bsears's comments

bsears | 4 years ago | on: Stripe Tax

Co-founder of Billflow here.

We were lucky enough to be able to integrate the Stripe Tax beta with Billflow. In my opinion this is the coolest thing Stripe is launched (For SaaS) since they came out with subscriptions. It just works™.

Implementing Stripe Tax was dead-easy, to get it working we essentially just had to switch a boolean to true on our subscription creation code.

Also, the new functionality of the upcoming invoice API is something we've been wanting for a while - being able to estimate the first invoice for a subscription _without_ the customer existing beforehand makes life so much easier when checkout is concerned.

Huge props to the Stripe team, love this product!

bsears | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What’s helpes you build a successful SaaS business?

To build on what everyone else is saying:

- Make sure your tiers make sense: The features each tier unlock should be logical, with the goal being to build a "value ladder". Give your customer just enough value to be successful and show them how the higher tiers will make them even more successful

- Charge money ASAP: I've talked to a lot of SaaS startups which are in "beta" and don't want to charge money until they've built up a user base or "finish" the product to be "sellable". What they don't realize is that the quality of potential customer goes down because people don't take free things seriously. Another thing is there is valuable data around how to price your SaaS. Free trials will give you all the "beta users" you want, with a potential to convert if they find value in what you are providing.

- Get Onboarding right: The process of a customer seeing the pricing, subscribing, getting started, to the eventual goal of the customer finding value in the product and converting should have a very clear path. When a customer signs up for a free trial you need to be able to show them that your product provides the value they were looking for quickly or they will most likely wont convert. Step-by-step forms as well as actual meetings with customers can go a long way to improving conversions. A/B test this process for best results.

(I started a SaaS which makes it easier to manage a SaaS, https://servicebot.io )

bsears | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: How many HN posts or articles you read daily?

I don't "read" nearly enough (maybe one-two full articles a day), most of what I do on HN is just read through comments to get an understanding of what is being talked about as there are usually interesting discussions.

bsears | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are your favorite DevOps tools?

I'll just list a few tools I use on a daily basis

Kubernetes - Great platform for orchestrating containers, made my life a ton easier (Learn Docker and containers first)

Jenkins - Very powerful automation platform, great for setting up CI/CD pipelines

AWS - Good to get your feet wet in the public cloud space

Chef - Configuration management and infrastructure automation tool, you define how you want your workloads to look and it delivers

Terraform - Infrastructure as code, where Chef defines the configuration of an existing machine, terraform defines how that machine should be provisioned

In terms of core concepts, read up on CI/CD, Agile, and SDDC architecture.

bsears | 8 years ago | on: Ad Companies Love Google’s Ad Blocker, but Hate Apple’s Privacy Features

Good on Apple for allowing tracking cookies to be blocked, i'd next like to see them implement blocking of tracking scripts.

They are a nuisance to privacy as well as contributing to web bloat. I've seen sites with 20+ trackers each with their own javascript and all it takes is for one to be compromised for an XSS vector to be opened.

bsears | 8 years ago | on: Global Mutable State

Global, mutable state is not necessarily a bad thing, it just needs to be managed very carefully (like through a database!) so all your mutations are routed through a single source of truth.

bsears | 8 years ago | on: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

I'm currently working on trying to replicate the success Wordpress has seen in monetizing open-source, It's my belief that the key to creating a viable open-source product revolves around creating a platform people can host themselves and make it open to plugin development. I don't see much value in the smaller projects most people work on because those rely on licensing for revenue.

bsears | 8 years ago | on: XSS Attacks: The Next Wave

The rise in the client doing heavy lifting via libraries such as React is driving an increase in vulnerabilities.

Developers getting into React don't always realize that all the code is executed in the client and any input validation and authentication they come up with has to also exist on the server storing that data.

bsears | 8 years ago | on: Nobody wants the product you just built

Building a product that doesn't "scratch your own itch" is usually a dangerous path. If you aren't part of the target market you are going to be making large mistakes unless you are getting experts involved from day 1 to both validate and influence the direction of your "million dollar idea" to be something people will actually pay money for.

bsears | 8 years ago | on: How low does Uber have to go before we stop using it?

Your average person is not going to pay attention or care about what Uber as a company does.

The only things that matters to the average user is the experience and the price - in order for people to stop using Uber something has to affect them personally.

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