Jackypot

I'm in the UK if it makes any odds.

I am about to release the MVP of my first ever Saas product which (hopefully!) will have paying customers. I know I'll need to deal with the business sides of things at some point - form a company, create a company bank account, track money in/out for tax purposes. Should I do all of this before getting a paying customer? Or afterwards..?

The MVP philosophy would surely be afterwards but perhaps for legal reasons this is undesirable. What did you guys do?

How can I send money to users (much like how Patreon sends money to their creators)?

Payment gateways don't seem to cater to this - except Stripe which only supports US debit cards.

I am currently creating a notification aggregation service where users have a bunch of configuration options which determine which notifications they will receive. I am struggling to keep the UI clean and intuitive as I have to cram so much in.

Does anyone know any examples of highly-configurable user accounts in some website where the UI is still simple and intuitive? Free or paid, I can sub for a month to check them out. Thanks.

HN is keen on side projects and threads always have plenty of us dropping links to their own and being very open.

There is often the suggestion that people with small niche projects will lurk and not contribute to those threads for fear that someone might compete with them - that they have some secret market which the rest of us don't even know about.

I'm interested in hearing from HN users in this situation who without talking explicitly about their business/domain/niche can talk about how they came to capture some small niche in its entirety and monetise it.

Anyone?

I am about to launch a website which I have built as an MVP and I want to be able to collect/encourage feedback from users -> does anyone know good (ideally free/with a free option) resources to facilitate this? I am thinking user forum/issue trackers/on-page widgets to collect feedback and report bugs etc etc.

I don't want to spend lots of money but I do want to a) validate my idea and b) get feedback to orientate development going forward.

Does anyone else have experience working with developers who just cannot code? By which I mean professional devs with terrible development skills, and little knowledge or interest in the field. I'm amazed they find jobs but they seem to.

Any strategies for working with someone like that? Or any stories about working with such people?

Have you guys noticed a difference in the number of tests you are inclined to write for your side project stuff as opposed to at work?

I have noticed that I write significantly fewer for my side projects. Is this normal or am I being lazy/reckless?

I had a facebook acccount when I was at university (10 years ago). Haven't logged in for over 7 years at this point. I have long switched email addresses and no longer can remember my login details for that email - I doubt it still exists (as webmail accounts tend to expire and get deleted after x years or so). I have tried to recover my logins to both FB and that email without success.

I created a different facebook login through which I have repeatedly reported my dead account asking for it to be deleted, to no avail. This was expected until..

Enter GDPR. I am in the UK, I am fairly sure they have to delete my data upon request. All good, but how can I actually prove that I own the profile without my login/being able to receive emails? It's me in all the photos of course, but I doubt that's going to get my request processed..

Has anyone else been in this situation?

I have a few side projects which I am tinkering with and am ready to launch MVPs for. Everything is written in dotnet core MVC. Ideally I would like to have my own server and run each site behind IIS as a reverse proxy (do this at work, familiar with it). I also like being able to spin-up/decommission sites quickly and easily, and a dedicated VM would allow me to do that. I also want to run SqlExpress locally on the same box for the sites to talk to, which you don't get with e.g. Azure App Service, nor do I want to have to administer each one separately.

Running a non-minuscule Windows VM in Azure seems to cost around $90 per month which seems pricey to me, when that over the course of a year would pay for a server with similar spec twice over. But, I don't want to touch a physical machine here.

Is hosting multiple sites on a dedicated VM the wrong approach here? Anyone else running multiple sites on windows have a better hosting solution?