, we evaluated FRB because we know a lot of founders (including yourself) have considered/are using them.
2. On whether our evaluation reflects your experience — this is the more interesting point for us. We have data from ~15 founders re: FRB, ranging from full-blown interviews to anecdotes. In general, we didn't hear anything substantially negative about their core banking service, but we aren't going to conclude that they're perfect from that data alone. That said, the founder data was informative enough to draw some directionally-accurate conclusions from, although additional data points help us both realign as well as shrink or expand our confidence interval.
If you're willing to email me about your experience with FRB, we'd very much like to look it over and take it into account when we update the guide.
2. I recognize that this is generally a hard job. Our original product/company was along the same lines as Wirecutter (https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ask-suto-launch/) and it's an extremely tough path to take. I do feel that it's easier for businesses since the value-props/features are a lot more distinct in how businesses make decisions.