Data segmentation. Segmentation of existing customers to find similar customers. With a reasonable number of paying customers there is always a sub segment who find you valuable. Wish we had invested more time finding more customers similar to that segment early on.
I enjoyed reading this interview with GoSquared founder. We did this over several weeks of iteration, deliberately over written text, chipping away at the ideas than trying to do a podcast. Would love to hear your feedback on the format.
In terms of competitive landscape – through GoSquared’s history, we’ve been thrown off course far too much by over analysing competition.
In our early days, we found ourselves being compared to other companies thanks to publications like TechCrunch who loved to report on a battle taking place. Investors also seem to love to back “the leader in the space” so they inherently need to define a “space” for you to exist in.
Our thinking has evolved tremendously since we were in our early twenties building GoSquared. We absolutely keep an eye on others in our space – who doesn’t? – but we don’t use that to fuel our decisions, and we don’t use that to make us anxious or fearful.
We keep looking at where our customers are going, what they’re asking for, and how their lives are changing. I believe if you can do that, and plot those trendlines, you can set a path out that’s an exciting trajectory, without paying too much attention to other providers in your space.
Krish, founder of Chargebee here. I read your feedback in the comments about EU VAT and understand your preference to not handle this yourself. Thank you for the detailed note. I would love to explore how we can improve our offering to bring the best of both worlds even if it is not possible immediately. My email id is krish at Chargebee. Thanks.
Thank you. Noted. Shared feedback with the team to review the password policy.
Could you please give some specific feedback on the UX for customer portal and signout flow? We can setup a 15 min zoom call with you to understand your challenges. I will reach out to you via email if that's OK with you.
Founder of Chargebee here. Thanks for the feedback and this broken experience doesn't make sense. Will check with the team. We will take it up to fix it. Sorry!
This is one of the companies I admire a lot and I also know the founders. I happened to go to their new office opening ceremony today evening to congratulate them. I thought the story is worth sharing as this is a company that is built in my part of the world (and hometown) Chennai. :-) Hope you enjoy reading this.
Thank you, Aiden. I am very happy to see our longtime customers like yourself recommending us in HN. We know there is so much more to do to make things easier and better. I look at Shopify for inspiration to see how long it has taken for them to get their product right by polishing every aspect, feature-by-feature. :)
I am sharing this thread with the team. They will be thrilled to read the feedback. Cheers.
Thank you @foxylion and @homero for mentioning Chargebee.
Krish, Cofounder of Chargebee here. A lot of our customers use Stripe + Chargebee combination as we complement them by leveraging the best features of Stripe. We like the way Stripe.Js, radar and auto card updater etc is beautifully built. (ex: you can pass Stripe token to create a subscription in Chargebee). We continue to build in a way that we let you use those features while providing a full fledged billing system that integrates all the way from CRM, helpdesk /intercom to accounting. Your finance or sales can collect non card, PayPal payments without any changes to the code. Enabling those business users post implementation with support is our core value prop, so that developers don't have to worry about giving internal solutions afterwards.
Give it a spin and for the idea launch stage we have a freemium tier for first $50k usd. If you have any feedback please write to me at Krish at Chargebee.
This is a brilliant way to put it. "Fear of shipping manifesting in 'productive' ways." We tend to manufacture busy work instead of focusing on what is necessary right now. (OP himself might be in a situation to seriously consider incorporation, so may not be applicable at all.)
I find so many startups in APAC incorporating in USA, with justification that they "need" a US company to get customers, or get a better payment gateway etc. That's just focusing on the wrong problem.
1. Get enough visitors by getting the word out.
2. Convert enough trials.
3. Talk to (email) real users.
4. Get to the point where they are ready to pay.
5. If objection clearly indicates payment experience, terms of service (location of company), then consider incorporation.
By setting up subsidiary / parent company elsewhere, you are committing to too many overheads in time and money.
While we built our SaaS application we spent several hours chiseling words, debating with the team to decide what makes more sense to a user. The text is never perfect. I wish I knew these techniques then. :-)
I would highly recommend "Founders at work",if you haven't read that yet. I liked Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull, which deals with challenges of managing a highly creative team and working towards tangible output.
I wrote that post. You are right. Just because it's easier now as a package, folks are blindly following it.
Stripe and AWS are great services that brought down the barriers to entry significantly for everyone.
Because Stripe Atlas is so easy, low cost and comes highly recommended, a lot of early stage founders are blindly choosing it. But we need to remember that we are dealing with governments across borders and tax obligations that we need to understand well. Even if you don't file certain documents regularly you could get into a lot of trouble. So my recommendation is to consider the pros and cons and choose the option wisely.
Keats, Thanks for mentioning Chargebee. Krish, cofounder of Chargebee here.
We support card data portability (we also use Spreedly to vault card as a service but we pay for it as an infrastructure) and in the case of Stripe we directly vault it in Stripe, as they do a great job of being friendly with customers and supports portability as well.
Apart from very detailed subscription management use cases, we enable hundreds of small things that come up as you grow beyond the first 50 customers - invoice based payments, coupon promotions for sales, credits (cash vs. promotion credit vs. proration credit) that finance cares about, detailed invoicing, accounting integration flow, taxes etc., while enabling pretty much everything with API as well.
Most of our customers find our product most useful once you grow beyond the 2 member founding team as the needs grow but you don't want to build spend your time building internal systems.
We share a lot of customers with Stripe / Braintree - Freshdesk, Study.com, Soylent etc.,
We also put a lot of focus on our customer support to respond within an hour for most queries and we generally deal with detailed use cases from non-technical members of team and we assist them.
This is a key area of focus for us, as that frees up a lot of developer distraction to address queries, as and when the cases arises. For an essential service like billing I believe it adds a lot of value, so we have built everything around having a very good customer support.
At https://chargebee.com we support EU VAT along with Invoicing & all the comprehensive credits related use cases that consumes time for finance folks.
We do have a neat API https://apidocs.chargebee.com/. And there is Laravel bundle being updated by one of our customer in Netherlands.
We support affiliates tracking with refersion.com - supported via Chargebee hosted payment pages & API.
We also support several gateways including Stripe, Braintree etc., along with Invoice based payments that can be reconciled for bank transfers (ACH equivalent in Europe is expected to release in early Q3).
Do give the free trial a spin. And the product is free to get started upto first $50k usd invoicing (just like Braintree's Ignite program). I would love to hear your feedback. (krish at chargebee).
It also deals with how the script of movie "Frozen" evolved and I found that very interesting as well. It showcases how your idea gets better & better for execution because of the team.