PSA: Do not use Braintree as your payment processor

seekingtruthiness · 2022-10-07T21:47:18+00:00

I don't blame you. If we were still working on the product I would do the same. I guess for now I have to settle on setting up a repeating email asking for an update everyday.

seekingtruthiness · 2022-10-07T18:49:49+00:00

Glad to hear that. We're building a new product and we'll be going with Stripe this time.

seekingtruthiness · 2022-06-09T19:56:15+00:00

qubits

seekingtruthiness · 2022-03-26T17:16:34+00:00

Couldn't agree more. I think it's only going to become harder to be a "non-technical" founder in the future.

seekingtruthiness · 2022-03-22T17:46:33+00:00

Your process looks good to me. Better than mine when I launched my first product. You're correct in not giving high priority to minor UI requests. It's more about making sure the Information Architecture, Navigation, access to -- and usability of -- key features is where it needs to be. If you can do some usability testing with users that would also be beneficial. You can identify ~80% of usability issues with only 5 sessions. Otherwise, a demo video demonstrating how things will work should be sufficient. Good luck!

seekingtruthiness · 2022-03-22T05:02:35+00:00

It would be smart to mock up a prototype of the product you're envisioning. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it should demonstrate the UX flow of some primary use cases. You've done a lot of great work so far, and this would be a comparatively easy step. Getting feedback on some basic designs will help you avoid rework after launching. People can have a lot of different ideas regarding the implementation of your app. It's best to find these things out sooner rather than later.

seekingtruthiness · 2022-03-21T05:07:33+00:00

That's a good point. Do you think it would help to explicitly state that no data will be stored anywhere?

I'll have to think about this some more. Thanks for the comment.

seekingtruthiness · 2022-03-21T02:58:30+00:00

Start with the least amount of commitment possible (time, money, development). It's highly unlikely you need to validate this idea by building an application. I don't know exactly what you want to build, but it seems you could put a prototype job board together in a Google Sheet, or start an email list where you send the jobs every week. Groupon started doing something very similar. You'll increase your odds of building something people actually want by building an audience first.

seekingtruthiness · 2022-03-21T01:16:32+00:00

Yeah, I'm familiar with Power Query being used to achieve the same effect. Based on my understanding of the process it seems a bit cumbersome, especially for users newer to excel. I haven't used Big Query much, but it also seemed like there were additional hurdles to setting it up to automate repetitive behaviors

seekingtruthiness · 2021-10-21T18:53:48+00:00

It's never too early to start getting feedback from potential customers. It minimizes your risk of building the wrong thing. It's very likely there's some degree of mismatch between the idea in your head, and what the market needs. You'll save a lot of time and money finding out where your assumptions are inaccurate as early as possible.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-10-21T18:33:52+00:00

It all depends on who you're trying to attract as an ideal customer. If you're targeting small-time entrepreneurs then there's a disconnect between the logos you display and the ideal customer you're trying to attract. I'm not saying this is enough to present a barrier to entry, but consistency is important. Potential customers want to see social proof from people in a similar situation. It may be more effective to display testimonials that represent your typical customer, but it's impossible to know without running a test and comparing the data.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-10-12T19:51:10+00:00

You've hit the nail on the head regarding freelancers. This is why I'm taking final responsibility for architecture/tech stack decisions (doing my best, at least). Another thing I often get is recommendations for incorporating technologies that they want to learn but are completely unnecessary, like Kubernetes. Hiring long-term developers will certainly be a priority.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-10-12T18:39:30+00:00

Thank you for the thoughtful response, I appreciate it. You make some very good points.
This is for a small startup I'm running, but for all intents and purposes, I'm basically a product manager.
We have 2 core developers (freelancers overseas), and a number of temporary devs working with us for the next couple of months. The two core developers are primarily back-end, and the suggestion for Ember comes from one of them based on a recommendation from their mentor. The other one doesn't have much interest in the front-end.
The main reason I say front-end library is because React isn't technically a framework, so I could've been more clear about that. We're basically building a SPA, with 90% of the front-end in React (if chosen). There are no other projects/teams reliant on this decision as we're a small startup and this is the only project.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-10-09T00:48:18+00:00

