Brickbox - Toolbox for Indie SaaS founders
brickbox.io - An indie founder does not require all the features that Mailchimp or Baremetrics or Zendesk or Intercom provides. You need only the bare minimum features. Brickbox provides all the essential tools with bare minimum features under one pricing plan.
It hasn’t launched yet, am I reading that correctly? When do you estimate it will be ready?
I’m especially interested in what the Stripe analytics look like in practice. Do you have any more information on that?
Yes, it hasn't launched yet. It will still take a couple of months to launch the first version. Stripe analytics will have basic features like MRR, ARR, Lifetime Value, Forecast (graphs), Cancellations & New Customers feed, overall growth rate, etc Still working on the minute details. I have this landing page to capture emails of founders who are interested in this - I'll be forwarding them a detailed feature list and beta demo access on time to time basis over a course of next two months before launch
Sounds awesome! Growth rate would be especially important to me.
Good luck with this project!
Thanks for the feedback, sir - I really do appreciate it :-)
Slick landing page, and I like the concept. Competing on price and targeting a large but price-sensitive niche. You even posted it on the right forum :-D
There are a few things I might be concerned about when using a less expensive option like this… and I point these out as challenges that can certainly be overcome, not flaws that make the idea bad:
Quality and reliability. If you are cheaper than the competition, are you going to be able to provide a quality experience? Especially when it comes to monitoring, backup, and email marketing. Those are business critical tasks, so I'd love some sort of uptime dashboard, or at least explanations of how/why your stuff is good. For example, what do your email deliverability rates look like?
Power. This is the big one for me. Eventually, I might want a really powerful email or analytics tool, and grow out of what you're using. One way you could help prevent that would be to create simple APIs for all of your products, and plug them in to Zapier. Suddenly they are hundreds of times more power, because they integrate with so many tools.
Resilience. It would suck to invest in your tools only for you to fold because you're not making enough money. So it'd be nice for you to prove, somehow, that you're doing well enough to keep this going. Or that you will open-source things if you quit. Etc. Something like that.
I get your points. The problem I am trying to address is slightly different.
Consider Mailchimp/Convertkit - as an indie SaaS founder you will probably use only 25% of the features at the most. Other features are focussed on content creators and bloggers which SaaS startups do not require.
Now consider Zendesk or any other service desk software - you won't need the majority of the features which are optimized for enterprise clients. The same way it is for Baremterics/Intercom and other tools in similar categories.
Most of these tools do the best and already are a manmoth in one area, which is great. But as an indie SaaS founder, I do not have the budget nor do I require all of those features until I really scale to an exorbitant level, but, with basic plans also I get quite a ton of features which I do not require at all for my SaaS app. Eventually, the total cost for some of these tools combines to go near about ~$250 per month and that sucks!! I want to address these solo indie developers who start and have modest revenues or less than 5 employees. Brickbox will provide all the essential features which are solely handcrafted for indie founders developing SaaS apps.
Wrt to your points about power, reliability and resilience, I think yes, if planned properly they can be tackled :-)
I have launched the idea on the Product Hunt's upcoming section - https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/brickbox
how are you validating this idea apart from landing page?
At the moment, nothing actively other than the landing page. But passively, I have been going through many comments/questions on various forums where people are asking for a lower cost and less feature alternatives of Intercom/Baremetrics/Zendesk and other similar tools.
i have to echo the others here and compliment you on a beautiful landing page!
ok. as someone who has worked at a small saas startup that pitches lower cost + less features ("less for less") I can only say that its a hard sell unless you are 10x cheaper than the bundle (we were only 3x cheaper). Sometimes people dont really want what they say they want and you spend a ton of time to build only to find that out.
I understand that and your concern regarding me not spending my time in waste. I'll be initially marketing this landing page and waiting for my idea to be validated. Once it's validated with enough subscribers showing interest, I will go ahead and build the actual app
Great idea! I LOVE the backups!
I also like the idea of NPS surveys and "where did you find us?" surveys.
ChartMogul offers free Stripe analytics/reporting up to $10K MRR. Since you're connected to the user's stripe account, you could do something similar.
Yes, that and it also includes other essential tools like email marketing, service desk, live chat which would have bare minimum but essential featues for an indie founder of a SaaS startup
mailchimp is also free to a certain point. haven't found service desk to be required– not a minimum/essential feature. drift live chat is also free.
I agree with your view but understand it from a different perspective - free plans for most of these apps do not expose many features which I want as an indie SaaS dev. Opposed to that, if I see paid plans, those are exorbitantly high and I pay for many unnecessary features which are targetted towards content marketers (Mailchimp) or similar other services.
I am not arguing but just placing my point of view which I have experienced in my couple failed apps :-)
I like this concept
great :-)
Seems like a really interesting idea. It seems like you're taking on a lot at once though by covering email, live chat, service, etc? Is it reasonable to do all of these features well?
I understand your question. Let me tell you with an example.
Consider Mailchimp/Convertkit - as an indie SaaS developer you will probably use only 25% of the features at the most. Other features are focussed on content creators and bloggers which SaaS startups do not require.
Now consider Zendesk or any other service desk software - you won't need the majority of the features which are focussed on managing the tickets across the team and for enterprise clients.
Similarly for live chat, a basic chat to support your customers.
If you consider this, the overall development scope is very focussed on indie founders who are developers. As a one-person team, you won't require all the features. If I take Baremetrics, Intercom, Zendesk, Backup & Monitoring apps, email marketing, I have to pay almost ~$200 per month and I'd be mostly paying for 75% features which I won't use at all. Rather than that, I'd love to pay $50 for limited features which are sufficient for a small app which I just started on. As an indie developer I can afford that :-)
Thanks. Completely agree that if you can pull it off, it would be an awesome (and cost-effective) product! Looking forward to your launch!
thanks for your feedback - I really do appreciate it! I hope that I stay focussed on the essential features only and not get carried away. Setting an end date for couple of months would help me stay on course.
Looks like an interesting idea! I can see the value and would be interesting in giving it a try when I launch my product. Added myself to the wait list.
Thank you for the interest :-)