6 ms·

Well, I've had my little SaaS up and running for about 6 weeks. - The landing page gets about 30-70 hits per day (excepting the occasional spike) -- how many o

by jcadam 9y ago

Well, I've had my little SaaS up and running for about 6 weeks. - The landing page gets about 30-70 hits per day (excepting the occasional spike) -- how many of those are bots and crawlers, I wonder? - I've had a grand total of FIVE (5) trial sign ups. - No buyers yet - My linode bill is currently about ~$120/month. - Still within the free tier on S3 and Mailgun. - You know, when I'm the only one using the app, I don't place much stress on the infrastructure. Now, I can't really say one way or another if I'm getting to that 2% because I'm just not getting enough trial sign-ups :) EDIT: Oh, yea, link for the curious: https://www.contabulo.com https://www.contabulo.com Bah, I've posted it here before.

robodale 9y ago
Why is your linode bill so high with so few users? I see a 32GB plan is $120/month. Do you really need that?
- jcadam 9y ago
  1. App Server (all my Clojure services... and the one transient service written in golang) 2. Postgres (Master) 3. Postgres (Standby) 4. Elasticsearch server (yea, only one right now, you know, few users) 5. One linode running RabbitMQ 6. The linode running NGINX that sits in front of the app server and does all of the reverse proxying Also, 7. The linode running the marketing site (wordpress). I know, I know, I'm a nerd and just couldn't help myself with the architecture. Hey, at least it should be fairly scalable.
  - lettergram 9y ago
    Don't need the standby server, just use automated backups. You also don't need the linode running nginx, with so few users put it on one server. Finally wordpress should be $5/month or less. Right there you could drop at least $15 / month.
    - lugg 9y ago
      $15 / month. Kind of not even worth thinking about when you're a developer and should be internally billing yourself for $100/hour+.
      - lettergram 9y ago
        Fair, what I decribed should reduce overhead as well (less nodes = less complexity typically). Also when you're starting something you can't bill yourself anything mentally. Else you'd go out and be billing someone else, you'd likely make more money. In part cutting costs is important because it's actual savings, i.e. imagning billing yourself doesn't produce real money.
      - jcadam 9y ago
        Hey, my day job doesn't pay nearly that much :)
  - pfarnsworth 9y ago
    Consolidate that all down to a single server and save your configurations in case you ever do get customers. There’s no need to be wasting $120/month when you literally have no customers at this point.
    - danenania 9y ago
      I'd disagree. Optimizing infrastructure costs is the last thing you should be worried about at the start. Your time is far, far more valuable. If it works, leave it alone and spend your time on product/sales/marketing.
      - pfarnsworth 9y ago
        He has 5 trial signups after 6 weeks. Let’s be realistic here. His time is literally valueless because he hasn’t made a single sale. Better to save money and expand if and when a paying customer shows up.
        jcadam 9y ago
        Well, you know, I'd like to think my problem is sales/marketing and not product.
        tarsinge 9y ago
        Maybe you know it, but reading your comments it looks like you are treating sales/marketing as an afterthought. For running a successful business, I think you should try to always have the others in mind when you work on one, because that’s how you can find product/market fit (otherwise it’s mostly luck, and/or you had perfect hindsight of your market).
        icedchai 9y ago
        $120/month is a drop in the bucket. You need to look at the opportunity cost. His time is worth over $100/hour and better spent on other things (features, marketing, whatever..) If he gets a ton of customers, he'll need to expand anyway and will waste even more time setting things back up.
  - tonyhb 9y ago
    You could containerize all of these services and run them on the same machine.
    - lugg 9y ago
      I'd advise against single machine container deployment. You'll hit big problems the day you need to horizontally scale. If you're going to dockerize, at least spread things over a two node swarm so you find these issues early.
japhyr 9y ago
I'm not in your market, but your product looks pretty interesting. The free trial is fairly prominent on your home page. On your pricing page, all of the free trial links are below the fold for me: https://imgur.com/a/4qsaf https://imgur.com/a/4qsaf You might want to move the free trial buttons higher, maybe right below "How much does Contabulo cost?" Also, you can put cost in lowercase.
- jcadam 9y ago
  Gotcha, thanks.
warrenmiller 9y ago
Site is down btw
- jcadam 9y ago
  I think y'all managed to crash my wordpress site. Rebooted :)
tinymollusk 9y ago
I can help you increase your visit-to-signup conversion rate for free, if you're interested. Just soft launched my own service (www.leadnexus.co), where I will split test your signup forms to find more effective options. Your volume might make it a little tougher to optimize, but I bet I can improve on that ~0.3% conversion rate for you. (That goes for anyone reading this -- happy to see if I can help, to test out my own idea. Not ready for a bigger announcement, but ping me via the site or travis@leadnexus.co if you want to give it a shot.) Link - https://www.leadnexus.co https://www.leadnexus.co
- jcadam 9y ago
  Nice site :) Might want to fix this passage: > We use an emphasis on optionality, machine learning, and a dedicate to results to get you more users and leads. We don't want you to pay us for unless we improve your results.
  - tinymollusk 9y ago
    Good catch, thank you! I've got to update the copy tomorrow, will make a pass through this as well.
lugg 9y ago
"Stop losing your mind" is clever but hard to grok. Maybe "Stop employee brain drain"? That would at least be relatable to people who have heard the phrase brain drain before.
ludston 9y ago
This product has a subset of features from Drop-box, Trello and Instagram?
- jcadam 9y ago
  I don't know about Instagram (haven't used that much), but I'm shooting for (long-term) a card-based, simplified replacement for tools like Confluence, which I find overwrought and difficult to use. It uses cards, so I suppose it superficially resembles Trello and similar agile board-esque tools, but it definitely has a different feel to it. I actually got the idea for the basic layout from Pintrest (I originally had a masonry-like layout to the cards, but switched to CSS grid -- makes sorting/searching/scanning for something specific easier, IMO).
weisser 9y ago