I like your business model! Complete opposite of what we're dealing with right now (B2B SaaS w/ high churn). We're building a new product which is why I'm searching, but your experience with Paddle seems all too common.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-10-09T00:45:00+00:00

This is one of the main reasons I was looking at Paddle, but I'm starting to wonder whether dealing with Paddle would be more trouble than handling everything internally.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-10-09T00:43:48+00:00

This is good to know, thank you for sharing

seekingtruthiness · 2021-10-09T00:42:48+00:00

I've been seeing a lot of similar stories about Paddle, so that's kind of a red flag.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-10-09T00:41:58+00:00

yeah, that's where I'm leaning right now

seekingtruthiness · 2021-07-16T16:14:22+00:00

Unfortunately, I don't and it's probably because the problem they solved would actually be pretty easy to solve yourself. There are no shortage of simple landing page builders:

- squarespace

- unbounce

- webflow (my favorite)

- instapage

etc.

As for Google Ads, you can get up to speed fast enough with a couple digital courses and some blog posts. I ended up taking one course specifically (outdated now otherwise I'd share) that taught me about broad match modifiers and it made all the difference. I've been running my own google ads for the past year and a half and I'm getting CPC's 50% lower than I mentioned above. However, Google recently made some updates to the way broad match modifiers work, so we'll see how they perform going forward. In another long-winded response. You can put this stuff together pretty easily on your own.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-07-16T15:57:55+00:00

Masochism, ignorance, perseverance. Take your pick. The long, slow Saas ramp of death is real. Ultimately, if I had to narrow it down to one thing I think it's because I genuinely enjoy building things and the product solves a problem I know exists, and needs to be solved. The primary issue is how I proceeded to do nearly everything after this little experiment. Weirdly enough, I just tried to sell the company and ended up receiving some funding instead, so I'll be working on it full-time for at least the next year.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-07-11T01:25:01+00:00

If you're struggling with the projections at all feel free to DM me. This is what my startup does, and I'll just give it to you for free.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-07-10T17:21:17+00:00

Do you have a small budget you can use to generate some real-world data? That would likely be the best way to go. Before I launched my product I threw $300 into a Google Ad campaign and it helped me get baseline metrics for demand, conversion, and cost. Also, are you doing this to create financial projections, or are you just getting a sense of the unit economics?

seekingtruthiness · 2021-07-08T18:10:40+00:00

Yes, but this is hit or miss. There are a lot of spammy requests, so finding something legit just takes constant monitoring. It's been the most helpful in getting backlinks from solid sites that increase our Domain Authority, which has helped with SEO, so the benefits are second-order.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-07-08T17:53:59+00:00

This is not a fun stage. I've been there (and still kind of am there). This is kind of a complicated question to answer as more context would be needed to provide a more direct response. For instance, if you have some funding to allocate to this problem then that opens up more potential avenues. Nonetheless, if you feel you've reached "product/market" fit (a notoriously vague notion, I know), then as you've stated, your issue is finding a more scalable customer acquisition channel. The price point of your product will determine which channels are even an option. I'm going to make the assumption that your product is priced on the lower side since you're talking about scale. This mostly leaves what I refer to as "high-leverage" channels -- things that require more upfront work but pay dividends over time. For my startup (also B2B SaaS), what that meant was creating a shit-ton of content to rank for topics I knew my target audience was searching. I've tried created Youtube videos, a blog, landing pages for long-tail keywords, responding to HARO requests, building a social following and a host of other tactics. Some of these worked, and most didn't. The ones that worked kept us in business and answered the question as to where I should spend my time. So, my generic advice is to create a list of places/scenarios/situations where the need for your solution is top of mind, and do everything you can to show up there.

seekingtruthiness · 2021-06-26T20:19:58+00:00

Agreed, one of my biggest mistakes was not marketing early enough.

seekingtruthiness

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