There are so many great tools and strategies, but almost all of them require you to have a person or even a team to support it - for example all social media automation tools require you to prepare a lot of content to be effective. I can't do that.
Do you know any great tools that are more or less 0 maintenance, relatively short setup and deliver value?
It doesn't have to necessary be marketing tool, but it's what made me curious. If you know of development, accounting or whatever other tool please shoot!
* AWS and Cloudflare for hosting
* Rackspace for incoming email
* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email
* Namecheap for domains
* A merchant account and Spreedly for payments
* ShareASale to run an affiliate program and pay a percentage commission for referred sales
* Facebook and Google ads
Please don't. More often than not, better-marketed products win over better products. It's unfortunate, but that's how it is.
> I like building products after all.
Most of us do, but you're unlikely to gain any traction without marketing, and after failing to see tangible results, grow resentful towards your project and start losing interest. Been there, done that.
If you want to minimize time spent on marketing in the longer term, your best bets are word-of-mouth, referrals, and SEO (if you're after low-competition keywords). However, not all businesses are conducive to these strategies.
Regarding tools, pick the ones (1) you're familiar with, (2) don't have complex billing, (2) and don't lock you in (in that order). There are exceptions, but this is a good rule of thumb (and that's the rule I have been sticking to in my current business).
Don't get bogged down in minutiae. Ship it!
- Crisp (best website chat, email campaigns).
- Namecheap.
- Cloudflare (speedup website loading around the world).
- Postmark (transactional emails).
- Uploadcare (come on, save days on image uploading/cropping features).
- AWS/DO.
- Amplitude analytics - the best of the best thing for SAAS products.
- UI libraries like bootstrap, but better use something well integrated with your framework. Don't reimplent.
- Use boring tech stack, which you are know as your five fingers (it'll keep you months).
- IDE by JetBrains.
- Stripe (save days on connecting billing for fair price).
- Books: Lean startup (foundation), Think and grow rich (don't give up), Steal like an artist (a vision).
- Forum: IndieHackers (it'll motivate you).
- Notion for docs, tasks, plans, ideas.
- Fixed pricing, very predictable billing
- No CPU throttling vs. EC2 instances
- Bandwidth included in the cost of the droplet
I've built a few projects with Netlify hosting a React frontend and DigitalOcean running an API server for the backend/database. A single DO droplet can scale far beyond what I've used it for, especially when combined with a SPA that offloads much of the processing to the users' browser.
Others:
- stripe.com Atlas for incorporation
- vercel.com for easy frontend deploys
- render.com for easy backend deploys
- pilot.com for taxes
- stripe.com for subscriptions
- sendgrid.com for email
- orbit.love is good for tracking community growth
- discord for actual community conversation
- best marketing for us has been word-of-mouth, thankfully driven just by doubling down on product and support
* https://paddle.com - Paddle (payments) - selling internationally without having to deal with all the local taxes
* https://uxwizz.com - UXWizz (analytics) - built my own private, self-hosted analytics platform that provides everything I need (stats, event tracking, session recordings, heatmaps, a/b tests, etc.) in a single platform that doesn't cost thousands per month
* Gmail - Like it or not, I got used to using gmail to handle customer support requests (I use the auto-labeling features to keep them categorized) and the SMTP forwarding to send/receive emails using my own domain names. I am thinking of moving away (for privacy reasons mostly), but it works really well at the moment.
* DigitalOcean/Contabo for VPSs for self-hosting everything that I need
This is mostly it, I try to stay as lean as possible. Self-hosting is pretty easy nowadays and it rarely needs maintenance, so I usually prefer it because of the control over the product/data and the cost reduction that it gives.
Lemlist - great for automating email outreach. A bit buggy and their support is friendly (but doesn't really know how the product works and you can never get a straight answer). Still, it works 95% of the time and does the job.
