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I've thought a lot about this specific idea. I think the problem with your business model is: - People who have already built their company/website/product ar

by a13n 5y ago

I've thought a lot about this specific idea. I think the problem with your business model is: - People who have already built their company/website/product are not going to move the world to adopt your platform. It's just too much work. - This leaves you with people who haven't built/shipped anything yet, who aren't really willing to pay $500-2000 for your software (there may be exceptions, but not thaaaat many). I think a really successful business model would be something like: - Free for the first $10k revenue - 3% of revenue after that (auto calculated via Stripe) This way, many more people will get started with your software, and those that are actually successful will end up paying you a lot more than $500. "We don't get paid till you do" is the headline on your pricing page. I'd imagine your retention would be amazing because it'd be very difficult to move off (similar reasons as Stripe, AWS).

arcturus17 5y ago
This could be interesting for agencies and freelancers more than the customers themselves. I own a consultancy and I might find this interesting as I don't have an internal SaaS framework yet. The two problems I see are: 1. Lack of options... There may be some parts of the stack that I don't like or don't fit requirements 2. Unknown code quality... Cannot tell what the coding standards are. This is related to #1 in that I don't know how hard the code will be to modify unless I read it. Otherwise it's an interesting proposition. React/Nextjs are my jam, and I prefer serverful (Django) to serverless but that might be negotiable. But even if I wanted to drop in my own server, if the front-end is well coded I could easily save 2x-3x the 1.8k sticker price in dev costs on a single project. If I were to build a SaaS myself, I might also find this interesting with all the caveats above, but I would 200% certain not pay a revenue share unless the platform really required minimal tweaking and was about 90% adjusted to my use case, and provided continued platform value after that launch (like, say, Shopify).
- a13n 5y ago
  I mean I think a lot of people want to build a SaaS, but it's a lot of work. You need to build a landing site, set up pricing plans, integrate with Stripe, build user authentication, build company accounts + team invites, and that's just for an MVP, not including the product itself. If you can get all of that for free (to start), and that saves you months of building, that's pretty worthwhile. At $1m ARR you're only spending $30k/yr on the platform, which is roughly what your AWS/Stripe bill is anyway. There can definitely be more features too like user permissions, A/B testing, CMS, analytics/tag manager integration, etc, etc that continue to deliver value / save you time/money/effort as you grow.
  - bsid 5y ago
    It's hard to build alll those things you mentioned in a deep enough fashion to make it something people would use (Which is where I think this template lands). Entire companies are dedicated to each vertical. These all things we wanted to tackle at Clerk (https://www.clerk.dev https://www.clerk.dev) as a SaaS. The first thing we hit down that path is user authentication -- and that opened up an entire can of worms we're still working through. User authentication alone has been tough enough because you can't just build yet another Auth0 clone and brand it "passwordless"... you'll have a tough time competing against the incumbents. This has led us to session management, which proved tricky to get right across local development and production environments, and has led is to the disparate ways people authenticate, which is a massive API design challenge. However, we think it could be a game changer, especially with all the Next.js / React advancements as of late. Especially the component-ization of the frontend in conjunction managed backends, session management feels like something that ties it all together. I'm certainly excited for the next decade of developer tools :). Things will get dramatically easier with all these commoditized verticals.
    - a13n 5y ago
      Yeah it's definitely not a company you could bootstrap with 2 people. You'd need funding to build the team and product. But once you've actually built everything and gotten traction it'd be really hard for competitors to catch up because nobody is ever cancelling... Great VC business tbh
      - tigroferoce 5y ago
        Yeah, don't tell me. We are two people and we are trying to do that, open source. I can confirm it's pretty hard :-). If you want to have a look, it's http://github.com/saasform/saasform http://github.com/saasform/saasform
lefrenchy 5y ago
I think that’s probably the right outlook, but how would you run their product through your stripe and take 3%? Wouldn’t that require the purchasers Stripe information to be a child of your Stripe account?
- a13n 5y ago
  I think you integrate with their Stripe account (you have to anyway to set up billing/subscriptions anyway), and each month generate a report on how much they billed, then bill their credit card 3% of that. If they don't pay then their site/product shuts down (after a grace period obviously).
creativedg 5y ago
Thank you for your valuable feedbacks and sharing your thought. I totally agree with your approach for a general Saas project/product and frankly speaking, I prefer as well your business model because it can bring recurring revenue instead of one-time sales. Here in terms of Nextless.js, as the customer will have access to the source code, the revenue sharing like 3% as you suggest is extremely hard to implement. It raises a lot of technical challenge... Perhaps in the future, this concern can be addressed somehow and your proposed business model shall be implemented. Have you had such concerns/experiences for your projects? Pricing is not an easy subject though :)

