I was browsing X today and stumbled on this site that claims to have launched the first "physical store selling survival gadgets" for customer support professionals. As a SaaS founder this site really hit home and got me.
You can buy items like patience pills or the german invoice template (which is actually hilarious AF). After you checkout you are presented with a little April Fools screen aka a marketing text about the customer support SaaS behind the idea.
I saw quite a few April Fools jokes yesterday but most were pretty boring. This seemed like they actually put in some thoughts. I feel like everyone, even companies are super lazy in 2024 so it's refreshing to see some creative stuff once in a while.
Hey @all since I have seen this kind of comment a couple of times I would like to address it in more detail:
"If you take extra funding and hire people just to meet their needs, you no longer have a SaaS. You are writing a custom product for this large customer, with explicit permission to try to sell it to other people too. But this big player will be driving everything, as if you do not do what they say, they can walk and your business collapses.
That does not necessarily mean it is the wrong choice - if you are not growing otherwise, and this is a path to keep it alive, it makes a ton of sense. But if you are growing and these guys are just a jumpstart to bigger ARR, it might be a mistake."
=> I realized that I can easily build the features myself and don't need to hire extra staff. I might need one contractor that could do some last-step safety checks but that's it. In terms of building extra features just for them: Besides the enterprise standards such as SSO and the apparent need for data isolation all the other requested features are on the roadmap.
My business right now is not really growing anywhere and this customer could essentially spark the engine. The reason for this is that there's actually another almost equally as large company that wanted to use my app but had to decline for the exact same lack of enterprise features (mainly the security part)
What I am concerned about is that they want some sort of support plan and an SLA which all seem intimidating at first glance as I have no idea how to properly price it so that I am not a slave just to their needs, you know?
Thanks for the advice! The problem is that they told me that they can‘t sign up yet because their security compliance team declined it. They need their data isolated and SSO.
Thank you so much Joshua for taking the time to write this! This is amazing advice! I will take some time to digest it and get back with questions once they come up.
Not sure if it's the language barrier but could explain again what you mean with "I would set your pricing around a proposed move to the US so you can ask for money at US labor prices" ?
Thank you all for the amazing advice so far!!! I love the fact that nowadays one can get this kind of valuable advice for free and it a matter of hours. I will take some time to digest everything you are saying here. Keep the advice comming! Hopefully this can also help other founders in my position as well in the future.
Thx for the advice! Yes the next question is how do I actually price them?! I have no experience in enterprise pricing/sales. Since they are a m-b$ company and even actively mentioned they have a large budget for this because they really want it... what can I expect? This all feels like starting over in elementary school for me, haha.
Thank you so much for the great insight! Good advice as well with the only hire on a contract basis. Thought of that as well. Yea it did sound like they would pay me upfront.
I just don't have any idea what the condition of the contract will be and where I have to be very cautious... The source code thing is great advice.
The charging on an hourly rate sounds interesting and new to me.
Also, this is not the first time I have read that multi-b companies screw over small rising startups. Sounds horrible but as you said – nothing to do about it.
Great advice. The reason I have no LLC yet is that in my country (I am not from the US) setting up a limited would require around 25.000€ upfront locked investment. Given my low MRR until now there was no need to do it by any means. Most small SaaS companies run as a sole prop for the time being. (Germany/Austria area) Coming up with the 25.000€ also seems unreasonably high and would instantly require me to do proper accounting for which I would need to hire a dedicated accountant which adds to the cost again... Hope you can see that for my 500$ MRR it's simply not economically feasible.
That being said, I am seriously thinking about setting up my company in another country with a more appealing legal entity structure. Either the US or Estonia (EU E-Residency). Appreciate your advice here as well!
Interesting! My product is very frontend-heavy actually when it comes to the customizations (except the SSO and ok... yes the database) Could you elaborate a bit more? I am struggling to understand.
You can buy items like patience pills or the german invoice template (which is actually hilarious AF). After you checkout you are presented with a little April Fools screen aka a marketing text about the customer support SaaS behind the idea.
I saw quite a few April Fools jokes yesterday but most were pretty boring. This seemed like they actually put in some thoughts. I feel like everyone, even companies are super lazy in 2024 so it's refreshing to see some creative stuff once in a while.