bsears | 2 years ago | on: TikTok is now banned in Montana
bsears's comments
bsears | 4 years ago | on: Stripe Tax
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 | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: FlowTrack – Increase Sales with Automation. Design Automate Engage Sell
bsears | 7 years ago | on: Dennis Johnson, Creator of a Rediscovered Minimalist Score, Has Died
bsears | 7 years ago | on: Growth Ranker – Top-growing products on Indie Hackers
bsears | 7 years ago | on: Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself
bsears | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What’s helpes you build a successful SaaS business?
- 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?
bsears | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are your favorite DevOps tools?
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
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
bsears | 8 years ago | on: Answers On-Demand: A startup turns to small business
bsears | 8 years ago | on: Answers On-Demand: A startup turns to small business
bsears | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: Open beta for ServiceBot, start a side-hustle in under 5 minutes
I'm a founder of ServiceBot - if you didn't know ServiceBot is an open-source project you can find the code here:
https://github.com/service-bot/servicebot
Let me know if you have any questions/feedback about the project.
Thanks!
bsears | 8 years ago | on: How to start a sidehustle: Make thing. Add Buy button. Tell people
Platform lets you list the services you provide and receive payments so all you need to worry about is the marketing aspect.
Disclaimer - I am one of the creators
bsears | 8 years ago | on: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies
bsears | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which Open Source Project Could Use UI Help?
Our code is on github at https://github.com/service-bot/servicebot
bsears | 8 years ago | on: XSS Attacks: The Next Wave
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
bsears | 8 years ago | on: How low does Uber have to go before we stop using it?
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.