Not sure if it helps, but if you approach marketing like a product instead of something painful it can be more fun. Hit me up direct (bwbbwb@gmail.com), I'd be happy to share more of what I've done by building mini products for marketing and might be able to spark some ideas that would help you market by building some little tools.
You're most likely doomed tbh. Talking to customers is essential.
- tawk.to
- render.com
- No Payments implemented but will use Stripe
- Namecheap
- Google Analytics + Google Search Console (Search console is really good)You should really look at finding a cofounder with those skills then. Every situation is different so I won’t say it’s impossible but you’re going to find it exceedingly difficult in my experience to skip that stuff and build a successful business.
- Notion
- HockeyStack
- Drip
- GPT-3
- Apollo.io
I would suggest learning how to do marketing, writing down an excruciatingly detailed process (on Notion), and then automating a part of it while delegating the rest to freelancers.
Though, to delegate as much as possible, you will need a good amount of capital.
* Slack for communication (we do very little email, except externally with customers; even then, we often set up shared Slack channels) * Justworks.com for payroll and insurance (tried Gusto and Rippling, and had horrible issues) * Google Docs and Notion for docs (our team is split 50/50) * SurgeHQ.ai for data labeling / creating ML training datasets * Github as both a code repository and project management tool (tried Asana and Trello, but it was always easier to stick to Github) * Heroku for hosting * Cleanshot.com for creating screenshots (I take a lot of screenshots, so it's crazy how much time this has saved me, compared to the default Mac screenshotter) * Google Analytics (but I hate it, so looking for a recommendation) * Pitch.com for creating slide decks
- Google Cloud Run (or anything that can run docker)
- SendGrid (but use SMTP only for easy migration)
- Google Workspace (Office/Notion are also cool but I just don't use them often)
- Mainly Go with Python for scripts
- PostgreSQL
- gRPC/Protocol Buffers for API servers
Where possible I try and take on as few dependencies on big cloud services, and always use standard gateways. It makes moving around much easier. Other stuff mentioned here is quite good, but I'll especially recommend https://IndieHackers.com
ChartMogul - Subscription Analytics
Prospectss.com - Growth Marketing / Lead Generation
GitLab - Code Repository
FirstPromoter - Affiliate Management
TawkTo - Free Live Chat
HelloBar - Exit Intent Popup
UberSuggest Chrome Extension - Keyword Stats directly on Google!
OpalStack - Best Python/Django Hosting
Bubbles Chrome Extension - Providing Feedback on Website
Loom - Video Recording.
Voxer - Better IM Like Voice Communication
Unsplash / Pexels - Free Stock
IPData - Check Geo Location of the user to set pricing & timezone
Amazon SES - Transactional Emails
MailJet - Promotional Emails
PorkBun - Domain
TunnelTo - Local Host Tunneling
Postaga - Outreach / Link Building
SEMRush - SEO Analytics and Link Building Outreach
Growth Runner Daily Google Analytics Report on Whatsapp
— Twilio for anything Messaging
— Stripe + Paypal for payments
— Biztoc.com for finding content to post
— Plausible.io for analytics
— Paperform for forms
— Bear.app for documentation
Here's what I use and what I think about it:
* Hetzner for servers, and use bare-metal ones, the speed and memory per dollar advantage over things like AWS is so large it's not even funny.
* Cloudflare for hosting domains and running your DNS (great).
* Braintree for subscription billing. It's not good at all, but Stripe is significantly more expensive and doesn't really get me that much more (it still can't handle EU invoicing with SAF-T export and its idea of invoicing is very US-centric). If you look at Stripe pricing and you are not in the US, look carefully: they will not deposit USD into a non-US account, which means they will hit you with currency conversion fees and poor rates. Add up all the fees and rates and you end up with 5.4% (last I checked).
* No ads. I stopped burning money on them after implementing my own tracking and finding out that I get exactly 0 signups through ads (tried Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora).
* Linear for bug tracking. Fantastic tool.
