DEV Community: Rishi U

5 things I did to turn my SaaS pipedream into reality.

Rishi U — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 04:20:14 +0000

Here are my 5 steps to help make that pipedream a reality:
People don't give a shit about your SaaS, here's how you can make 'em.

People don't give a shit about your SaaS, here's how you can make 'em.
Make 1 Good thing vs 9 crappy things.
Provide 10x the value
The 10-5-20 Rule
Ditch Freemium

1.✅ People don't give a shit about your SaaS, but here's how you can make 'em.

Look, people are busy, their time has already been allocated between fleeting moments of hard work, youtube shorts and season 6 of Black Mirror. They're not looking for your product, nor have any intention to spend money with you.

Nobody wakes up in the morning saying I want to buy a new SaaS, I want to pay another $9 month No one cares, nobody wants new subscriptions, they have Excel & Email, and everything else is shit.

And therein lies the problem, how can your crappy SaaS compete with Excel & Email? The short answer is, it can't, but the good thing is that really doesn't matter. As long as you know how to fulfill your customer's desires and aspirations.

What your customers really want in their heart of hearts 💖, are small desires, their pain points to receive some some tender love and care. You're job is to find out these desires and fulfill the crap out of it by communicating your value, but how?

Get emotional in your messaging.

If you're able to communicate your value in your copy, you've hit the jackpot, you've reached your customer's midbrain, the amygdala 🧠, you know that part of your brain that causes you to salivate.

Your goal is to convince your ideal customer to: Get it, eat it, order it, or click it, instantly without hesitation. Give your customers instant gratification when they log in, signup, and register, it doesn't matter if your goal is to harvest subs, pre-order a book, or buy egg cartons (sidenote, eggcartons.com recently sold for $20mn)

But Rishi, you ask, what happens if my product is not desirable? Then you have one of three problems:

A) Your product stinks, like it genuinely sucks.
B) You need to create the desire if none exists.
C) You're not targeting your ideal customer.

You know your product stinks if your only cheerleaders are your mom or spouse, and you seem to think that a shiny new laptop or that swanky new feature will solve your problems. STOP IT, nothing will help, PIVOT and read on.

Remember no one wants more software, they want results, get emotional with your messaging and fulfill their desires, however small.

2. ✅ Make 1 good thing vs 9 crappy things

Don't be a serial entrepreneur, multitasking on several businesses only works for Elon and folks like @levelsio, the rest of us have 97% chimp DNA, which means we're good at doing one thing at a time.

Try rubbing your belly clockwise and patting your head while saying my name 3 times fast. You failed, you don't even know my stinking name and you're almost halfway done with this post, well maybe one of you passed, hi mum!

This would be a good time to follow and share your anguish with me here or on medium

How do you find that 1 good thing? Well here are a couple of ways that worked for me:

Find a market segment that interests you, look for a problem in that market and solve it, and solve it better than others. Look for areas where you believe there should be a better consumer experience than what currently exists and iterate from there.
Start with a problem you've experienced firsthand, then see if others have the same problem, ask yourself if you're motivated enough to solve it for other poor humans?

Once you find your 1 good thing, aim on getting product market fit. If you have 5 paying customers and none of them is your mum 🤶🏼, you're halfway there. If your 6 months in and broke like shattered glass with zero sales well then, continue reading.

3. ✅ Provide 10x the value

It took me years to figure out the 10-5-20 rule, let me explain.

Early Adopters, friends & family may be the exception but the rest of us need to be sold too. Your SaaS better offer more value than you charge, and you do that by providing 10x the value. For example, if your SaaS is $9, $69 or $999/month, ask yourself this, are you offering $90, $690 or $10k worth of value to your customers? 💶

Can your ideal customer perceive the 10x value? Or in other terms, are they saving 10 times more than what they would have without your software? Time and money go hand in hand 🤝, if you're saving your customers time, that has immense value. Spell this value out for your customers in your above the fold sales copy.

✅ Increase pricing by 5% until you have a 20% churn I leached this pro tip from Kevin Hale from Y Combinator and tweaked it a little.

Always be testing what your customers would be willing to pay. You've heard it before:

"Founders always be undervaluing their product".
-- Someone smart.

Once you have 10 paying customers, raise your price by 5% every 3 months, and wait for pushback. If you're still growing, keep increasing prices by a further 5% for new customers only, and grandfather the rest. Your early adopters will stick around knowing that they have a super deal and will spread the word for you, don't penalize them, rather thank them for supporting you in the early days. Continue to increase pricing for new customers, rinse and repeat until you've found resistance.

