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> half of my time went to actually solving the problem I wanted to solve (knowing if a site is down, and alerting folks when that happens). The other half went

> half of my time went to actually solving the problem I wanted to solve (knowing if a site is down, and alerting folks when that happens). The other half went to building a SaaS platform around that problem. You’d think in today’s software landscape there would be tools to simplify or automate the part or building a SaaS business that everyone needs to do. He mentions Stripe for payments of course, but isn’t there anything broader to get set up more quickly? Like a shopify for SaaS businesses?

Veuxdo 5y ago
Stripe pretty much is that. There's only so much abstraction you can do on payment processing.
bytebln 5y ago
Paddle.com is pretty simple. I implemented Paddle in my App in less than 2 hours. Stripe API became too complex for my needs.
PhilipA 5y ago
Depending on the technology stack there are frameworks like SaaS Starter Kit for Phoenix: https://fullstackphoenix.com/saas-starter-kit https://fullstackphoenix.com/saas-starter-kit
rozenmd 5y ago
There probably is, but I like to avoid sharing around customer data unnecessarily.
dbbk 5y ago
> Like a shopify for SaaS businesses? This is Paddle. As a one-person startup, there's no way I could go with Stripe. The tax implications alone are too much.
- zild3d 5y ago
  that's still just payments provider vs "Shopify for SaaS" which handles a lot more
zild3d 5y ago
> the part or building a SaaS business that everyone needs to do. A few critical ones off the top of my head - payments (subscriptions, cancellations, invoices, etc) - authentication (signup, login, invite, forgot password) - transactional emails (confirmations, etc) for enterprise: - permissions, access controls - audit logs - gdpr - reporting, monitoring - single sign on other common saas-y needs - notifications - error monitoring - performance monitoring - admin tools (impersonate, deletions) - feature flagging I'm surprised a "SaaS in a box" hasn't really gotten traction. I think part of it is the tech stack dependencies - frontend frameworks, backend languages & frameworks, infra, databases, 3rd party tools
- ozim 5y ago
  Frameworks like RoR, Laravel, .NET framework provide most of it which are mostly SaaS in a box from technical perspective. Then you have headless CMS-es on top of which you also can build stuff. So you can plugin your email provider, payment provider, single sign on. It does not take much code but you still have to understand how to integrate stuff. Then you have wordpress where people basically install all kind of plugins and you can have all what was listed in CMS, but then you get "wordpress developers" to hire so I don't see much difference.
- joshmanders 5y ago
  You gotta understand that a lot of people who go into bootstrapping a SaaS are technical people, mostly developers. We're highly opinionated and naive af on stack stuff. We could find the ideal "SaaS in a box" framework/boilerplate, but one small feature just doesn't sit right, so now we're building it all ourselves.

Veuxdo 5y ago

Stripe pretty much is that. There's only so much abstraction you can do on payment processing.

bytebln 5y ago

Paddle.com is pretty simple. I implemented Paddle in my App in less than 2 hours. Stripe API became too complex for my needs.

PhilipA 5y ago

Depending on the technology stack there are frameworks like SaaS Starter Kit for Phoenix: https://fullstackphoenix.com/saas-starter-kit https://fullstackphoenix.com/saas-starter-kit

rozenmd 5y ago

There probably is, but I like to avoid sharing around customer data unnecessarily.

dbbk 5y ago

> Like a shopify for SaaS businesses? This is Paddle. As a one-person startup, there's no way I could go with Stripe. The tax implications alone are too much.

zild3d 5y ago
that's still just payments provider vs "Shopify for SaaS" which handles a lot more

zild3d 5y ago

> the part or building a SaaS business that everyone needs to do. A few critical ones off the top of my head - payments (subscriptions, cancellations, invoices, etc) - authentication (signup, login, invite, forgot password) - transactional emails (confirmations, etc) for enterprise: - permissions, access controls - audit logs - gdpr - reporting, monitoring - single sign on other common saas-y needs - notifications - error monitoring - performance monitoring - admin tools (impersonate, deletions) - feature flagging I'm surprised a "SaaS in a box" hasn't really gotten traction. I think part of it is the tech stack dependencies - frontend frameworks, backend languages & frameworks, infra, databases, 3rd party tools

ozim 5y ago
Frameworks like RoR, Laravel, .NET framework provide most of it which are mostly SaaS in a box from technical perspective. Then you have headless CMS-es on top of which you also can build stuff. So you can plugin your email provider, payment provider, single sign on. It does not take much code but you still have to understand how to integrate stuff. Then you have wordpress where people basically install all kind of plugins and you can have all what was listed in CMS, but then you get "wordpress developers" to hire so I don't see much difference.
joshmanders 5y ago
You gotta understand that a lot of people who go into bootstrapping a SaaS are technical people, mostly developers. We're highly opinionated and naive af on stack stuff. We could find the ideal "SaaS in a box" framework/boilerplate, but one small feature just doesn't sit right, so now we're building it all ourselves.