* ProfitWell for tracking your subscription billing metrics.
* I still pay for Sendgrid, but I'd recommend against using them. They will send your E-mails from the same servers that their spammer customers use, so you will get plenty of rejected mail. No way to get around that unless you pay them big $$$ for dedicated IPs etc — it's a form of ransom, really. I send transactional mail myself, and for newsletters I'm looking for something better.
* Clojure + ClojureScript for software. Use a single language for both client and server, use the same business logic code for both, minimize line count, minimize programmer effort. An obvious bet for a solo founder.
* Ansible for managing your sever clusters, terraform for quickly spinning up experimental environments, and don't use AWS or heaven forbid Azure for those, use Digital Ocean which makes things really simple and saves you lots of time. Vultr is good, too.
That's it for tools, I think. But there is one thing I found more important than tools: I believe you should disregard most "common knowledge". Do not follow the hype. Read HN comments very critically: most people here are not in your situation. You need to optimize for different things than most HN readers. You are responsible for everything, including the bottom line of your business. So think for yourself. Don't jump into something just because lots of people write about it (ahem, Kubernetes). Don't do something a certain way just because it's current fashion (ahem, microservices). Don't use services just because most people do (ahem, AWS and Stripe). In each case, consider each service/tool carefully in the context of your business, your metrics and your requirements.
In my case, I am primarily optimizing for my time. But not only — I am willing to do some things manually (invoiced billing with wire transfers) or use a lower-tech provider (Braintree rather than Stripe) when it makes financial sense.
You mentioned PR and marketing — I also thought I would need to hire people, run campaigns, etc. I listened to all the podcasts and conference talks about marketing tools and strategies. And then I realized that most of these people do not run my type of SaaS — in fact, most of them make marketing tools for marketers. It's a huge echo chamber. I found out that with limited content marketing (e.g. writing articles from time to time) and "organic" spread, I'm getting a consistent number of signups. Could I get more? Yes, very likely so. But at what expense? Would these customers stick around? And would I be able to onboard and support them? So here again, think for yourself.
Unless of course your business is the same as everybody else's and you are building another tool for drip email campaigns, conversion tracking, idea voting, etc :-)
These are the only services I pay for:
- AWS for hosting
- names.co.uk for domains
- Paypal to receive payments (I started in 2010 and at this time stripe was not really an option in the UK)
- Twilio for inbound voice, which is $1 month to get a phone number
These are the used services with a free tier or totally free:
- A dev/ops stack that I am really familiar with
- Cloudflare for DNS management and SSL certificates
- sendgrid for smtp outbound emails (< 300 / days)
- names.co.uk for inbound emails (mail lite with 100mb mailbox) that I import in my own database (new saas product coming soon actually)
- Telegram for event notifications
- Crisp Chat
- Google Analytics
Right now I'm spinning off publicly one of the tools I've created: polyblog.io Polyblog let you create and delegate away a content marketing blog. We are currently in beta and I'm looking for beta testers. I can pass you down my knowledge on hiring a writer on Upwork and almost completely delegate the content marketing blog. Please write me at giorgio dot zamparelli at polyblog dot io
Use it you can consolidate emails from multiple domains to forward to the same inbox. And you can add webhook/slack notification too.
* Hosting + DNS with AWS & Cloudflare * Code with GitHub and mirror to GitLab * Domain with Godaddy * Transactional emails with PostMark * Errors with Sentry * Docs, Mail, Calendar with Google Workspace
- FastAPI for the SaaS itself
- WooCommerce for the accounts and subscriptions
- Nikola for the gallery and feature demonstrations
- FreeAgent for handling all the tax obligations (UK)
I’ve been checking out Ghost CMS recently. It’s looking great so far for content and subscription management.
* Atlas Stripe for international incorporation
* CorpNet for state by state registrations (e.g. employees)
* Gusto for payroll
* Revolut Business for banking
* GBS Tax for annual US filing