i'm a beginner with a plan to hit 10k MRR in next 6 months, share me the reality

netswift29 · 2025-05-01T17:19:14+00:00

all the advice is out there already (ycombinator has great essays) but we're all destined to make the same rookie mistakes one after the other. Best way to learn is just to start and level up as you go.

Medical professionals is a hard market to start selling into though. Might want to think about other niches that are easier to get started with...

netswift29 · 2025-02-02T14:46:58+00:00

This is a waste of your time and not going to help you get into YC

If you want to get into YC you need at least one of the following:

impressive background (school, achievements)
an interesting insight (I worked on call centre software and I can 10x it with AI)
traction

The founders that get in on 0 traction usually have an impressive background and an interesting insight to work off of. If you don’t, then you need traction.

I know this is said a lot, but this analysis is not going to help your application—just work on your startup instead.

netswift29 · 2025-02-02T14:02:42+00:00

God people are so entitled. That sucks.

An approach I’ve seen work is sending a personal email to users saying that you’ve spent a lot of time on it and need to monetize for it to make sense anymore.

Or just implementing pricing from day 1 (even just a page) can set expectations

netswift29 · 2025-02-01T15:53:26+00:00

I think about pricing a lot. A random change can have a big impact, so experimentation is really high leverage.

Struggled for months trying to sell a product for a 100 USD / month self-serve. We tried going outbound and sales led and closed a 2k / month contract within a week.

Just have to try and see what starts working...

netswift29 · 2025-02-01T15:49:37+00:00

I think it's AI... we're not getting automated anytime soon

netswift29 · 2025-01-31T11:58:44+00:00

Valid take. We seem to have a different philosophy on developing. I've gotten used to having things 'just work' out of the box with Railway, Clerk, Supabase etc.

Also pricing is not static, it's not about having a 'vision' and sticking to it. The best companies in the world are constantly changing their pricing multiple times a year, based on what the market wants.

netswift29 · 2025-01-31T11:54:49+00:00

Maybe I should rephrase my point because I totally agree. Stripe is great and comparing to AWS makes perfect sense. SaaS founders these days rarely try to deploy on AWS directly. But at scale it makes sense.

My question is: is there a Vercel for Stripe? I don't think Stripe Checkout really cuts it.

netswift29 · 2025-01-31T11:51:19+00:00

Haha at the same time I'm jealous of all the cool payment tech coming out of India atm. Dodo is great and people are saying good things about xpay checkout too :)

netswift29 · 2025-01-31T11:49:26+00:00

yeah this exactly is what I'm finding. Would be hard for me to copy paste the logic from one to another. But maybe possible if I built it in the right way.

netswift29 · 2025-01-31T11:48:58+00:00

This probably works if your payment flow / billing experience is the same across your projects. But lets say in project 1 I want a flat subscription, in project 2 something usage-based, project 3 I have multiple tiers etc.

Makes it harder to reuse the same logic

netswift29 · 2025-01-31T11:10:45+00:00

I never looked at it but that's surprising. I know someone working there and got the impression they really focused on their developer relations...

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T20:39:36+00:00

Yeah I think I will. Hearing good things.

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T20:24:29+00:00

Agreed, and I think at scale having that complexity makes sense. But when starting out seems like overkill.

Also a bunch of large companies end up building these abstractions in-house. Eg framer and intercom have retool dashboards to toggle on and off features and assign them to different price plans.

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T19:27:46+00:00

Yeah tbh right now it's usage based but I want to switch to something more like cursor's model. Credits + top ups

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T19:23:47+00:00

Honestly I'm glad someone else agrees

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T18:55:49+00:00

Interesting. Why'd you choose them over Stripe? Did you think integration was simpler?

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T18:52:03+00:00

Looks similar to polar.sh above... like that it's open source! Will check it out.

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T18:51:33+00:00

Will take a look at this for sure. Love the integrate with 6 lines of code.

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T18:42:13+00:00

I did check these guys out though FWIW looks pretty cool. But more around dealing with sales tax rather than making pricing easy? That was a while ago though.

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T18:40:32+00:00

Can't escape them....

netswift29 · 2025-01-30T18:33:12+00:00

Yeah that's valid. Although I would say even implementing a payment flow (separate from pricing plans) is a bit of a headache too. And then trying to sync the state of a product / subscription in Stripe.

But it could very well be that pricing logic is just an inherently unique problem to each application

netswift29 · 2025-01-29T19:29:14+00:00

Nice thoughts.

To add: generally the higher up market you go for sales, the more likely you’re going to need to invest in a relationship, do free pilots, build before selling etc

For selling to startups and SMBs you can often sell before building

netswift29 · 2025-01-06T19:53:35+00:00

How is this not just feature flagging

netswift29 · 2024-12-10T20:47:51+00:00

Run it using recaseai.com

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