Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
I am building a web SAAS and being a developer, I want to mostly focus on development and skip the marketing, pr and other related stuff, hence I am looking for tools to automate/delegate as much as possible. I like building products after all.
There are so many great tools and strategies, but almost all of them require you to have a person or even a team to support it - for example all social media automation tools require you to prepare a lot of content to be effective. I can't do that.
Do you know any great tools that are more or less 0 maintenance, relatively short setup and deliver value?
It doesn't have to necessary be marketing tool, but it's what made me curious. If you know of development, accounting or whatever other tool please shoot!
133 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadLemlist - great for automating email outreach. A bit buggy and their support is friendly (but doesn't really know how the product works and you can never get a straight answer). Still, it works 95% of the time and does the job.
Not sure if it helps, but if you approach marketing like a product instead of something painful it can be more fun. Hit me up direct (bwbbwb@gmail.com), I'd be happy to share more of what I've done by building mini products for marketing and might be able to spark some ideas that would help you market by building some little tools.
Can you explain why you go this route instead of something like 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. Spreedly is a payment gateway agnostic credit card vault that lets me own the payment data and switch processors at will. If Stripe became cheaper or better in some way for me tomorrow, I could start billing my existing customers through Stripe tomorrow just by changing one token in my code.
I don't think this is true, Stripe always work with you to move customer data to another provider
He is an active HN'er. You can also find out more about users by clicking their name. Seasoned ones have some sort of profile.
Also, that is a rough background with it changing every couple of seconds.
"I'm Dan Grossman, the founder of Improvely and W3Counter. In my spare time, I also run Lignin & Light, a shop for hand-crafted gifts, with most items made on my Glowforge Pro."
Are the majority of your products physical or digital ecommerce? Or a subscription based automated service?
Edit: Looks like you have a great analytics framework, found your blog from another comment. Thanks for sharing your stack with us.
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 get better statistics (opens etc) They came back with saying I'm not a good fit for their org and boom disabled my account which is used in production ! Was a fun weekend switching everything over.
So they were willing to send my mails for 5 years for free and after I wanted to give them money to KEEP sending the EXACT same mail, they basically said bugger off and my production systems were left without an email service !
EDIT1: After searching SendGrid on HN - seems I"m not the only one !
I can recommend PostMark - Brilliant service.
a) Not as far as we could tell. It's "plain vanilla-transaction-emails" - think "JIRA-Like Tickets notification" but for Restaurant Maintenance ( product page: https://littlebigstats.com).
b) We have send the 'exact' same type of emails (mostly password-resets and maintenance-ticket-notifications) through them for the last 5 years. So if we were somehow against their terms, their process for vetting/detecting is not working at all.
Sidenote: Sorry I'm venting now - but was a real crappy weekend ! Trying to switch out your email provider and sign up for a new one.
It's not just switching out, it's also about getting verified (100% agree with this step) by the service provider most email service provider can take 24-72 hours(I can understand why). Since it was weekend we actually had to send out a mail to our three biggest customers in Africa (KFC, PizzaHut, JavaHouse) telling them we will be offline for 48 hours :/
Even after BEGGING them to enable our account for another 24 hours while we are being verified by other providers and to get our data off, they outright refused !
We applied to a bunch of email sending services and went with the first one that approved us, which was PostMark and I had a little chat with them via support and signup-process. Was impressed from start to finish by this company and their personal.
For reference AWS-SES took a little over 3 days to approve us.
I've previously had good experiences with SparkPost.
> “Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different… I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”
It left a bad taste in my mouth. We now use SparkPost.
Postmark is a phenomenal service and I'll be using it for every transactional email service I need going forward.
The first major issue we had was when emails sent to comcast.net addresses were bouncing. We were told that it was a known issue and that SendGrid was working on it. If SendGrid knew about this issue, why didn't anyone at SendGrid contact us proactively about the situation? We learned about the issue from unsatisfied customers who had not received order confirmations. To make matters worse, we never received a follow-up email informing us that the issue had been resolved. The lack of communication was unacceptable, especially given the man-hours that SendGrid allocates to the dissemination of fluff on Twitter (e.g., "Some sweet demos today from last night's hackathon").
