Is there a really seamless SaaS stack?
For the tech-stack of my current project (SaaS) I still experience some drawbacks regarding integration and some features missing. Maybe somebody has a recommendation?
I have the following requirements regarding the tech stack, in the frontend:
- Customer support with ticketing system (better: chat-box, mainly B2C)
- Subscription based payment system for Web-Users with support for Credit Cards, Paypal & coupons
- Landingpage with editor for Non-Coders
- Helpdesk
- Optional: Feature voting tool
And backend:
- Integration of Google Play Store and Apple App Store subscription payments
- Send transactional newsletters / campaigns
- Cashflow prediction tool
- Crash/Error reporting
- No-SQL database with auth
- Dashboard with most important metrics
- Ticket System for developers
Ideally, all tools work seamlessly together, so the user can login once and use every tool (Single-Sign-On), and on the other hand support can see the status of a user regarding subscription status, bug-reports, non-reported errors in production etc.
Currently I came up in my production SaaS (yet very small) with:
Firebase (+Firestore), Crisp.chat, Paypal, Upvoty, Ghost, Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Clickup
What I am currently missing is:
- cashflow prediction
- transactional mails, that interact with the activity of the user on the app as well as his subscription status
- a working dashboard with metrics like MRR
- a working CRM/admin backend with all relevant infos/actions about a user
I would change any tool (except firebase, that would be too much effort) to get a more seamless integration and a better user experience.
What stack do you use? Do you have any recommendations?
We use these tools for some parts of this:
Hi, thanks for your insights! I was not aware of namiml, thanks for that!
Segment to my knowledge is an analysis tool like mixpanel, was not aware it is a complete customer data platform.
I also use github and github actions for building, testing and deploying, love it!
Also I second sentry!
Did you came up with a synchronization of user data between all these tools? Do you use segment for this?
Also worth mentioning that I forgot above, but actually my favorite tool is Fullstory. https://www.fullstory.com/
We've learned more about our customers and made big improvements to our user onboarding through the use of this tool.
And it's deployed through segment! And integrated with sentry so if an error occurs we get a link from sentry to a screen recording of the issue:
https://help.fullstory.com/hc/en-us/articles/360060837853-How-can-I-use-FullStory-with-Sentry-
We use segment for all the data synchronization. We track all key events in segment, both on the web and server-side in our backend, from "account created" to completing key onboarding actions.
We then add all new tools through segment. It has been extremely powerful, otherwise getting all these integrations working together would be too much work for a small product.
Just this alone lets us look up a user by their account name in all our different vendor tools without really any extra integration work.
Sentry is the only one we did not deploy through Segment. You can, but we didn't want any extra dependencies since the error reporting is so important.
Here's more details on their startup program:
https://segment.com/industry/startups/
The actions are very interesting, as you scale if can have a simple admin panel for support that would be great.
Most founders I spoke with custom coded something for it.
Also two things you're missing I think
Hi @volkandkaya, thanks for all these valuable hints! I will check those tools out.
Regarding landing page, I just switched from a custom gatsby page to ghost (using it also as a LP).
What would be the benefit of switching to versoly, besides being able to costumize the layout in the UI? Is that already the main advantage or do I miss something?
Gatsby is something else (multiple customers have had issues swapping from it to Versoly, it uses services workers to cache pages, after swapping to anything other than gatsby it breaks your site)