Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

If you see enough of these AI-generated portraits on the Internet you'll start to notice the similarities, especially since This Person Does Not Exist is usually the source for the vast majority of them that I've seen. They're very often used as profile pics by Twitter bots.

The way the person's head is framed in the shot is pretty much identical most of the time and kind of a tell on its own.

Other tells:

- steve.jpg: The skin above the top rim of his glasses has some repetition/distortion.

- customer1.jpg: Distortion in the hair, most noticeable at top left. Mouth looks fake too.

- customer3.jpg: I didn't notice anything significant, but it just looks like an image taken straight off TPDNE. Do "vibes" count?

- customer4.jpg: The teeth merge into each other.

Go to https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and spend a few minutes refreshing the page. There's something distinctive about all these fake faces - I can't explain what it is, but once you've seen enough of them you can recognise the "look" quite easily.

Probably the biggest giveaway is that the faces are all positioned identically in each photo, but there's something else that juuuust quite doesn't look real. Maybe some of the faces just seem a little bit more androgynous than anyone I ever see in real life. There's something about them that sits just on the edge of the uncanny valley.

Outside from the odd file names, minor details like ears, glasses, earrings.

Our friend Steve has something going on with the left hinge of his glasses.

Customer1 has an interesting right ear.

Customer3 has very asymmetrical earrings.

Customer4 has a bulge where the left earring would normally be, and the right hinge of their glasses is crooked.

I think the image names gives it away more.

"customer1.jpg" and "steve.jpg" lol

Usually eyes are not completely symmetrical.

Problem is that it makes you question the whole post. Ie does he actually have 100 customers or is it just something he writes because it is well known that people are less likely to buy something no one else is buying.

Yeah, you never worry about doing business with an out-and-out liar, of course?

It’s one thing if Reddit founders post news articles themselves on their free site. It’s another if a saas site has fake reviews.

Try googling the names, job titles and companies of the people who "wrote" these reviews. I can't see any evidence that these people (and in some cases their companies) actually exist.

I don't believe that these testimonials are real.

When compared to a similar site hosted on the same server[1] the reused pictures and reviews are definitely suspicious[2].

[1] https://teracrawler.io/

[2] see the Our customers feel it section

I'm impatient and easily frustrated as well. But I've learned to kind of lean into my frustration as a motivator when learning new things.

I try to spend time learning things that interest me personally, and when that happens to overlap with things I deal with at my day job, great. If not, oh well.

I don't really consider how long it might take to learn something if it's interesting to me, and I tend to dive pretty deep, even if I don't get to "expert" level. I figure if I need to become an expert in a thing, that'll come with time.

> I'm shit at it, but the mantra I tell to myself is: "remember when you were a kid? These are other kids that play with the same toys as you. Just talk about the toys and how to make toys more fun. Same enthusiasm!".

The problem is: this kind of "nerd talk" that you are enthused about often comes across as awkward in particular to business-minded people.

In other words: I can perfectly understand why many developers have bad experiences with talking to people: too different interests and thus quite a lot of bad experiences in the past.

But big expensive machines and software sales usually involves a lot of customer research and pre sales intelligence and rocking your sweet lone self (allowing you might be able to fake the roles and personalities necessary to mimic a remote team) to a enterprise closing meeting, isn't going forwards. Possibly you could look for interim executives from among the growing pool of experienced management exiled by industry ageism. But this(and my other suggestions) do require a broader professional ability. Enterprise software sales seems to have suffered something akin to job title inflation in IBs and start ups. And I can buy a lot of enterprise software directly online even in single digit seats. If you can do any of what I just pondered, almost certainly you're better off using your energies to hone your customer product fit, Steve Blank style or any which way.

The only thing I'll differentiate in my thinking from the OP advice is consider thoughtfully how well you are served by diarizing your development process and how much more can come from thinking in reverse from the customer perspective.

it's not easy, it's a nightmare for both you and your accountant (which is happy to charge you for that)

Use paddle or revin instead of stripe or use stripe with quaderno or with stripe tax.

Stripe tax doesn't work too well yet imho but it may end up getting there

Do you use Paddle or Spring?

I would expect that MoR's have their own set of issues. As they become the seller. So they are liable for the product quality, safety etc.

So I don't think signing up and working with them will be very easy. Especially if your product is not as standardized as an ebook or something.

So if you use those, I would love to hear about your experiences. What you sell, how the signup was and how the relationship with them is going.

Last time I looked at the Paddle signup flow, I already had two issues I could not resolve:

- What product category my product falls under. None of their categories seemed to fit.

- How to sign up before the site is live. Paddle wants to look at the site. So do you have to build a dummy that works up until the point where the user buys something and then it says "Sorry, we are still looking for a payment solution"?

Paddle only replied with nonsensical semi-automated messages to my questions. And when I answered and asked for a real answer by a human, I never got a reply.

And it allows more payment options like Paypal.

I disagree - HN already gets enough self-promotion, the last thing we need is everybody copy/pasting their blog-based marketing here. This specific article was decent, but it absolutely is marketing and I don't want to encourage that.

Yes, no pictures, no ads, I liked this format as well.

Why does your site say:

> It's not allowed for us to publish your app in our own developer accounts

I've published apps for others in my developer account

Stickiness is more valuable early on than that $10/mo or whatever you charge. Make sure you measure how often a user returns, uses, consumes, etc to see if what you are building (or built) is actually used like you want. Often people forget this and it leads to hostile user behavior and payment traps.

You - being the future SaaS startup developer.

I agree with this. The harder the thing is you're doing, the bigger your moat. Ideally it shouldn't be too hard for you though of course, e.g. because you have prior knowledge about it.

This is why I think it is critical for a founder to do customer support for as long as possible. It should also be the last thing that is outsourced (or better: never outsource customer service!).

Customer feedback is the most valuable resource for a starting company. Understand what brings value to your customer, and understand what the pain points are. Where do they get stuck trying to use your product or service?

Apply what you learn from customer feedback. This is also a feedback loop on the improvement cycle of your product, as you should observe a drop in customer service requests once an improvement has been applied.

With every improvement cycle, the product should bring more value and less friction to the customer. This will make marketing so much easier as you now understand the customer's pain points, and you have a product that solves just that. Do it right, and the product will basically sell itself (you still need marketing though).

yes, but you need to or you SHOULD have MVP to sell just to not get into position where you sold something that isnt there :)