My two cents: make it easier for people to see know what it is. I'm not entirely sure from a brief scan - is it team wiki software? Is it sorta like trello cards but for archival/searchable org information? As someone who is actually looking at team wiki software for a couple startups and nonprofits I'm helping I can tell you that my threshhold for signing up for a trial (even no CC required) is pretty high so don't let that discourage you.
- jcadam 9y ago
  > is it team wiki software? Is it sorta like trello cards but for archival/searchable org information? That's basically it. The idea came to me after I had become frustrated with enterprise wiki/KM software. At the time I was being forced to use Liferay, though I've also had to use Confluence, MediaWiki, and Sharepoint (the worst thing in the universe) in a corporate setting, none of which I particularly liked.
ciguy 9y ago
A quick glance at your site, and I left with the impression that you're a more corporate version of Trello. Right now Trello serves our needs perfectly for free, so what's the value add in signing up?
- jcadam 9y ago
  Gah, I get that. It serves a different purpose and I wouldn't think it's really in competition with Trello. Perhaps a screencast/animation showing the product in action could demonstrate its not-a-Trello-clone-ness better than still screenshots.
  - devocracy 9y ago
    Are you more in-line with Confluence, as a place to build a database of knowledge in the organization? This is purely my opinion, so please take it with a large grain of salt. I'm not a fan of videos and won't last long enough on a site to sit through them unless I've arrived there from a referral (there is too much software out there that does the same thing, so time is at a premium). I'm more of a fan of descriptive workflow/image showing what the software does and keeps the value prop simple. As an example, this marketing site impressed me greatly and I actually took the time to read through the different features as it was easy to follow and I didn't feel flustered by each of the feature explanations: https://www.contactually.com/how-it-works https://www.contactually.com/how-it-works My only gripe, there is no cohesive single blurb explaining how all these features fit together in a complete package. Their tagline at the top is weak, but visually they've nailed it. Also, having to sign up for a demo kind of sucks and slows down the process of me getting to try out your product to evaluate if it meets my needs. I'd love for our industry to move towards a "here is a sandbox, have fun for a few minutes" model which would be completely painless for folks evaluating the tool. After a couple of minutes it could nudge you to sign up for a full trial account.
arethuza 9y ago
I find your pricing page a bit confusing (could well be me though) - I'm used to SaaS pricing being per-user while you are advertising 'packages' that actually look quite high but aren't really when you calculate the per-user price. e.g. Maybe replace $29.99 for 10 users with $2.99 per user (with a minimum sign up of 10 users)?
- jcadam 9y ago
  Hmm... you might be right there. I thought packages would be simpler (and I know basecamp charges a flat $99 - I'd be afraid of large enterprises coming along and placing more than $99 worth of infrastructure costs on me). I know Jira, for example, has a low rate package for the first 10 users (basically like a paid trial), and then the pricing switches to per-user and it ramps up quickly.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    Maybe A/B test it or something - I guess I take a very simplistic approach where I see the numbers on the page, assume they are per user and the run away before reading the small print. Good luck with the service!
    - jcadam 9y ago
      > assume they are per user and the run away before reading the small print. LOL, that could be a problem. I could at least draw attention to the fact that these are packages and NOT per user pricing in a more obvious way.
lustig 9y ago
How are you marketing the product?
- jcadam 9y ago
  So far: - Get listed in any/every saas (esp b2b) directory I can find (haven't done producthunt yet, though). - Send out cold emails (not a lot so far). I'd start making cold phone calls if I wasn't sitting at a day job during business hours every weekday. I could try postcards..? - Post to online formus - kind of like I'm doing here :) I'm really trying to avoid resorting to PPC ads, but it might be time to do that. I'm also thinking of making it free for academic use, just to get some folks using the product and talking about it. Also, the thought to find a partner who knows bizdev/marketing/sales has occurred to me.
  - lustig 9y ago
    Thanks! I think 30-70 visits per day without paying for them is quite a lot after six weeks. I'm in a similar situation, working a day job while trying to get something off the ground. Right now I'm just experimenting with ideas and trying to learn as much as possible. I think paid ads is a pretty good approach to validate the product and copy, even if it's not a viable strategy in the long run. Making it free for academic use makes sense in more than that sense. If you're lucky you might get a .edu backlink from it, which is valuable for seo.
jakobegger 9y ago
I’m currently looking for a team wiki solution (team of 3), but I wasn’t sold by your landing page. Here are some things that went through my head: - I don’t like the graphic design - evaluating if this is good will take us more than a month - I’m worried about lock-in. If, after a few months I discover this isn’t for us, do I need to keep paying not to lose my data?
- jcadam 9y ago
  > - I don’t like the graphic design Of the landing page or the product itself? The landing page is an easier fix :) > - evaluating if this is good will take us more than a month That's quite possibly true. Wikis take time to populate and only become useful if people commit to doing so. The problem is how to balance: - Giving users time to evaluate the product - Revenue > - I’m worried about lock-in. If, after a few months I discover this isn’t for us, do I need to keep paying not to lose my data? Valid point. I do plan to add a data export feature at some point. I'm wondering what the most useful format for such a thing might be. CSV? XML? JSON? SQL? Conversely, I still haven't thought of a sane way to allow for a mass data import... but I'd like to.
  - jakobegger 9y ago
    I was talking about the graphic design of the product screenshots. I'm personally not a fan of time limited trials -- I think feature or usage limits are better, especially when you don't have any users yet, and you need people to use the app and give feedback...
    - jcadam 9y ago
      Currently the trial is limited to 5 users and something like 100MB of file storage. I was actually more worried offering a free-tier would result in people abusing the service (i.e., using it to store/share illegal stuff). However, just between you, me, and the internet, I actually haven't enabled the logic to lock trial accounts out at 30 days. Because I'm still unsure about it.

