Developers, do you understand what my product does?
I'm trying to get some feedback on my landing page / messaging. I find the creation of sales & marketing materials to be one of the most challenging things during product development.
My product is aimed mostly at developers. If you go to the site, do you understand what the pro
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Supertools is looking good!
The first question would be why not use Heroku? The Supertools website might just be a bit lite on the "privately" features - which I assume are the seller.
"Before Supertools, product managers were required to write database queries to rollout features to users." - I am not sure I understand that use case. Are features flag not variables in the code base?
"Authorized team mates access it over a proxy to ensure secure & authenticated access." This is interesting. That's very much how we implemented DjaoDjin -as-a-Service features :).
How do you setup the team members? Supertools user accounts? 3rd party LDAP? Okta?
A flat fee pricing (€99/ month) is interesting. What happens to your cost if there are 1,000 teammates, or the team is running a bitcoin mining operation, or running long-lived websocket connections?
Hey, thank you for the thought-provoking and constructive feedback! :)
Ah. :) Yeah, the selling point is not the hosting but the collaboration features, I might need to be pushing that more.
Ah good to know! I think I will have to change that one up a bit. Were the other use cases understandable / relatable for you?
Yeah, each user has an account. There's also a Slack-integration that you can setup so that your existing Slack users are easily onboarded. I will probably add more SSO providers like Google in the future. I will have a look at LDAP and Okta.
Honestly I haven't given the pricing too much thought so far apart from the fact that I definitely don't want to undersell. I might restrict the number of team mates in the future per plan or have some TOS with a fair use paragraph or something like that. But that worry is one of the future for me. 😇
Thanks again for the feedback, there's definitely some actionable stuff in there for me!
By the way, DjaoDjin looks interesting! Seems like we're targeting a similar market. How did you find your first customers? It looks like you're doing "more sales than marketing", right? Do you target developers or higher-ups like product managers, CTOs, that kind of a thing?
I like the Slack integration. Did I miss it on the website? One idea: even if all Supertools does is to keep in sync a GitHub team and who can access the deployed app on Heroku, that would already be valuable.
SaaS Hosting can be difficult to do when the number of HTTP requests per seconds increases above what a single server can handle. SaaS can also be difficult to sell due to data ownership, security and compliance concerns. We are actually thinking to switch to managed services ourselves, where we manage the DjaoDjin product fully deployed within your own AWS account (instead of ours).
Otherwise there is always a pre-launch / staging phase with its own constraints (ease of testing, team communication around the MVP, etc.), and a production phase (ease of customer support, handling chargebacks, etc.). I see how Supertools and DjaoDjin could target the same market and still be widely different in their use case.
If you are interested, @genemachine did a great interview about DjaoDjin, with more back story on how we started (https://saasgenius.io/dev-shop-to-saas-djaodjin-turns-clients-into-customers-grows-via-referrals-content-marketing/).
When you are handling hosting and payment processing (Stripe-integration) for a SaaS business, there is a lot of trust involved. That usually doesn't happen without multiple Sales calls, sometimes face-to-face meetings. We used to sell to business owners with little technical skills. Now we are mostly focused on software development shops that build products for those entrepreneurs, with a mix of talking to developers and CTOs.
Yeah the Slack integration is mentioned in the website, but it's one of 4 items below the hero-section so you might have missed it. ^^
Yes, I think so too. I'll be interested to know if there are concerns regarding the hosting-part. Definitely open to adapting the product on that end. :)
That's interesting. Do you already have customers that use the DjaoDjin within their own AWS account?
After learning more about your product it does seem to me like we at least have an overlap in target market. :) I see Supertools to be targeting small-medium companies with at least a few employess, of which at least one is a developer. Of course there are many SaaS companies like this which is where I see the overlap.
Very cool how you found your first customers! Are you guys still freelancing or 100% focussed on DjaoDjin?
That makes a lot of sense. I'm also preparing to start selling directly because I think normal landing-page-based marketing won't build the necessary trust. Interesting that you're mainly selling to agencies nowadays. Is it because they handle multiple customers themselves? So they will basically buy a DjaoDjin license for each one of their customers?
To me it looks like a some kind SaaS for creating and deploying isolated Node.js environments.
Thanks for your comment! What do you mean by isolated? Containerized ala Docker?
Yes. Looks like that.
:| It's not that at all! :D
Supertools is like the access-control-layer of a team's control center. Team mates are using certain internal apps/tools written in Node.js. Supertools lets you manage the permissions for these team members.
Example: Your company has a finance department and they need to be able to access an internal Node.js application that can export certain financial records from your database. You would host that internal Node.js app on Supertools and then use the Supertools control panel to give only the finance team access to this application that is handling sensitive financial data.
Does that make sense?
I got it now. But me as a financial department or institution wouldn't give that much trust into third party providers. I would request inhouse solution.
Thanks for getting back to me! I'm definitely open to providing on-premise solutions that companies can host themselves.
It's an expensive host without SSH that only works for Node apps, but in exchange there's Slack integration, a user role system and probably some other helpers.
Thanks for your feedback! Yes, the main selling point is not the hosting. It's the framework that Supertools provides so you don't have to implement the access control and all that yourself. The hosting part is just part of the package because I'm offering a managed service. If I get the respective feedback, I might explore a self-hosted option in the future.
What I take from your comment is that I have to sell the collaboration features more and focus less on the hosting. Thanks!
Honestly i think i got the idea, but something is misleading to me: it seems that this tool will provide access management to specific resources like generic scripts and/or programs ("...Build tools for your team and control exactly who gets access. From simple database-export-scripts to sophisticated SPAs...") but the main headline says exactly Node.js, so is it limited to node apps?
Hi, thanks for commenting!
It currently is limited to Node.js apps but support could be expanded to other languages as well. Writing your apps in Node.js is currently a technical necessity because every app on Supertools is basically an Express application. I'm making that assumption to provide helpful tooling around logging, error-reporting and so on. Also, Node.js is what I know myself so it's easier for me to cater to the Node-crowd than, say, the PHP crowd.
Does that make it more clear?
Yes it makes it clearer now that you explained it to me, but not from the headlines ;)
I see you have updated the landing based on various feedbacks, now it's clearer.
I actually haven't updated the page. 🙈Maybe you picked up some additional context in the comments here that made it clearer. 🧐
I'll need to see what I can do to get the message straight. Thanks for your help!
Awesome
Would love to see more about how Supertools privacy features differentiate it from other hosting solutions - Heroku, AWS Lambda, EC2, Digital Ocean, etc.
The use case I see based on my experiences at companies it sounds like its meant to give teammates the ability to run scripts you've written. e.g. instead of having the sales team install node, express, teach them to use the command-line etc to run some database export script you can give them a UI to run it.
Another super important thing for me would be logging/debugging info for when an error is inevitably thrown.
Hey Alex, thanks for your feedback!
That's good to know and it seems like you're not the only one. I think I definitely have to make it more clear how Supertools is different from common hosting providers.
Yes, you got it – you're exactly spot on with this! :)
That's already included, I should mention it on the landing page. Thanks!
I've sent you an email by the way – I'm hoping I can learn more about your experience! 🙃