Q for SaaS founders: what portion of your app do you wish, in hindsight, that you (or your team) hadn’t built from scratch yourself?

[clmorgan]

title

And then - what did you do? Build it? Use a service?

 

[twinkiemama]

@clmorgan Built website in Django when a SquareSpace site would've sufficed

 

[lizzielou]

@clmorgan Analytics. We spent the better part of a year working on a custom analytics solution that our competitor had out in less than a month using a third party service that did 90% of what it needed to do.

Learnings from that for me: if in the early stages you can integrate third party solutions to add complementary features to your primary ones, do so.

 

[clmorgan]

@lizzielou What did u use eventually?

 

[lizzielou]

@clmorgan Like I said, we built our own right from the beginning which served us well later on but seriously slowed us down in the beginning.

 

[thelordismyshepard777]

@lizzielou We're building verbdata.com to make it way easier to set up customer-facing analytics. If you're in this phase of product development check it out.

 

[mainechild]

@clmorgan Sooo many things. In order of $ lost:

• image/asset handling. Sizing, hosting, uploading, pre-generating images. Sooo much code. And now just uploadcare.com
• email sending. Maintaining mail server, IP whitelisting, .... -> Sendgrid.com
• subscription management. A lot of business logic (plans, pricing, discounts, ...) and now all on stripe.com

 

[clmorgan]

@mainechild Oh damn I'm a user of uploadcare as well Really great product

Stripe as well ofc. Any headaches/pains with Stripe's subscription management? Or is all nice and rosy there?

 

[mainechild]

@clmorgan no its not. Thats what you'd expect (i mean its stripe). Problems with stripe:

• no support for billing period above 12 months
• multi currency support is rough (to switch customers you have to recreate)
• invoices are limited (numbering, adding PO later,..)

But it's doable with some workarounds

 

[clmorgan]

@mainechild Huh, interesting. Mind if I dm you to ask some more? I might help

 

[ih8peas]

@clmorgan One thought is to look for CMS systems that have content approval workflows and allow assigning editing rites on a per-article basis.

Then you'd invite your writers to log in, they'd only be able to see their articles, and you'd get notified when they submit for review.

A good one will probably allow you to give feedback and request changes.

I Google'd it and found this: https://www.contentful.com/blog/202...s-supercharge-your-content-approval-workflow/

I'm not affiliated with Contentful, but this looks really close (in fact I use DatoCms for static sites and that doesn't have approval workflows sadly).