by jcadam 9y ago

robodale 9y ago

Why is your linode bill so high with so few users? I see a 32GB plan is $120/month. Do you really need that?

jcadam 9y ago
1. App Server (all my Clojure services... and the one transient service written in golang) 2. Postgres (Master) 3. Postgres (Standby) 4. Elasticsearch server (yea, only one right now, you know, few users) 5. One linode running RabbitMQ 6. The linode running NGINX that sits in front of the app server and does all of the reverse proxying Also, 7. The linode running the marketing site (wordpress). I know, I know, I'm a nerd and just couldn't help myself with the architecture. Hey, at least it should be fairly scalable.
- lettergram 9y ago
  Don't need the standby server, just use automated backups. You also don't need the linode running nginx, with so few users put it on one server. Finally wordpress should be $5/month or less. Right there you could drop at least $15 / month.
  - lugg 9y ago
    $15 / month. Kind of not even worth thinking about when you're a developer and should be internally billing yourself for $100/hour+.
    - lettergram 9y ago
      Fair, what I decribed should reduce overhead as well (less nodes = less complexity typically). Also when you're starting something you can't bill yourself anything mentally. Else you'd go out and be billing someone else, you'd likely make more money. In part cutting costs is important because it's actual savings, i.e. imagning billing yourself doesn't produce real money.
    - jcadam 9y ago
      Hey, my day job doesn't pay nearly that much :)
- pfarnsworth 9y ago
  Consolidate that all down to a single server and save your configurations in case you ever do get customers. There’s no need to be wasting $120/month when you literally have no customers at this point.
  - danenania 9y ago
    I'd disagree. Optimizing infrastructure costs is the last thing you should be worried about at the start. Your time is far, far more valuable. If it works, leave it alone and spend your time on product/sales/marketing.
    - pfarnsworth 9y ago
      He has 5 trial signups after 6 weeks. Let’s be realistic here. His time is literally valueless because he hasn’t made a single sale. Better to save money and expand if and when a paying customer shows up.
      - jcadam 9y ago
        Well, you know, I'd like to think my problem is sales/marketing and not product.
        tarsinge 9y ago
        Maybe you know it, but reading your comments it looks like you are treating sales/marketing as an afterthought. For running a successful business, I think you should try to always have the others in mind when you work on one, because that’s how you can find product/market fit (otherwise it’s mostly luck, and/or you had perfect hindsight of your market).
      - icedchai 9y ago
        $120/month is a drop in the bucket. You need to look at the opportunity cost. His time is worth over $100/hour and better spent on other things (features, marketing, whatever..) If he gets a ton of customers, he'll need to expand anyway and will waste even more time setting things back up.
- tonyhb 9y ago
  You could containerize all of these services and run them on the same machine.
  - lugg 9y ago
    I'd advise against single machine container deployment. You'll hit big problems the day you need to horizontally scale. If you're going to dockerize, at least spread things over a two node swarm so you find these issues early.

