Looking for your feedback 👀 on our product and landing page
Hi all,
We are working on a product and decided to share our landing page with the IH community in advance to hear your honest feedback.
We'd like to ask just 3 simple questions:
- Do we need to proofread our landing page texts or our English level is enough for the early s
Trending on Indie Hackers
Interesting concept.
a. Whenever I see a product that claims to replace everything in my stack, I question the quality. Sure, you have every feature I could ever need, but do they work well? How can you support that many different components without a large team? How can you keep each piece secure (specifically auth)?
b. I have $17,000 of credit on GCP. I don't really want to create an AWS account...
c. It's hosted on my AWS account. That seems a little odd. Sure, I own the data. But what happens when you change something and it causes usage to go up a ton and I get a huge AWS bill? What happens when it breaks and goes down? Are you going to fix it for me or do I have to? Do you handle backups or do I need to? Those are just a few of my questions.
d. I pay for SaaS products because I don't want to worry about those things. But now I have to worry about them.
e. I don't know consistently how much it is going to cost. That kind of unknown is a HUGE blocker.
Honestly, most of my worries are about the fact that it is hosted on my AWS account. I don't see much benefit to that outside of me owning my data. Which isn't a benefit I care too much about. To me, it just feels like you are pushing a lot of responsibility onto me because you don't want to deal with it. I doubt that is the case but that was my first impression (and first impressions are important).
I hope that wasn't too harsh of feedback... Keep iterating on that idea and you might stumble onto a great product!
Extremely useful feedback. Thanks so much. The concerns you've mentioned are crucial and definitely have to be addressed on the landing page and in the product itself.
BTW it would be interesting to know the reasons for choosing GCP over AWS. Or was it just an imaginary case?
Partially an imaginary case and partially reality. I use GCP because they gave me $20K in credit, they have the best managed-K8S (they did make it after all), I found that GCS was a whole lot faster than Azure Storage or S3, it integrates with G Suite (which I use), and it has a slicker and easier to use UI than Azure/AWS.
Honestly, mostly because of the credit though :)
Ok, thanks for the clarification :)
Well the headline caught my attention. But the moment I noticed the list of things you provide, I got totally confused.
Are you a single company providing all these API's?
It's not clear as well, why should I use any of these - would it do anything better than the products I know of.
As a developer why you WOULD NOT use our product in your projects?
I am not clear about why should I. When I go to Freshdesk, they give me a million reasons to use them. You have missed out on the "benefits" part, in every one of your offering.
Thank you for your feedback @kushon. The main benefit is pricing (it's stated in the headline). It's not just a regular discounting. It's another way of third-party products hosting model.
To make it more clear, let's compare it with MailChimp. If you need to run marketing campaigns, you can buy a MailChimp plan. MailChimp rents servers in the cloud and hosts their service on them. That servers rent price is included to the paid plans price. Also, MailChimp needs to earn money, so it adds some extra margin into the pricing. The more emails you send - the more money it charges.
Saasless provides the essential features of MailChimp, but it deploys the services (MailChimp alternative) to your AWS account. So we don't charge the transaction-based margin. We charge a small amout at a flat rate for deploying and managing AWS infrastructure in your account.
Since AWS provides a Free Tier - you don't have to pay for its resources on the early stage of your project. At a scale, you don't have to pay extra margin that MailChimp applies. For instace, if you pay $1000 to MailChimp, you would pay only $50 for Saasless at the same scale. Hope it makes sence :)
I got that bit actually. And also that pricing is the primary benefit.
Let's continue with your mailchimp example - I am actually thinking if I should get their paid subscription. And evaluating Zoho.
Bu t since it's not clear to me what 'essentials' you'll provide, I cannot decide if I should go for it.
Additionally, my fear would be - if it's a company with so many products, would their bulk mailing software even be good? What if they have the same guys working on all this stuff ? What if my mails go in spam, and their email settings are responsible for it etc etc.
Software purchase decision, for a business, is pretty nuanced. Pricing alone might not cut it.
If I were you I would completely share your fears.
Regarding our 'product set' and 'essential features' - we are going to run a survey here on IH and on other developer communities to discover which products we listed are of a bigger demand and which features are considered 'essential'. Since we've built several SaaS products by ourselves we have an internal vision of it, but we should align it with the market.
Regarding reliability and trust - of course it's very hard and risky to go for a product that an unknown company build, especially if it's a startup running by a couple of unknown founders. I have two answers here so far. First, we build it on top of AWS. AWS is being used by millions of developers, including mail services. AWS has best practices of how to use mailing services properly not to find your emails in spam. We are following them. Second, we have a number of products that are running in production with lots of users. We plan to migrate them to Saasless eventually. So, we have to make it reliable to keep our products functioning properly. We are fully committed and depend on it.
Our backend and Admin Console are in progress and we hope to start publishing our first beta services soon and migrate our projects to them. Would love to see you our beta users and hear your feedback :)
Great. All the very best.
Tho I'd still say the more niche you get, the better the results. Just my 2 cents.
So I take it this is basically devops as a service? If so I think it could be useful but I would focus on load balanced setups and auto scaling for small business to be able to use it.
Thank you for your comment @adlee83. We use serverless stack to develop our tools and APIs. You can learn more about it here https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/
It doesn't require any load balancing or extra efforts to enable autoscaling. It's all enabled by serverless design. So, Saasless tools and APIs are autoscalable to millions of users/requests out-of-the-box. We tried to convey this on the landing page, but it looks like we need to pay more attention to it. Thank you.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree with what you are saying. We are to test different products and chose those that work. AWS clones a lot of popular products, so we should be sure it won't introduce an alternative to what we do.