8 things forgotten on our SaaS launch

https://follower.io/blog/8-things-forgotten?utm_source=news.ycombinator.com&utm_medium=referral

by joshowens • 13 years ago

27 9 13 years ago

follower.io

rasmuskl• 13 years ago

9. Linking your logo to the main homepage (currently the blog).

joshowens4• 13 years ago

Haha, touché. We are using a rails blog engine and it is isolated. Guess I will look into it :)

snide• 13 years ago

10. A tour is not bullet points that say what your product does. It shows what your product does. I have very little idea of what will happen after I authorize your service to use my twitter account. Some screenshots, video or such would be nice!

Also, just a heads up, looks like you've got some formatting errors there as well. http://snid.es/image/0n2e2E410h2y

joshowens4• 13 years ago

Thx for the advice, will try to work on the tour more.

I will also look into the formatting issue, thx for the screenshot.

mzarate06• 13 years ago

Having a product in the wild, I agree w/everything on the list. I also wanted to offer the following. Numbers correspond to the order in which the OP lists them:

1. Error Tracking. I'd also recommend catching JS errors that are happening client side. Whether they're sent to 3rd party analytics or bug tools, or sent to your server for logging (what we do) is up to you. A JS error can prevent your app from working just the same as a server side bug can, so definitely do this.

2. Setup your support email. Yes, but also include a very easy to access support form inside your app. Even though I include our product's support email address on our website and in account verification emails, 95% of support emails come from w/in our app through the built in support form.

3. Get a few friends to test the app first. We were fortunate to have friends very eager to do this, that also represented our target audience. In addition to finding bugs, we also found they re-emphasized features we left out or thought weren't important. They also downplayed features we decided to include instead, either b/c they didn't work as expected, or weren't as important as we thought they were. But use good judgement when acting on their feedback, depending on how much they represent your target audience.

5. Uptime Monitoring. OP, what are your uptime reports saying? I test drove Digital Ocean for about a week, but their network was the least reliable out of all 5 hosting providers I tried.

joshowens4• 13 years ago

We are at 99.937% uptime for the month of July. We have had 28 minutes of downtime and most of that is related to deploys and fixing a puma issue we had.

cpursley• 13 years ago

Good tips, about to go through this myself. Linking to the other services would be nice.

joshowens4• 13 years ago

Which other services? Happy to share anything we use.

1. Errbit (open source and hosted free on heroku) 2. Uptime (open source and hosted free on heroku) 3. Dashing (open source and hosted free on heroku)

cdmwebs• 13 years ago

I used errbit for a while and it was losing stacktraces ;(. Wound up using https://github.com/getsentry/sentry and am much happier.

8 things forgotten on our SaaS launch

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