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.
Hi Krish! So to be clear I absolutely love Chargebee! It's rich of features, very flexible and support is always friendly and ready to help. It's probably the best experience I've had in a while with any SaaS.
The problem is that I don't want to handle VAT :( Are there any plans to do something so that Chargebee can act as a MoR as well? That would be super awesome!
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!
Sounds good! Chargebee and Heroku are the 2 paid services that have saved us the most time. I'm a champion of your service.
While I have your attention, some unsolicited feedback: Chargebee's core is great (and that's what we care most about), but a lot of the UX is kind of whacky and the new redesign of the Customer Portal and Signout flow was also a bit whacky and we won't be upgrading.
Last thing, small pet-peeve of mine: password rotation is annoying and is an outdated practice. Both Microsoft[1] and the FTC[2] are encouraging people to stop using it. It ends up wasting my time because I can never remember what I've incremented the last digit to (I now track it in a file). I've given your support that feedback, but doubt anything will happen unless you give the order.
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.
Please clarify whether Chargebee supports custom hybrid plans (e.g., Per Seat + Usage models in Stripe terminology, which, correspondingly, would approximately be equal to a combination of Per Unit + Volume + Tiered models [1]). If Yes, please create or point to relevant documentation; if No, do you have plans for implementing such capability?
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 @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.
Thank you, Krish! Chargbee has been an awesome experience all round for us and one of my most recommended products.
The team have always been ready to jump on a call to deal with the murkier migrations over the years — I'm looking at you, merging our single currency sites into a single multi-currency site...
It's nice to see you guys getting a lot of love in all the threads about billing on HN these days. You absolutely deserve it.
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.
I'm in the process of building a SaaS and looked briefly at Chargebee. Right now I'm trying to stay as lean as possible so I quickly wrote of Chargebee as something that would cost money.
The fact that you have a freemium tier completely changes my perspective on that. Guess I didn't spend enough time looking :)
But that's just the thing -- most people referring to themselves as ninjas are designers aspiring to be devs, and they are usually cute chubby smiling guys who tend to stumble on their own feet. Hardly something to be afraid of!
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.
