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My Journey from Unemployed to Entrepreneur and Y Combinator Alum
By
Jacob Eiting
December 19, 2018
My Journey from Unemployed to Entrepreneur and Y Combinator Alum - Indie Hackers
This is such a good idea. I found you guys a couple weeks ago searching for the same solution a plug-and-play to solve the delicate process of IAP.
If you release a flutter sdk I would love it even more.
+1 for flutter
Thanks Tony!
We're excited to work on a Flutter SDK too! We're still trying to smooth out our underlying native SDKs, but we want to work on it soon. You can upvote it on our public roadmap.
Financial possibly sensitive question - ignore if so.
I saw you guys got 1.5 million in funding after YC. What kind of runway did that produce in the SF bay area? What kind of revenue would you need to make to start looking at Series A?
Just trying to understand financing and costs.
Such a great story! 👍 Thanks for sharing!
Typically you want to be a painkiller, not a vitamin. The logic being that your product needs to be something people can't do without. If your business is in pain, you can do without a vitamin, you can't do without a painkiller. But I get the point :)
Perhaps my terminology was off there. My point is that we can't just be a long term cost that replaces a one-time investment.
One way to offset that is provide more features that add value over time.
Great story! One question: What value did you see in asking users to request access over just letting users create an account and poke around on their own? Have you found this created friction for new users looking to see what RevenueCat is all about? (as they have to fill out a request form and wait for you to get back to them etc)
That's a great question. I essentially gave everyone access that requested it.
It did give me a chance to set expectations that it was very early stage, this created a very forgiving and engaged early user base who helped me figure out the product. Some of them have gone on to become our biggest advocates.
I was also able to get on the phone with just about every one of them. This was invaluable for honing the pitch and the product. Also, with so few users early on, I was able to make changes to the SDK on demand and refine the API.
The obvious downside was that it may have scared off people. I'd like to go back in time and redo so I could see what works out better. I think just opening it up could have a bunch of benefits too.
Forgive my ignorance. How does this integrate with Apple's payment system? Does this bypass it (and the 15%/30% fee) somehow? Or does this use Apple's payment system under the hood, providing easier DX and metrics?
The latter. We sort of act as a meta-processor or billing server, specifically for Apple and Android right now, though Stripe support is in beta.
We want to take all the sting out of deploying a money making mobile app.
Gotcha, thanks!