The second major issue was even worse. Our latest invoice failed to be paid automatically for some undisclosed reason, and we didn't receive any notification regarding the issue. Again, we learned about a SendGrid issue from unsatisfied customers. To make matters worse (there's that phrase again), our customer service email address was added to the hard bounce list after our automatic payment failed. So after we manually paid our invoice, we still didn't receive emails sent to our customer service email address from our site's contact form.
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?
You also have to deal with abuse complaints and discovering where the form is for whichever provider is blocking your email addresses while also dealing with a customer who never got an email from you with their receipt or invoice. It’s a pita.
Did it once, never again.
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.
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.
Also is Cloudflare better (or cheaper) than Cloudfront ?
2. Too many eggs in one basket. I prefer to minimize (a) the chances of losing an account/asset and (b) the impact if it happens. If Amazon drops me, or has a long-lasting outage, I can re-build everything I run on another host and point the domains there in an afternoon. Not so if Amazon also owns the domains and hosts the DNS.
People like making life harder for themselves /shrug
— 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
- Crisp (best website chat, email campaigns).
- Namecheap.
- Cloudflare (speedup website loading around the world).
- Postmark (transactional emails).
- Uploadcare (come on, save days on image uploading/cropping features).
- AWS/DO.
- Amplitude analytics - the best of the best thing for SAAS products.
- UI libraries like bootstrap, but better use something well integrated with your framework. Don't reimplent.
- Use boring tech stack, which you are know as your five fingers (it'll keep you months).
- IDE by JetBrains.
- Stripe (save days on connecting billing for fair price).
- Books: Lean startup (foundation), Think and grow rich (don't give up), Steal like an artist (a vision).
- Forum: IndieHackers (it'll motivate you).
- Notion for docs, tasks, plans, ideas.
2. Mixpanel is slow as a hell in a real world apps. I'm not joking. You can wait by 15 seconds to load one page.
3. Amplitude is 10 times more flexible and intuitive.
4. Amplitude is free completely. 100 000 000 events included. Mixpanel gives about 5000, maybe a bit more, just for testing purposes.
Free Plans Monthly: Amplitude: 10 million events Mixpanel: 100k tracked users with 1000 events each. aka 100 million tracked events.
https://amplitude.com/pricing https://mixpanel.com/pricing/
I am using Paddle from the EU, what do you mean it doesn't work? You will only receive a single invoice that you have to deal with instead of hundreds of invoices from customers from various countries with various tax laws, right?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/registrar-for-everyone/
- 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.
For example, Zapier "moves things between web apps." Is that an ETL as a service? What is it E'ing, T'ing and L'ing, though?
Eg, you want a slack notification when a Google form is filled out. Pretty painless to set up a zap.
You want to keep a database table up to date with a Google sheet. You can do it on zapier, but it's gonna be a pain.
- Google Cloud Run (or anything that can run docker)
- SendGrid (but use SMTP only for easy migration)
- Google Workspace (Office/Notion are also cool but I just don't use them often)
- Mainly Go with Python for scripts
- PostgreSQL
- gRPC/Protocol Buffers for API servers
Where possible I try and take on as few dependencies on big cloud services, and always use standard gateways. It makes moving around much easier. Other stuff mentioned here is quite good, but I'll especially recommend https://IndieHackers.com
You should really look at finding a cofounder with those skills then. Every situation is different so I won’t say it’s impossible but you’re going to find it exceedingly difficult in my experience to skip that stuff and build a successful business.
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
- discord for actual community conversation
- best marketing for us has been word-of-mouth, thankfully driven just by doubling down on product and support
- Fixed pricing, very predictable billing
- No CPU throttling vs. EC2 instances
- Bandwidth included in the cost of the droplet
I've built a few projects with Netlify hosting a React frontend and DigitalOcean running an API server for the backend/database. A single DO droplet can scale far beyond what I've used it for, especially when combined with a SPA that offloads much of the processing to the users' browser.
Why the hell does DO need to change their UI so often? There are so many bugs to fix. Stop reskinning it please.