by a13n 5y ago

arcturus17 5y ago

This could be interesting for agencies and freelancers more than the customers themselves. I own a consultancy and I might find this interesting as I don't have an internal SaaS framework yet. The two problems I see are: 1. Lack of options... There may be some parts of the stack that I don't like or don't fit requirements 2. Unknown code quality... Cannot tell what the coding standards are. This is related to #1 in that I don't know how hard the code will be to modify unless I read it. Otherwise it's an interesting proposition. React/Nextjs are my jam, and I prefer serverful (Django) to serverless but that might be negotiable. But even if I wanted to drop in my own server, if the front-end is well coded I could easily save 2x-3x the 1.8k sticker price in dev costs on a single project. If I were to build a SaaS myself, I might also find this interesting with all the caveats above, but I would 200% certain not pay a revenue share unless the platform really required minimal tweaking and was about 90% adjusted to my use case, and provided continued platform value after that launch (like, say, Shopify).

a13n 5y ago
I mean I think a lot of people want to build a SaaS, but it's a lot of work. You need to build a landing site, set up pricing plans, integrate with Stripe, build user authentication, build company accounts + team invites, and that's just for an MVP, not including the product itself. If you can get all of that for free (to start), and that saves you months of building, that's pretty worthwhile. At $1m ARR you're only spending $30k/yr on the platform, which is roughly what your AWS/Stripe bill is anyway. There can definitely be more features too like user permissions, A/B testing, CMS, analytics/tag manager integration, etc, etc that continue to deliver value / save you time/money/effort as you grow.
- bsid 5y ago
  It's hard to build alll those things you mentioned in a deep enough fashion to make it something people would use (Which is where I think this template lands). Entire companies are dedicated to each vertical. These all things we wanted to tackle at Clerk (https://www.clerk.dev https://www.clerk.dev) as a SaaS. The first thing we hit down that path is user authentication -- and that opened up an entire can of worms we're still working through. User authentication alone has been tough enough because you can't just build yet another Auth0 clone and brand it "passwordless"... you'll have a tough time competing against the incumbents. This has led us to session management, which proved tricky to get right across local development and production environments, and has led is to the disparate ways people authenticate, which is a massive API design challenge. However, we think it could be a game changer, especially with all the Next.js / React advancements as of late. Especially the component-ization of the frontend in conjunction managed backends, session management feels like something that ties it all together. I'm certainly excited for the next decade of developer tools :). Things will get dramatically easier with all these commoditized verticals.
  - a13n 5y ago
    Yeah it's definitely not a company you could bootstrap with 2 people. You'd need funding to build the team and product. But once you've actually built everything and gotten traction it'd be really hard for competitors to catch up because nobody is ever cancelling... Great VC business tbh
    - tigroferoce 5y ago
      Yeah, don't tell me. We are two people and we are trying to do that, open source. I can confirm it's pretty hard :-). If you want to have a look, it's http://github.com/saasform/saasform http://github.com/saasform/saasform

lefrenchy 5y ago

I think that’s probably the right outlook, but how would you run their product through your stripe and take 3%? Wouldn’t that require the purchasers Stripe information to be a child of your Stripe account?

a13n 5y ago
I think you integrate with their Stripe account (you have to anyway to set up billing/subscriptions anyway), and each month generate a report on how much they billed, then bill their credit card 3% of that. If they don't pay then their site/product shuts down (after a grace period obviously).

creativedg 5y ago

Thank you for your valuable feedbacks and sharing your thought. I totally agree with your approach for a general Saas project/product and frankly speaking, I prefer as well your business model because it can bring recurring revenue instead of one-time sales. Here in terms of Nextless.js, as the customer will have access to the source code, the revenue sharing like 3% as you suggest is extremely hard to implement. It raises a lot of technical challenge... Perhaps in the future, this concern can be addressed somehow and your proposed business model shall be implemented. Have you had such concerns/experiences for your projects? Pricing is not an easy subject though :)