Resistance is measured by a 20% churn rate, anything less is negligible, keep increasing until you hit this number. Once you've found your upper limit and can't increase pricing any longer, sit back, and take a break. Come back refreshed, for a couple of sprint weeks developing those long-awaited features from your roadmap.

Viola, now you have Add-ons or maybe a whole new pricing plan, your customer will love this.

By nudging your price up every so often you will find your pricing strategy, and you're then forced to deliver 10x more value. Your customer wins with a higher-quality product and you win by producing value for your ideal customers.

Summary: Offer 10 times the value, increase 5% until you have 20% pushback.

5.✅ Ditch Freemium (Controversial)

In 2022/23, there were 200 new product hunt launches per day.

Look, I get it, you have a well-intended generous free plan and all you want are some paying customers, say a ballpark of 25%? Typically SaaS industry conversion is anywhere between 1% and 7% at best.

I hate to break it to you, but almost all of the free users you're supporting have no intention of paying. I'm not throwing shade on your users, you've just targeted the wrong demographic, they're a lousy audience that will consume your freemium services because you've allowed them to.

It's alright to provide widgets for free, but so does everyone else.
If you had bothered to target your ideal customer from the very beginning, with the right messaging they would be paying you today, I promise you.

The problem with having a free plan is two-fold, one, you're seducing the wrong demographic and two, you're free pricing plan isn't differentiated enough from everyone else.

There's too much noise with freemium, so I'd say drop the coupon-cutting customer and target somebody more lucrative.

Sure, it's alright to give customers a little taste, perhaps a super short 7-day trial, most genuine customers who are outside your ideal customer profile, forget they ever signed up within the first 24 hours anyway.

In summary, stand out from the rest, and ditch your freemium plan, focus your efforts on paying customers with 100% effort.

I previously wrote 7 opinionated tools to go to market faster which is on Medium, linked here.

If you found this helpful, sub and stay tuned for the next 5, where I will discuss more topics such as:

Do unscalable things first.
Your quitting too early.
Get ideal customers fast.
Build your email flywheel with the right tools.
Don't change you product, change your audience.

I currently work at Sinosend
Track docs like Fedex, Transfer Like DropBox.

Comments, criticism and friendly banter always welcome.

Does this SaaS pipedream sound familiar?

Rishi U — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 04:04:15 +0000

Allow me to enter your SaaS headspace momentarily:

You’ve committed to your startup idea, possibly the most consequential decision you’ll ever make. After a previously failed idea, you’re sure this is the one. You’re committed this time.

Your decision could impact everything you do for the next 3–25 years. You’ve done everything right; you hand-coded 🧑🏽‍💻 your baby, you’re building in public, mastering Twitter threads, and even posted your first Stripe payment wins on Indie Hackers. 💪

You’re now thinking of launching your second simultaneous SaaS and, hey, maybe a podcast too.

You’re hitting on all cylinders, this SaaS thing seems easy, and your dreams are in fruition. Your partner supports you, baby number two is on the way, 🤰🏽life is great!

You reach $327 MRR and are considering quitting your day job.

No pressure.

2 years later, the grind continues; it’s 2025, and building in public seems to like it only worked for the banner bear guy. 🧸 Your MRR has been struggling at around $736 for the past six months as you woefully peak at your descending Stripe graph.📉

The Twitter-verse is polluted with products that lasted 10 mins, and Indie Hacker’s posts are flooded with sob stories and uninspiring motivational quotes.

You notice the same founders building and rebuilding new businesses every 3 months, and now your partner is at her/his wits 🤬 with your lousy “startup”, you feel like an imposter, scratch that, you are an imposter, and you think to yourself:

“I should quit, get my job back, this SaaS is a bloody mistake.” 😪

You listen to one more motivational podcast. You tell your co-founder it may be time to start over…That dream of being a guest on How I Build This with Guy Raz is now a pipe dream.

But something tells you to keep calm and code along...

This was me, I pushed, failed, flatlined, and pushed again.

Does any of this sound familiar?