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 not good at all, but Stripe is significantly more expensive and doesn't really get me that much more (it still can't handle EU invoicing with SAF-T export and its idea of invoicing is very US-centric). If you look at Stripe pricing and you are not in the US, look carefully: they will not deposit USD into a non-US account, which means they will hit you with currency conversion fees and poor rates. Add up all the fees and rates and you end up with 5.4% (last I checked).
* No ads. I stopped burning money on them after implementing my own tracking and finding out that I get exactly 0 signups through ads (tried Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora).
* Linear for bug tracking. Fantastic tool.
* ProfitWell for tracking your subscription billing metrics.
* I still pay for Sendgrid, but I'd recommend against using them. They will send your E-mails from the same servers that their spammer customers use, so you will get plenty of rejected mail. No way to get around that unless you pay them big $$$ for dedicated IPs etc — it's a form of ransom, really. I send transactional mail myself, and for newsletters I'm looking for something better.
* Clojure + ClojureScript for software. Use a single language for both client and server, use the same business logic code for both, minimize line count, minimize programmer effort. An obvious bet for a solo founder.
* Ansible for managing your sever clusters, terraform for quickly spinning up experimental environments, and don't use AWS or heaven forbid Azure for those, use Digital Ocean which makes things really simple and saves you lots of time. Vultr is good, too.
That's it for tools, I think. But there is one thing I found more important than tools: I believe you should disregard most "common knowledge". Do not follow the hype. Read HN comments very critically: most people here are not in your situation. You need to optimize for different things than most HN readers. You are responsible for everything, including the bottom line of your business. So think for yourself. Don't jump into something just because lots of people write about it (ahem, Kubernetes). Don't do something a certain way just because it's current fashion (ahem, microservices). Don't use services just because most people do (ahem, AWS and Stripe). In each case, consider each service/tool carefully in the context of your business, your metrics and your requirements.
In my case, I am primarily optimizing for my time. But not only — I am willing to do some things manually (invoiced billing with wire transfers) or use a lower-tech provider (Braintree rather than Stripe) when it makes financial sense.
You mentioned PR and marketing — I also thought I would need to hire people, run campaigns, etc. I listened to all the podcasts and conference talks about marketing tools and strategies. And then I realized that most of these people do not run my type of SaaS — in fact, most of them make marketing tools for marketers. It's a huge echo chamber. I found out that with limited content marketing (e.g. writing articles from time to time) and "organic" spread, I'm getting a consistent number of signups. Could I get more? Yes, very likely so. But at what expense? Would these customers stick around? And would I be able to onboard and support them? So here again, think for yourself.
Unless of course your business is the same as everybody else's and you are building another tool for drip email campaigns, conversion tracking, idea voting, etc :-)
* https://paddle.com - Paddle (payments) - selling internationally without having to deal with all the local taxes
* https://uxwizz.com - UXWizz (analytics) - built my own private, self-hosted analytics platform that provides everything I need (stats, event tracking, session recordings, heatmaps, a/b tests, etc.) in a single platform that doesn't cost thousands per month
* Gmail - Like it or not, I got used to using gmail to handle customer support requests (I use the auto-labeling features to keep them categorized) and the SMTP forwarding to send/receive emails using my own domain names. I am thinking of moving away (for privacy reasons mostly), but it works really well at the moment.
* DigitalOcean/Contabo for VPSs for self-hosting everything that I need
This is mostly it, I try to stay as lean as possible. Self-hosting is pretty easy nowadays and it rarely needs maintenance, so I usually prefer it because of the control over the product/data and the cost reduction that it gives.
- FastAPI for the SaaS itself
- WooCommerce for the accounts and subscriptions
- Nikola for the gallery and feature demonstrations
- FreeAgent for handling all the tax obligations (UK)
I’ve been checking out Ghost CMS recently. It’s looking great so far for content and subscription management.
Can you please explain what Nikola is? I tried searching for it, but it's a common name.
Found it by searching [nikola software].
It's as mkl said - a static site generator. It's a Python-based one so I was more comfortable customising it.
You're most likely doomed tbh. Talking to customers is essential.