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Ask HN: Advice for a solo SaaS founder dealing with a customer?

2 points by anon7331 ↗ HN
I am a solo founder/developer of a SaaS product. I have many customers (enterprise, small, medium, etc). I have never had this issue before now...

I have a customer that agreed to pay in N-days which is common for enterprise sales. However, this customer used our subscription/plan and refuses to pay (ghosting me at this point).

I believe the next step is writing a demand letter before officially bringing this to court. Does anyone have advice for a situation like this?

I have spoken to lawyers and they don't want to help (not quite enough cash for them to care, but a bit too much for small claims court as well...).

9 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 54.5 ms ] thread
bob1029
My initial gut reaction is to not chase this one unless the amount of money is going to make/break your business. The amount of time & mental energy required to chase things like this can almost immediately overtake the original loss. Just do a simple calculation: Your hourly consulting rate X total hours spent dealing with this bullshit = The additional cost this asshole customer has incurred so far.

My red line for a 1-10mm USD business would be 25-50k USD. I would seek recovery at that threshold, and only if I had skin in the game (aka some substantial marginal cost per customer). If I got screwed out of "here's my enterprise pricing menu and here's some demo API access to the sandbox DB instance", I would not be so upset. However, if I got screwed out of hundreds of hours of deep consulting work, I would almost certainly lawyer up.

anon7331
I understand-- what about the use of a debt collector? Wouldn't it be better to settle for N, where N is greater than 0? Especially if the collector does all of the work/time investment?
accrual
Can you just drop/ban/block them?
anon7331
This has been done, but they already used all of the plan that was agreed upon.
kjs3
bit too much for small claims court as well

Disable/delete their account, make a note to never deal with them again and move on. If it's too small for small claims, it's too small to waste time on.

anon7331
The debt is too much for small claims court, not too little.
kjs3
Ack. Misread. My bad.

Still...fire that client hard.

t312227
if the amount of money you are talking of is not "world-shaking" for you:

just get over it!!

it makes no sense to go to court / take legal actions - its just not worth your money and time.

write it off as "premium of apprenticeship" or whatever it is called in english - in german we say "lehrgeld" -, if you lose money due to your own mistakes but got an opportunity to learn something.

idk ... write them a formal letter, announcing you are deleting their accounts / accesses / data in 2 or 3 months if they do not pay until n days in the future and move on!!

in the end: large companies have more money, can afford them better lawyers than you - if they are for example a financial-institution, maybe they even have their own business-unit filled with lawyers, who don't have anything else to do than to fight your claims and they are already on the companies payroll...

just my 0.02€

anon7331
I can somewhat understand the idea... but I don't see this as my mistake. A person agreed to pay for something. They signed an agreement. The payment terms were specified (N-30). The person used the product but decided not to pay.

Not sure what I can learn here, besides not allowing an enterprise access even if they have agreed to terms and signed the agreement... but that is not common. As far as I am aware, it's common to give an enterprise access as soon as the agreements have been signed.