110+ days MVP build to front page HN

Late last year I decided to pivot my saas boilerplate Parthenon to focus on Billing. I started by improving the billing functionality within Parthenon making it easier to issue refunds, change prices, and subscription plans from the admin system. Then I realised that what I really needed was a completely new project that just fully focused on billing. This would make it easier for people to understand and not be confused with all the non-billing functionality. So then I started BillaBear - which is a standalone self-hostable SaaS subscription management and billing system.

When I originally started to build BillaBear I thought I would take my time and not rush the MVP and spend 45-60 days. Normally, I build MVPs in 15-30 days so I thought this was plenty of time to build a polished MVP. I forgot the reason most companies want to outsource their billing and subscription management is that it's painful. From buying the domain for BillaBear to publically announcing version 1.0 - was actually 110 days.

I didn't realise how hard it is to spend 100 days on a MVP. Not from a technical point of view but from a psychological one. Building and shipping something and getting feedback and knowing what changes to make from the feedback you get really helps you know what to do next and gives you some mental validation. Once you've shipped something you can see something happening, be it visits, sign-ups, GitHub stars, etc. And the mental validation this gives you is hard to replicate when you're building an MVP and half the things aren't there and you spend every day just looking at how much work is still needed before you can show people what you've spent months working on.

WIth a feature list that includes:

• Templates for Invoices, Receipts, and E-Mails. So you can be in complete control.
• White labeling - Ability to have different brands - allows reselling or multiple different products.
• Expired card notifications to help reduce churn
• Ability to offer a discount if they add a card during the expired card process. (Helps reduce expired card churn by up to 30%)
• Ability to have custom plans and prices for enterprise or legacy customers
• Ability to integrate with Stripe BIlling and extend
• Ability to migrate away from Stripe BIlling and save money
• Ability to have invoice customers who are separate from Stripe
• And more

Yesterday I started to share BillaBear with the thought "Time to deal with the sea of indifference".

My plan is/was to post a few places every day to hopefully result in people selling it more. (Today is IndieHackers :p)

• I posted on r/php since it's built in PHP using Symfony. - Got upvoted and downvoted - that subreddit is pretty toxic. The comment I left offering the lifetime discount got -10.
• I posted on r/selfhosted - Got upvoted 10 no comments.
• Posted on HackerNews - Was on the front page for about 10+ hours I think.

I was sharing to the GitHub repository - https://github.com/billabear/billabear - so the analytics I have are different from if I was posting to a web page.

Results

• Github Traffic says 3,776 unique visitors (200 from Reddit, 2,600 from HN)
• 900 people clicked through to the website
• 271 people clicked through to the docs page
• 162 GitHub stars
• 1 Org watcher
• 2 repository watchers
• 2 demo call requests - one booked for today.
• 0 life-time deals sold

Considering Parthenon which I pushed heavily to get GitHub has 76 stars over months of sending traffic to GitHub (on HN front page multiple times) and BillaBear got double that in one day seems like a sign that it's more relatable and interesting to people. Getting a demo call requests also is quite a big sign for me. Sadly, no lifetime deals so far but with some sales calls for hosted versions I think I could get some MRR from a hosted version soon.

My Lifetime Deal is 250 - which is 5% of the company price which will be 5k per year and 25% of the Indie Hacker price which will be 1k per year. So I think it's a really generous offer. But considering the type of software it is and that it's not something people are generally looking to buy on a whim I'm not surprised it hasn't sold any.

If anyone here is interested in it you can buy at
https://buy.stripe.com/4gweY33GnaNP8daeUU