If you're still here; I wrote a post as to what I did to overcome the feeling of failure and what 5 actionable things you can do to turn your SaaS business around:

https://dev.to/ricky11/5-things-i-did-to-turn-mysaas-pipedream-into-reality-1ndl

7 opinionated tools I always use to build my SaaS

Rishi U — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 05:36:23 +0000

Part 1 of 2

*** Original posted on Medium ***

Your startup is going to the moon 🚀, your mom and sister are super excited. Nobody else cares, and until they do here are my thoughts on the tools stack most solo founders should use for a micro SaaS startup.

Hopefully this list will help you avoid the burnout and disappointment that I and other founders experienced.

TOC

Do not roll your own Auth.
Do use what you know.
Serverless + JAM stack Hosting.
Database - Keep it simple stupid.
Don't waste more than 45 mins on logo design.
Do spend at least a week on your domain name.
Transactional & marketing email.
Collect dollars only when your fake billing page breaks.

❌Do not roll your own Auth

As much fun as it was the last time around, there's only so much JWT's vs Sessions & Cookies Vs Local storage arguments you can have in one day. 🥱 It's not worth building a scalable user authentication system on your own. But sure you can take a deep dive down the endless rabbit hole and watch this and this oh and this and dont forget to read this. But in production, go with one of the big boys.

Auth options

Firebase Auth
Magic Links
Supabase Auth
AWS Cognito
[MongoDB Serverless Authentication]https://www.mongodb.com/realm/appdev)
Auth0 & Okta are the OG's but pricey when you scale. Also, I'm not sure if they're still cool?

✅Do use what you know.

Don't waste time learning that new tech stack you saw on fireship.io. Astro with CloudFlare Workers & Solid JS comes to mind; Instead, go with what you know to get traction quickly, then tweak/learn/improve. If it's Rails, then go with it; if it's Django, perfect. In my case, Vue 2.x SPA with pre-rendering. Just no PHP. 🤭

✅ Serverless + JAM stack Hosting

There is no excuse for not loading fast in 2Ø23. Indeed, not all cities are within reach of edge locations, but sub 3 second load times for FCP is certainly doable. Managing servers are great, but handling both the front and back end coupled with SaaS marketing and two crying kids is HARD. Focus on the fronty part of the site and spend the rest of your time figuring out how to GO TO MARKET. Let cloud functions and server less do the rest. IMO don't bother with managing or scaling hardware.

If you need to scale hardware, that's a high quality problem to have, and perhaps you should be writing articles instead of reading this one.

Hosting options

Vercel
Cloudflare - My Pick.
Render
AWS S3
Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service The last two are object storage which works great for hosting static files, but do need to be managed and shoved behind a CDN. plus literally 100 more options.

✅ Database - Keep it simple stupid... said someone mean 🙄

Or they might have said keep it open source and hosted stupid, whatever, I did exactly that. Simple was using either documentDB's or SQL.

Hosted DB options

MongoDB Serverless. My pick Mongo Serverless allows me to execute database updates/queries from the client which is a game changer, no backend needed and fiddling around with backend API's to make a db connection. Time saver and a joy for my clients to use.
Supabase looks promising postgres managed DB.
Firestore You already know this, not opensource.
Fauna DB Simple pricing, auto scales, worry free, but has a learning curve, *FQL whaat? - Not opensource.
AWS has a tonne of hosted options, but apart Amazons own DB option, none of the others are native, I would rather go and sign up with the provider direct like MongoDB, if I was looking for a document store.
Air Table, Google sheets are options too, but not really opensource and you need to learn their API.

❌Don't waste more than 45 mins on logo design

If this is your first SaaS, then I'm going to tell you the exact opposite of what I would recommend everyone else. Go on, spend 3 weeks fluffing about with some fancy Adobe package crafting that awesome abstract logo, you're going to do it anyway, after all its all part of SaaS building fun 🤗, hugs and rainbows and unicorns 🌈🦄.

Once your done wasting your time, come back to reality and just TYPE in your logo, shove it in the top left of your and your done. You can thank me later. 👏🏻
For second time founders these tools take 10 mins and the result is a million dollar logo :

No Logo just use a 24px font size and tags and voila.
Logology Ask for Lucie she's amazing with an eye for design. 10 mins svg and eps logo done.
NameCheap Logo Maker formally Launchaco nice free option and done is 7 mins.
Whatever you decide save your logo as a SVG.

✅ Do spend at least a week on your domain name 😜

Finding your unicorn domain name, has almost zero effect on the success of your business but is inherently exciting. I always recommend searching for a domain while you build and not before. If you lose interest in your idea 7 days in, at least your not out of pocket 24.99. More importantly you save yet another domain name from biting the dust in your already lengthy list of dreams in your GoDaddy account.

