The Case for Outseta

As told by successful SaaS founders on Twitter

If go-to-market and speed is key to winning for SaaS companies, then @outseta is such an unfair advantage. Holy shit this is amazing.

Start-up employees are increasingly feeling overwhelmed by the number of SaaS products used at their companies. When everyone is signing into different tools, technology is only fractionally used and important context on the customer is lost.

the apps you buy should help you and teams see more clearly through clutter & 'busy'ness, not add to it. #startup

More apps, more problems.

Increasingly common feeling for a new startup employee in Silicon Valley: SAAS tool overwhelm. All of these new easy to use/good UX tools are great for their specific purpose but overwhelming when combined with all of the other tools they have to learn at the same time.

Start-up founders tend to over-architect their technology stacks in the early days of a SaaS start-up. This results in unnecessary technical and financial overhead at an early stage—both killers of start-ups.

Start with the tech that can most quickly make you relevant.

Stripe has become the de facto payment gateway for new SaaS businesses, and rightfully so. But founders still need to write a significant amount of code to register and authenticate users, manage subscriptions, and integrate Stripe with their products. Outseta allows you to integrate Stripe with your product and start accepting subscription payments in minutes, and is a Stripe Verified Partner.

SaaS developers: what was your last experience like integrating Stripe billing with your app?

Ruben Gamez
@earthlingworks
Replying to @derrickreimer

Annoying. Sucks. We did this twice (two diff apps) in the last few months. Standard SaaS tier and monthly/yearly billing options. For all the hype about how easy it is, took longer than it should’ve and some parts were confusing.

Ben Orenstein
@r00k
Replying to @derrickreimer

I'd guess we've invested more than 100 hours into it and we're definitely not done.

Will probably invest another 200 in the next year.

Stripe provides amazing primitives, but there's a lot that needs to be built on top of them.

Outseta also offers pre-built solutions for user management, activity notifications, and product engagement tracking. This functionality is scaffolding all SaaS businesses require, but involves writing additional code that’s not core product functionality.

The amount of code that needs to be written around your core product is smaller than ever, but still a larger percentage than it should be.

Q for SaaS founders: what portion of your app do you wish, in hindsight, that you (or your team) hadn’t built from scratch yourself?

The fact of the matter is almost all SaaS products need the same table stakes functionality, but founders continue to roll their own solutions or integrate at least a handful of products to support the launch of their business. No one has yet to build a hosted platform that gives SaaS founders all of the core functionality that they need. Until now…

Systems you should never build yourself when bootstrapping a SaaS: Authentication, Payment, Invoices, Tax Calculations.

Bite the bullet and pay others, it will save you so much pain in the end.

Wrap them in abstractions to change them later. But never build them yourself.

Please chime in if you know of a great book or course on this topic of technical design patterns for SaaS. Even if you created it.

Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Replying to @robwalling

This book would sell X,000 copies pretty quickly and create substantial value, so if anyone wants to take a stab at writing it... Much of it is not rocket science, but having every SaaS entrepreneur independently reinvent not-rocket-science as table stakes is clearly suboptimal.

Daniel and 10 others
@techwraith
Replying to @patio11

I'm honestly surprised an off the shelf framework for SaaS companies doesn't exist yet. Users, permissions, notifications/email, internal dashboards, recurring billing, etc. are pretty universal.

Don't build this yourself: Authentication Systems.

Why? Because you won't make it reliably secure. It'll be complicated and not extensible.

Most importantly: it's not a core feature of your unique solution to your customer's critical problem.

All of the things in a SaaS that are NOT your competitive advantage.

Outsource all of these. Don't waste time coding.

- Payments
- Authentication
- Forms
- Search
- Database
- Analytics

Outseta and Stripe is the fastest route to market for your SaaS start-up.