japhyr 9y ago

I'm not in your market, but your product looks pretty interesting. The free trial is fairly prominent on your home page. On your pricing page, all of the free trial links are below the fold for me: https://imgur.com/a/4qsaf https://imgur.com/a/4qsaf You might want to move the free trial buttons higher, maybe right below "How much does Contabulo cost?" Also, you can put cost in lowercase.

jcadam 9y ago
Gotcha, thanks.

warrenmiller 9y ago

Site is down btw

jcadam 9y ago
I think y'all managed to crash my wordpress site. Rebooted :)

tinymollusk 9y ago

I can help you increase your visit-to-signup conversion rate for free, if you're interested. Just soft launched my own service (www.leadnexus.co), where I will split test your signup forms to find more effective options. Your volume might make it a little tougher to optimize, but I bet I can improve on that ~0.3% conversion rate for you. (That goes for anyone reading this -- happy to see if I can help, to test out my own idea. Not ready for a bigger announcement, but ping me via the site or travis@leadnexus.co if you want to give it a shot.) Link - https://www.leadnexus.co https://www.leadnexus.co

jcadam 9y ago
Nice site :) Might want to fix this passage: > We use an emphasis on optionality, machine learning, and a dedicate to results to get you more users and leads. We don't want you to pay us for unless we improve your results.
- tinymollusk 9y ago
  Good catch, thank you! I've got to update the copy tomorrow, will make a pass through this as well.

lugg 9y ago

"Stop losing your mind" is clever but hard to grok. Maybe "Stop employee brain drain"? That would at least be relatable to people who have heard the phrase brain drain before.

ludston 9y ago

This product has a subset of features from Drop-box, Trello and Instagram?

jcadam 9y ago
I don't know about Instagram (haven't used that much), but I'm shooting for (long-term) a card-based, simplified replacement for tools like Confluence, which I find overwrought and difficult to use. It uses cards, so I suppose it superficially resembles Trello and similar agile board-esque tools, but it definitely has a different feel to it. I actually got the idea for the basic layout from Pintrest (I originally had a masonry-like layout to the cards, but switched to CSS grid -- makes sorting/searching/scanning for something specific easier, IMO).

weisser 9y ago

My two cents: make it easier for people to see know what it is. I'm not entirely sure from a brief scan - is it team wiki software? Is it sorta like trello cards but for archival/searchable org information? As someone who is actually looking at team wiki software for a couple startups and nonprofits I'm helping I can tell you that my threshhold for signing up for a trial (even no CC required) is pretty high so don't let that discourage you.

jcadam 9y ago
> is it team wiki software? Is it sorta like trello cards but for archival/searchable org information? That's basically it. The idea came to me after I had become frustrated with enterprise wiki/KM software. At the time I was being forced to use Liferay, though I've also had to use Confluence, MediaWiki, and Sharepoint (the worst thing in the universe) in a corporate setting, none of which I particularly liked.

ciguy 9y ago

A quick glance at your site, and I left with the impression that you're a more corporate version of Trello. Right now Trello serves our needs perfectly for free, so what's the value add in signing up?

