FormCaster

With only two active subscriptions, neither of which was in active use, I retired Formcaster in favor of (the upcoming) Drrrip.

I reached out to the last two subscribers, thanked them for being long time members, and refunded the last two months of service. I also let them know that Drrrip, while meeting a different need, would be launching in the near future, and offered them each a free key for lifetime access.

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FormCaster went live on ProductHunt today. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/formcaster-co

Excited to see how that pans out. Haven't done a real push to launch on PH in ~ 5 years, I'm sure it's changed a ton. I'll share the dash results after the day runs it's course.

Checkout FormCaster on PH !

While not exactly a blood, sweat, tears endeavor, this was a super fun project to build and to get the community evolved in.
A special launch offer for a lifetime Pro access is going on for a brief period at just $99 – for lifetime access. Pro access is normally $10/m so this is your chance to take advantage some huge savings.

FormCaster will be getting a long-term road map within the next couple weeks. I’m pretty stoked to be using this in house already. I’ll be migrating the rest of the sites off Gravity Forms, Wufoo, etc this week and next.

ProductHunt promotion is tomorrow, and I’ll make posts on a few other sites. This is a zero-budget project, so no paid listings (such as Betalist), no Google ads, no Facebook ads, etc.

A big thank you to everyone who followed along and supported this fun community project. We’ll be transitioning The Four Week SaaS into SaaS Crew tomorrow, and the next build will start on Dec 28th.

https://formcaster.co/?ref=launch

Two days from launch of FormCaster, yay! Pretty stoked about that. As I wrap up the first Four Week SaaS, it’ll officially be the last – because I’m changing the project into a more community focused endevour, and going again.

The Four Week SaaS will, on Dec 26th, officially become SaaS Crew. On Dec 28th, the next project will start.

What does this mean for FormCaster? Nothing intersting, really. FormCaster will be post launch, which means developing a road map and setting up proper support channels. That means my time on it will shift to incremental improvement & customer support rather sprinting, with some marketing thrown in. I’m expecting a time slip something like 50/30/20.

What is SaaS Crew? It’s the same basic idea as Four Week SaaS, but ongoing, and with more community involvement. I’ll start the next project on Dec 28th, and begin grouping projects into Seasons for organizational reasons. Projects will also not be limited to four weeks. Some may be shorter and others longer. This will allow a much wider range of projects to be under taken.

I’m really hopeful that I can get the community building on their own projects too, discussing how their projects are going, and so on. Not just for building though. Running a SaaS is a complex and multi-faceted endeavour, and it’s my hope we can discuss and help each other grow across disciplines.

If you want to follow along with the next season, or even start building, come join the community. Next Season starts Dec 28th and FormCaster launches on Dec 25th!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2844508445593836/

There is not a ton left to do on FormCaster before launch, so my goal this weekend was just to add a new temporary plan for launch pricing.

During launch I’m going to offer a lifetime option for the Pro plan @ $100 for life. Against $10/m or $90/year, I am hoping this provides a good amount of value.

On to the bump. I had expected to be able to simply add a new pricing option within Stripe and attach it to ServiceBot, but no such luck. ServiceBot doesn’t support products that are not recurring, and a lifetime subscription of course is a one time purchase.

Concerned I would have to add a entirely different payment path for Lifetime payments, I reached out to ServiceBot and they confirmed no support for one-time payments. They suggested the same idea of adding another path using Stripe checkout, which I was already reading. They suggested another idea as well, and that was to price it as a subscription, but then automatically apply a coupon after each sale with a discount value of 100% thus disabling the billing.

This is the route I ultimately opted for. It’ not ideal. On the front end I needed to hide parts of the ServiceBot payment form with CSS, and on the back-end of the platform now has to update the Stripe user after payment and apply a lifetime coupon with a 100% discount. So not ideal at all.

The upside is it works, and I didn’t need to implement a whole new payment pathway. I should also note that ServiceBot said that single-payment products was on their roadmap. No indication of where on the roadmap, but knowing that they are aware and intend to add it is exciting.

It’s almost launch day, and with launch comes pricing.

