The SaaS Startup Founder’s Guide | Hacker News Reader

The SaaS Startup Founder’s Guide

startups.salesforce.com

86 pointsvyrotek26 comments

Way too much fluff, filler, unimportant (at this stage) information, and latent Salesforce sales pitches. A much better resource without all the bullshit (and it's even on sale): http://www.singlefounderhandbook.com/

Interesting suggestion. Didn't know the book until now. Did you read it? What's your general impression?

Yeah, bought it probably 6 months ago and read it cover to cover. It was good, a lot of it is stuff you will already know if you've read a lot about startups, especially Paul Graham's blogs and YC's video lectures. It does cover some stuff PG/YC doesn't though, especially at it applies to solo founders (which YC/PG advise against). I am pretty frugal and spending $50 on a book is pretty abnormal for me, but even then I feel like it was probably worth the price. I would have been happier with a $30 price though. It's $39 right now so at least it's half way there.

So instead of a free epub, I should spend $199 on this other book. Do you have any financial ties to the link to disclose?

If you scroll down, just the book is $39.

Wow only $39 to learn how to make money on a startup. Is it perhaps a book about selling books on how to make money on a startup for $39?

That's not really a fair assessment. He doesn't advertise it as some scammy "Make money on a startup!" like those work from home pyramid schemes. The book is largely designed for people already invested in the idea of starting a startup or possibly already progressing on one, and he advertises it as such. It's a guide of good ideas and bad ideas, not how to make as much money as possible as easily as possible.

And no, I've literally never met Mike and have zero connection to him other than I bought his book and sent him an email asking a question about it once.

What successful company has Taber solo founded? The about section on that marketing page doesn't really inspire me to fork over $199.

He started an owns Moon River Software, which does software consulting and development, I think. They make products like this: http://www.auditshark.com/

He's also done a few other side projects and seems pretty involved in the startup community.

The book also includes feedback from pretty respected people in the small startup space:

Patrick McKenzie - Kalzumeus Software

Brennan Dunn - DoubleYourFreelancing.com

Gabriel Weinberg - Founder of Duck Duck Go

Josh Ledgard - CoFounder of KickoffLabs

Brian Casel - Founder of Restaurant Engine

Dr. Sherry Walling - Clinical Psychologist

Hiten Shah - Crazy Egg & KISSmetrics

Justin Jackson - Product People

Nathan Barry - ConvertKit

Also the book is only $39. Mike should pay me for this promotion, haha.

The joke of this piece of content marketing is SalesForce, as a CRM, specifically does NOT gracefully handle reoccurring revenue in its product.

So, if you want to run a SaaS business w/ SFDC, be prepared to jump through constant hoops for auto-renewing / re-occur "closed won" opportunities.

SFDC is very flexible, and you could customize SFDC to handle this. Let me know if you need help.

Yes, every founder dreams of spending time and effort to customize a third party tool, instead of focusing on their core business.

If SalesForce is seeking a wide audience for this material then why offer only the choice of the epub format for download? Why not plain text, html or a pdf?

Following on from this, what are the best/recommended epub readers for the desktop? (Windows in particular) I don't have an eBook reader and it's not a format I've dealt with before.

I usually use Calibre, it's available for a variety of platforms: https://calibre-ebook.com/download

This is my current tool: EPUBReader, an add-on for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/epubreader/

You can upload to Google Play Books. https://play.google.com/books

It works fine on my iphone (iBooks - installed by default).

They asked about readers for desktop, specifically Windows. Pretty sure iBooks is not relevant.

iBooks run on the desktop as well and syncs back and forth.

http://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

It's my goto PDF and epub reader.

You could have mentioned it is Windows only. Thanks for suggesting it though.

This is well written. 100 pages covering the basics for someone with a interest in how to get started.

Ch.4 on "nice to have" vs "need your solution" is especially good because it's where many companies fail.

Haven't actually read the book yet, but I'm pleasantly surprised I didn't have to provide an email address! The number of drip campaigns people run nowadays can get pretty annoying pretty quickly.

Yikes, hopefully it doesn't contain a chapter on building a training course, with something as sad as #trailhead where contestants, sorry certified solution experts, dress up in Halloween outfits and post selfies to twitter for extra badges...

my calibre says it's DRM and could not open it?

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