skrish

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.

There is volume discount available with assisted solutioning and onboarding from our team for customers with over 1M revenue.

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 @artemis

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.

+1

And "visionaries". May be it's just me, but my defenses go up whenever I read a profile with visionary in it.

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.

Happy to answer any questions.

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.

https://packagist.org/packages/tijmen-wierenga/laravel-charg...

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).

Disclosure: I am one of the cofounders.

I enjoyed listening to the book "Smarter Faster Better" in which this article is one of the chapters.

http://www.audible.com/pd/Business/Smarter-Faster-Better-Aud...

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.

And the easier to read PDF format of report.

http://dq756f9pzlyr3.cloudfront.net/file/2016_internet_trend...

This is annual report by KPCB that is very useful.

I think if you can be that high energy contributor while you are in office and draw the line clearly stating your expectations, most colleagues can understand and respect that. 6 hours of high quality work any day trumps 8 hours of low quality work. Why should anyone expect that. The guidelines and rules are created for "everyone" who can't define their own schedule. If you can then more power to you.

"*Sequoia LPs will have 30 days to export their data." That's a very good punchline.

It's one of those days when everyone gets to express their ambition under the veil of prank. ;-)

I am pretty sure it's not someone from our own startup saying that.

Thanks. Most customers complete integration within a day, if you have the billing use cases written down. Normally 2-3 days max including all the testing. It's very much Stripe like in terms of API capabilities but more comprehensive built for all subscription edge cases, proration etc., including invoice payments.

Soylent, Freshdesk, "VinylMe,Please", Taxamo, Sharetribe, Cirrusseo are some of our customers. We now serve customers in 48 countries.

Hey HNers, Cofounder here. From the initial feedback that we got on HN (even specific feedback on website copy, thank you) we have come a long way building something customers love.

Has been an interesting journey with Braintree & Stripe expanding across the world, we followed them, as onboarding customers became much easier around the world (& by the fact that taxation made it more compelling as a solution in EU and rest of the world). Will be glad to answer any questions. Thanks.

Thank you. Krish, cofounder of Chargebee here. We were worried about couple of team members who were specifically in areas that were worst affected but glad to know that everyone of them is safe.

Thanks to distributed infrastructure the services were at 100% and we had DR plans in place. But support wasn't very distributed. Lessons learnt. Having our San Francisco team member onboard was very helpful to get to urgent call back requests but still limited. Some of us stayed in office to provide support, as it was one of the safest places with power backup for weeks for such eventualities, internet and most importantly food. We also had a few folks who needed a safe place to stay.

As a critical infrastructure provider we do have our disaster recovery & business continuity plans, but thankfully the service availability was not affected.

But I think it is equally important to ensure we distribute team more globally as we continue to grow, so that data safety & availability is not dependent on what you as a customer plan for, rather something we have also baked-in as part of service.

Thank you for the support and shoutout. Cheers.

On a sidenote, I found Creativity Inc., to be a fantastic book about how to build a company. I find it very insightful.

I love this particular chapter where he discusses about how you feel like you don't "belong" in that role of a leader within your own company, imagining that the leader is supposed to have some perceived aggressive characteristics of your ideal leader.

But all along, you may have been the right person to make sense of everything happening in that group and it is very important to let go of those inhibitions and just focus on the job to be done. As long as we have a group that is passionate and motivated to do the job and focused on customers, you are doing alright.

It was beautifully narrated by him and I loved it. It is something you experience as a startup founder, bringing along smarter folks into the group and be humbled by everyday experiences.

It is a huge opportunity to capture email id of serious users.

You could think of intent to explore sandbox as a slightly advanced stage in engagement with potential customer. The top of the funnel could just be a visitor who downloads a fact sheet about your space or just download pricing sheet from your website (mapbox does it nicely without being intrusive). And they don't spam. That is one good way to populate top of the funnel.

The sandbox access is another stage in your funnel. I am assuming you would like more folks to try your sandbox, without friction or as less friction as possible without giving too much information.

1. You could just let them play in a generic sandbox site without even email / registration and then subtly ask them to register and reserve the site, if they would like to come back.

This is like Stripe. Classy and confident that your product is loved and folks will register.

2. You could ask only for email id and allow them to get to a separate sandbox site. They could name the site later if they like it. You know that only those who complete registration process are more likely serious users to engage later with smart follow-ups. Those who bounce off & abandon are more likely not interested in your product. This is what we do at Chargebee - our product is serious in nature (shameless plug: we do billing with REST API on top of Stripe, Braintree & other gateways with all kinds of payment methods including card) .

3. If you are a 2 member team and only want to focus on very few serious users, then having a card upfront for trial acts as entry barrier. This allows only serious users to get in but with better conversions. I think you are not inclined and very few SaaS services do this. (aweber.com has a paid $1 trial as well).

You should definitely test one or more of these options. But to start with a simple sandbox to explore product is definitely a good way to measure engagement, see where they click & explore product. And then derive insights based on that.

Then you could iterate to see if having email id for registration as a filter helps bring in serious users.

In our case we implemented #2. In our first iteration we asked for email, site name & password and when we removed site name & pwd fields we doubled conversions for trial as well as paying customers. We are not testing how simplifying the registration / account claimed would impact conversion.

P.S: When I say engage smartly, I am assuming we are all talking about non-spammy, subtle but showing enough intent to earn a serious trial user's business, like we all prefer to be treated. :)

Thoughts?

Great point.

Interestingly, I see several tech startups of this nature started by folks having a deep understanding of a specific business problem due to their prior work experience tend to create such startups.

As a service provider for small businesses, I see many amazing bootstrapped services & products come up around the world, that serves a very specific need for a small subset of customers. These viable businesses tend to make enough for the needs of 2-3 folks for a long time. I have a strong inclination towards finding many of them as a service provider because they just tend to be some of the best customers with great ROI.

Reminded me very much of blog by Jacques Mattheij. I liked it.