Don't use traditional registries like GoDaddy when searching for your prefect name, they tend to store cookies and increase pricing on subsequent visits! Clear your cookies when searching for the same domain over again. Their also known to buy up your domain just before you do.

Instead use tools like:
DomainR Scans several registries at once with a really nice UI.

Cloudflare Register No markups, nice UI.
Hover - No ads, no upsells, costs a little more but worth it My Pick

✅ Transactional & Marketing Email Options

Introverts tend to mourn the thought of actually reaching out and saying 'hi, hello, how r u'. Sadly in SaaS, you do need to talk to people... Well, at least your app does, so it's not all that bad, below are some options to help you with your SaaS communication. There are many options above $60 per month with automation and drip marketing, but they might be overkill for a solo founder, so I will not list them here.

Email Options

👍🏻 Postmark Transactional One of the best and easiest API for sending transactional messages, support is genuinely remarkable, ask a question, get a helpful reply within a couple of hours. $10 for 10K transactional, you can't go wrong. I use this for email verification, lost password, etc. Lots of customizable options via the API. The downside is Postmark is not a marketing suite, and they don't want to be. You can send broadcast messages, but they kinda want to stay away from the whole drag and drop template builder and automation aspect of marketing. Still an amazing transactional service.
👎🏻 Mailjet Not for me, tried them several times, support wasn't there , dated UI Don't use them; could be wrong but I have nothing else to say.
DRIP Good if you have an eCommerce site or selling tangible items, but if it's SaaS, I think they are more focused platforms.
Courier I'll be using this one soon. The cool thing about Courier is that it scales, and you can get started for free. You bring your mail service to them. So if you have a Postmark Account or Amazon SES, Courier will use your keys to send all your Email through their beautiful interface. You now get templates, automation, transactional, and other shiny things all within Courier. IMO Postmark + Courier could be a winner.
🙏🏻 Noteworthy mentions I have tried and used in past projects include: a. Sidemail Patrik a fellow Indie Hacker built this, great UX. b. AutoPilot c. ActiveCampaign d. MailerLite e. Parcel For coding your email templates, ask for Avi.

💰 Collect dollars only when your fake billing page breaks

Back in the early 2000's I remember setting up a lengthy merchant account with Authorize.net, the days before PCI compliance! Yes this does date me, but if you think dealing with payments is hard now well, you should have seen it then. Merchant accounts, discount rates, customer service, paper reports, thousands in setup fees, it was a real mess especially for beginner devs like myself.

Thankfully two Irish boys saved us all from dying a slow poor death. Thank you Stripe 🙏🏻🍻☘

Still even with Stripe, don't get too excited and build out your custom payment flow too early, get traction first. In my early failed startups, I've spent countless days, weeks setting up custom billing, accounts, upgrading and downgrading all for nothing, no-one visited, nobody paid, hence please don't do this.

I now use a fake payment page for new projects 😁, and when someone tries to pay me, only then do I implement Stripe. The user gets an error message and is contacted later to the stripe payment form a day or two.

I highly recommend Stripe for two reasons. Their API is relatively easy to understand, and if you get lost in the docs, they have live chat support for all account levels. Support is friendly and super cool.

Payment Options
Stripe Checkout - Simple way to build checkouts quickly hosted on stripe.
Stripe Elements -Custom styling, more finesse , inputs on your page.
Braintree Yeah I would now say there API is as good as stripe, not sure about the support, but they do have PayPal payments built in!
Paddle - Lots of SaaS using this now
Charging Bee - Looks cool too.

Did you find this post helpful? Let me know what other tools you use?

Part 2 will be landing soon.

Follow me on IH and twitter for more opinionated views on building SaaS

I'm a developer and I got scammed. Then I got mad.

Rishi U — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 15:59:22 +0000

Cathay Pacific (CX) 🛩

It was a slow and groggy Monday as I satisfyingly hit delete on most of the trash that fills my inbox. An email from Cathay Pacific Airlines was next in line, surprisingly this one actually made it to through Office 365's spam filter, hence the email was legit, see for yourself

Red Flags ⛳

Hindsight is 20/20, so hold that thought for one second. Cathay often sends promotions like this and at first glance, I was intrigued, an email from CX was welcoming, and I can't remember the last time I've been on a plane.

