The case for Outseta
As told by successful SaaS founders on X.
Some days, it feels like building SaaS needs an equal amount of code for each of:
1. create new user account
2. user forgets password
3. user changes password
4. user changes email
5. user adds billing
6. user removes billing
…
…
…
101. the thing the product actually does.
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.
Founders tend to over-architect their technology stacks from an early stage. Time spent integrating tools is time taken away from building your core product!
Start with the tech that can most quickly make you relevant.
Tools like Stripe have made it easier than ever to start to start a SaaS business, but there's still a significant amount of code required to register and authenticate users, manage subscriptions, and integrate Stripe with your product.
SaaS developers: what was your last experience like integrating Stripe billing with your app?
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.
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.
And there's a bunch of other features that nearly all SaaS products require too—stuff like user management, activity notifications, and product engagement tracking. Again, scaffolding all SaaS businesses require that typically 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.
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.
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.
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
That's what Outseta delivers—all the core tools required to launch and grow a SaaS business.
Isn't it time to get back to focusing on the work that will differentiate you? The work that will actually dictate whether or not your start-up is a success?
When the time is right...
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.