jcadam 9y ago
Gah, I get that. It serves a different purpose and I wouldn't think it's really in competition with Trello. Perhaps a screencast/animation showing the product in action could demonstrate its not-a-Trello-clone-ness better than still screenshots.
- devocracy 9y ago
  Are you more in-line with Confluence, as a place to build a database of knowledge in the organization? This is purely my opinion, so please take it with a large grain of salt. I'm not a fan of videos and won't last long enough on a site to sit through them unless I've arrived there from a referral (there is too much software out there that does the same thing, so time is at a premium). I'm more of a fan of descriptive workflow/image showing what the software does and keeps the value prop simple. As an example, this marketing site impressed me greatly and I actually took the time to read through the different features as it was easy to follow and I didn't feel flustered by each of the feature explanations: https://www.contactually.com/how-it-works https://www.contactually.com/how-it-works My only gripe, there is no cohesive single blurb explaining how all these features fit together in a complete package. Their tagline at the top is weak, but visually they've nailed it. Also, having to sign up for a demo kind of sucks and slows down the process of me getting to try out your product to evaluate if it meets my needs. I'd love for our industry to move towards a "here is a sandbox, have fun for a few minutes" model which would be completely painless for folks evaluating the tool. After a couple of minutes it could nudge you to sign up for a full trial account.

arethuza 9y ago

I find your pricing page a bit confusing (could well be me though) - I'm used to SaaS pricing being per-user while you are advertising 'packages' that actually look quite high but aren't really when you calculate the per-user price. e.g. Maybe replace $29.99 for 10 users with $2.99 per user (with a minimum sign up of 10 users)?

jcadam 9y ago
Hmm... you might be right there. I thought packages would be simpler (and I know basecamp charges a flat $99 - I'd be afraid of large enterprises coming along and placing more than $99 worth of infrastructure costs on me). I know Jira, for example, has a low rate package for the first 10 users (basically like a paid trial), and then the pricing switches to per-user and it ramps up quickly.
- arethuza 9y ago
  Maybe A/B test it or something - I guess I take a very simplistic approach where I see the numbers on the page, assume they are per user and the run away before reading the small print. Good luck with the service!
  - jcadam 9y ago
    > assume they are per user and the run away before reading the small print. LOL, that could be a problem. I could at least draw attention to the fact that these are packages and NOT per user pricing in a more obvious way.

lustig 9y ago

How are you marketing the product?

jcadam 9y ago
So far: - Get listed in any/every saas (esp b2b) directory I can find (haven't done producthunt yet, though). - Send out cold emails (not a lot so far). I'd start making cold phone calls if I wasn't sitting at a day job during business hours every weekday. I could try postcards..? - Post to online formus - kind of like I'm doing here :) I'm really trying to avoid resorting to PPC ads, but it might be time to do that. I'm also thinking of making it free for academic use, just to get some folks using the product and talking about it. Also, the thought to find a partner who knows bizdev/marketing/sales has occurred to me.
- lustig 9y ago
  Thanks! I think 30-70 visits per day without paying for them is quite a lot after six weeks. I'm in a similar situation, working a day job while trying to get something off the ground. Right now I'm just experimenting with ideas and trying to learn as much as possible. I think paid ads is a pretty good approach to validate the product and copy, even if it's not a viable strategy in the long run. Making it free for academic use makes sense in more than that sense. If you're lucky you might get a .edu backlink from it, which is valuable for seo.

jakobegger 9y ago

I’m currently looking for a team wiki solution (team of 3), but I wasn’t sold by your landing page. Here are some things that went through my head: - I don’t like the graphic design - evaluating if this is good will take us more than a month - I’m worried about lock-in. If, after a few months I discover this isn’t for us, do I need to keep paying not to lose my data?

jcadam 9y ago
> - I don’t like the graphic design Of the landing page or the product itself? The landing page is an easier fix :) > - evaluating if this is good will take us more than a month That's quite possibly true. Wikis take time to populate and only become useful if people commit to doing so. The problem is how to balance: - Giving users time to evaluate the product - Revenue > - I’m worried about lock-in. If, after a few months I discover this isn’t for us, do I need to keep paying not to lose my data? Valid point. I do plan to add a data export feature at some point. I'm wondering what the most useful format for such a thing might be. CSV? XML? JSON? SQL? Conversely, I still haven't thought of a sane way to allow for a mass data import... but I'd like to.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  I was talking about the graphic design of the product screenshots. I'm personally not a fan of time limited trials -- I think feature or usage limits are better, especially when you don't have any users yet, and you need people to use the app and give feedback...
  - jcadam 9y ago
    Currently the trial is limited to 5 users and something like 100MB of file storage. I was actually more worried offering a free-tier would result in people abusing the service (i.e., using it to store/share illegal stuff). However, just between you, me, and the internet, I actually haven't enabled the logic to lock trial accounts out at 30 days. Because I'm still unsure about it.