Sure I'll take the survey, besides feedback is great! We love getting all kinds of criticism at Sinosend and the extra miles will sure come in handy one day. 😷

So right about now you're probably thinking to yourself:

Why didn't you notice the blatantly obvious domain?

Look I hear you, yes I should have but I didn't.

Didn't you hover over the "Take the survey" button to reveal this scammy URL?

Umm.. no I didn't, indeed it was painfully obvious

I didn't take a screenshot of the form, but I am sad to say that I eagerly provided personal details such as full name, date of birth, identity data and others.

Then I hit "send" and that is when it hits me.

Realization I just F'd up 😲

A pseudo error shows up "Data cant be sent", it was at this point I know I had been phished, or is it phishing, I'm not entirely sure, but something got my blood boiling. The nerve of this guy to pretend to be someone else, a company like CX, my home airline of Hong Kong, how many other people have received this email, hundreds maybe thousands... it was then I went pure nerd 🤓

Tracert & Devtools are your friends

Remember the domain name, the root was amrlink.net, a quick search of this showed that this was a company in Bangladesh that claimed to be ISP. I called the number on their website and asked to speak to a technician or someone in the fraud department. I wasn't surprised that the person at the other end didn't want to entertain the conversation and promptly hung up the phone. This got me nowhere, but now I had the scammers origin.

I opened Chrome developer tools and hit the network tab. Here is where you will find all the incoming and outgoing requests under XHR/FETCH. There is a treasure of information here:

So now I had the IP address 45.251.57.89, this is where all the personal information I submitted was being funneled. I knew that there was nothing I could do to claim my data back as once it's been POSTED it's stored on an SQL database somewhere, but I could do the next best thing and stop these guys from collecting other peoples data.

The next step is to run a tracert in the windows terminal, you can easily do this on a Mac or Linux machine with a number of other command-line tools.

Okay now we're getting somewhere, this takes me to a company called hrctech.net. Their website looked like a legit ISP in Bangladesh with a tonne of clients listed on their home page. But I needed to be sure so I picked up the phone and called them. I got connected to someone in sales and it took me a few mins to get routed through to the correct person in support. I spoke to a very friendly staff member who gave me his personal email and asked me to send him any evidence I had and that he would be in touch if I was right.

I should probably let the airline know -- me.

If you've ever called up Cathay Pacific's hotline you're greeted with a lovely jingle followed by:

🎵 Welcome to the Marco Polo Club

I had tried looking on their site for a number to CX legal, fraud, any department that might be interested in saving their customers data from being used in a deceptive phishing scam, but all I could find was a feedback form. This hotline will have to do. These days ain't nobody booking flights so I got through almost instantly, a godsend.

I explained to the kind attendant that this was going to be a weird request and that a phishing scam was taking place right about now and the email was probably sent to hundreds if not thousands of people around the world. I continued to explain to her that I have been in touch with the ISP hosting the website and they could potentially do something about this. I asked if I could add someone on the email loop or if they would like to have the contact details of the ISP, or perhaps get law enforcement involved. The reply that I got was :-

Please fill out the feedback form and we will get back to you

Okay, that got me nowhere fast, perhaps CX gets this kind of scam complaints all too often, if only they were proactive they may be able to thwart the regularity of these scams. A notice on their website does state to be wary of emails claiming to be from Cathay Pacific, but this in my humble opinion, is a very passive approach. After all, this isn't their first rodeo, they were fined in 2020 for a data breach that happened way back in 2018 that exposed the personal details of 9 million people, maybe my email address was one of them.

Ok, forget the airline -- me 30 seconds later.

I had to move fast and decided to send the email to the ISP outlining what I had found and screenshots of the POST requests, and a link to the form which captured users' data. Believe me, when I say this, I was not expecting a reply, but what I got instead was a Whatsapp message with the following contents :

It's these little wins that count

Boom! Mic Drop

A quick refresh of the criminals website and this is what showed up.

You can do this too!

Thank you to the folks over at Hrctech, you guys are amazing in your action and professionalism, as it turned out one of their customers hosting accounts was compromised. While we may have shut down one site today, there will be another set-up tomorrow. You can do this too, with a little bit of network knowledge like I shared above you can find out where and who may be responsible. Email your local cyber police or contact the ISP directly, more often than not they are willing to listen.

Thanks for reading. I work at https://sinosend.com a nice place to send business documents securely.