FormCaster will have immediate MRR. We have several client sites using other form processing services (Wufoo etc). Those that aren’t on annual billing will be moved over immediately, and those that are will be moved over at the end of their subscriptions. Instant revenue. Not much, but a bit.

That’s a good start, but we still want to pull in more users – especially those using other solutions that re loaded with site-slowing cruft. We’ll try to add a handful at launch with a launch discount.

Standard pricing is $10/month for the pro plan, or $90/year. During launch, which is on December 25th, we’ll do a life-time subscription for $100. This seems like a solid balance of offer-value and price.

Thought on pricing? Hit the group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2844508445593836/

With FormCaster in a perfectly launchable state with days to go, I have some time to think about what to do with this Four Week SaaS once the launch is done. The idea seems to have some traction and I’ve recieved a fair amount of feedback. Even managed to get at least a couple people cranking on their own ideas.

And that was the goal, really. Build something so others can see just how approachable building a small SaaS can be. And I believe that’s working, but four weeks? That’s fast, and early to kill something.

So I think after I launch FormCaster I’ll do another SaaS build, and try to engage a little more. More tech postings, a road map, maybe a live stream or two.

That means moving this site over to it’s own domain, getting a proper site + blog setup, and focusing on the Facebook Group. And that sounds like a full time thing to run; building a SaaS, maintaining that level of interaction, etc. So I’ll need to stretch builds out to be longer than four weeks, or maybe break them into an iterative process? Not sure there, just something to make this stay an evening hours kinda deal is a must.

FormCaster officially launches on the 25th (yay Christmas!). I’ll shoot to have the next SaaS project start on probably the 28th.

What do you think? Should we go again with another SaaS product? https://www.facebook.com/groups/2844508445593836/

Meet the SaaS Email Kit! The kit is a set of 15 emails, in plain text & HTML varieties, for SaaS / MVP owners. It gives you a great set of emails to cover all the bases of a new SaaS, and you a good starting point for a custom series.

Simpy update the highlighted portion with your information, site, email, name, etc and you’re good to go.

These are the same emails I’m using on FormCaster, and more or less what is in use on a number of other SaaS platforms I’ve built over the last few years.

I distilled these down from a few other of our email sequences into something a little less “service-y” than they were before. After getting them slimmed down and ready for the platform, I realized they were almost appropriate for broad use. So I pulled the references to FormCater, generalized a few sections, and cleaned them up a bit. I figured I could use them drop-in on whatever I build next.

That, however, made me realize that if they work well for me on the other platforms, and they are now essentially drop-in for my future use, they’d probably be good for other people too. So I made a readme, signed up for Gumroad, and made a new product.
I’m pretty stoked to present the first product I’ve made in some years, the SaaS Email Kit.

Check it out the SaaS Email Kit on Gumroad, and if you like it or think it might help get your SaaS off the ground, buy it!

https://gumroad.com/l/saasemails

I added in rate limiting to FormCaster today. There isn’t ton to say about that. Essentially I’m just limiting specific activities to a certain number of actions over a specific amount of time. Those limits depend on the activity being undertaken, as some are more acceptable than others – for example static file access is less restricted than form submission.

Next I added in Nunjucks from Mozilla. It’s a clean and light templating engine much like Liquid or Jinja2. Here I’m using it to populate static HTML files containing the platform’s emails with use variables, and then output that parsed HTML in a string to be passed to Mailgun for email sending.

Hey look at that, some code. Really simple, right? I quite like using Nunjucks for email template handling. This is a little more simple implementation than I’ve used before, and this is hardly the first time I’ve used Nunjucks for this. I’m pleased every time I do use them.

Spent the weekend largely chilling with my wife and the kids. But I did knuckle down and work a bit on the little side project from this. I’, pulling the emails written for the platform, making them a bit generic, and getting them ready for release. Have them up for sale either Monday or Tuesday, and I’ll do a proper post about that.

This week I’ll be releasing the emails product, and adding in proper rate limiting on form submission. After that I want to move the transactional emails out of the routes and into templates. That way they can be more easily edited, and pulled only when needed.

That’s it for the recap, work was really very minimal this weekend. Head over to the Facebook group though and join us!