Show HN: Wrote book that builds a SaaS boilerplate. Save weeks on side projects | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Wrote book that builds a SaaS boilerplate. Save weeks on side projects

builderbook.org

78 pointstima10173 comments

The price is expensive, but not eye-wateringly so. The non-preorder price gets closer to eye-watering territory, but it’s still in the range of things I’d buy if I was confident they’d save me quite a bit of time.

Your site does not inspire that confidence so far. Here are some things that leave me disinclined to purchase your book even though I consider the price reasonable and am interested in the topic:

1. I don’t know who you or your co-author are, and I don’t know of any SaaS you’ve built that I’ve used or contemplated using. Have I used something you’ve made? If so, tell me!

2. Show me an example of the SaaS that the book teaches me to build. If I could experience what result I might produce, it’s easier to spend the money to learn how.

3. In light of points (1) and (2) not being satisfied, your terms of purchase are really scary. I can’t download a copy of the book to keep? You can revoke my access at any time? No refunds? I know I can reliably get my credit card company to issue a chargeback within a month or two if something’s not as promised, but I tend to read this kind of content more slowly than that. I want to make sure that I can continue to have it as I make my way through it at my own pace.

I hope none of that sounds like hostile feedback. It’s not... I’m someone who’s actively looking for this kind of resource. The price itself isn’t a problem, except that I can’t see what I’m getting, I don’t know your work well enough to know I’ll find this work useful, and you say you won’t offer a refund if I don’t find it useful. Plus you say you might revoke my online access and refuse to offer offline access.

Thanks for feedback.

Each chapter has ample of free excerpt (10-20% of total content), all code is public under MIT license: https://github.com/async-labs/saas

This worked well for us so far. We received less than 10 refund requests out of 850 purchases. Not sure what else to add here.

Code speaks for itself, I am just no-name guy in the cabin in the middle of the forest, with hotspot and generator. I have early-stage SaaS business with few paying customers but nothing to brag about it: https://async-await.com

If I were you I would not buy this book. At least one author is not a celebrity =)

I saw the code. If I knew enough to judge whether the book was worth purchasing just by reading the code, I wouldn’t need to buy the book.

(I’m glad to hear you’re not receiving many refund requests. Are you refunding those requests you receive? The terms page makes it look as though you are not. That would be the relevant thing to add there, relative to my questions.)

The code might speak for itself if I were already an expert. I’m not. I’m a good programmer who wants to learn more about the details of building a service offering, and I’m trying to figure out how effectively your book will teach me what I want.

The link to your SaaS business is part of what I was asking about. Is there a way for me to explore that without paying to see what it’s all about? Is that a typical example of what the book is helping me build?

> If I were you I would not buy this book. At least one author is not a celebrity =)

I’m smiling at that, but it’s not at all what I meant when I said I don’t know who you are. I didn’t mean I literally need to know who you are; I meant I was hoping to see an example of the end state your book is purporting to guide me towards. SaaS is kind of a big space.

I’m really glad it’s working well for you so far. I hope that continues, and a cabin in the middle of the forest with a hotspot and generator sounds like a great place!

Sorry if I misunderstood. I cannot and I don't want to convince every potential buyer individually to buy a book. Imagine a farmer's market, you ask how much is a bundle of garlic, seller says $20, you don't like a price or seller and you move on.

---

I see many are unhappy about price. How much time would you need to build subscription API with Stripe in your SaaS project? Few hours at least if you are good and know where to look. How much is your time worth, $50 an hour? So here you go $100-$200 saved. The book paid itself. And that's just one feature out of few dozen.

I totally get that. And I'm not asking you to argue with me about the price for a head of garlic. You're saying "I wrote a book on how to build a boilerplate SaaS application." I'm thinking "I have a couple application ideas I'd like to sell as services. I wonder if this book could help me. Are my ideas like what this author has built before?" And I'm finding nothing to guide me on your page.

For example, one of the things the application I'm imagining needs to do is send people text messages to remind them about appointments. That feels like a very "boilerplate SaaS" thing. But I can't tell if that's part of what you're selling here or not.

For another example, my app would need to send mobile push notifications. That also feels like boilerplate SaaS and I can't tell if your book covers it or not. It could break either way based on the outlines you list.

Your terms page just says "(5) We use Stripe to securely process payments. We do not offer refunds."

If I spent $200 on your book and learned what I wanted, it'd feel like a wonderful purchase. If I spent $200 and it didn't teach me the things I was seeking to learn, it'd feel like a terrible purchase. Since I don't want a refund to enter the picture anywhere, I'm trying to figure that out in advance :)

I apologize if this discussion is unwelcome. I'm mostly engaging it because I am actively seeking to purchase reading material on this specific topic, so talking about it in detail seems relevant and helpful here, as you are, at least superficially, seeking to sell what I am seeking to purchase.

How about the access question from GP?

What is GP? We had under 10 refunds, in all cases we refunded people. There are zero cases when access is taken away without refund. Terms say no refunds because we have no time to refund but we always did in a past since we got request in less than a week after purchase.

This is a useful discussion - we should update terms to allow refunds within 48 hours and no refund after that. To be updated later today.

I meant the question from the parent of my parent comment - they asked how they could access the book if the website ever went down? Seems to imply it’s only available as a webpage while your server is up.

For me, books are really useful as pdfs as I can load them into eink readers. Easier on the eyes.

Based on conversation in this thread, we updated our Terms to include:

"If you are unhappy with a book purchase, you can request a refund by contacting team@builderbook.org. We will grant refunds within 48 hours of book purchase, no questions asked. After that point, we cannot guarantee a refund."

I would not consider this project a proper SaaS boilerplate. It is a Web application boilerplate and maybe a good one, but not SaaS.

SaaS implies multi-tenancy and your project does not seem to offer support for that.

Irrespective to that, your book's regular price IMO is too high - similar books/tutorials/courses (targeting various stacks) can be found for as low as $59.

Thanks for your comment. The `Team` data model is per Team Leader and not visible to other customers. `Team` "contains" `Discussion` and `Post` data models. So same application on the same hardware serves multiple customers. Is this what you call multi-tenancy?

You're welcome. If your boilerplate application allows serving totally independent customers / organizations (not different teams of the same organization!), then, your project is, indeed, multi-tenant and SaaS-compatible. If so, please accept my apologies for missing that aspect of your boilerplate (I looked at it very briefly). Otherwise, my point still stands.

No problem. Thanks.

I'm not OP, but it's boldly indicated that the book will be kept up to date and it will be up to the author to continuously provide new content on breaking changes or whatever happens to this stack in the future. $99 seems appropriate to me

A promise to keep a project up-to-date does not imply a promise to add a significant feature, such as multi-tenancy support (assuming that it's missing, that is). Re: price - $99 is pre-order price; by "regular" I referred to post-pre-order price of $199.

SaaS just implies someone else hosts the software. Multi tenancy is one architecture you can use for a SaaS application.

In theory, you're right. However, in practice, SaaS pretty much always implies multi-tenancy. Why would one want to host software for someone else who is a single entity?

Many large enterprise customers want complete segmentation between them and other customers. It is not uncommon for critical apps to not actually be multi tenant but a single deployment.

When you talk about consumer apps or low cost business apps your point is well taken.

edit: Sometimes SSO ties it together so single tenants appear to be a multi tenant environment.

Thank you for clarification. Point taken. Nevertheless, I still stand by my opinion, as multi-tenancy is a fundamental SaaS feature for overwhelming majority of deployment scenarios, both B2B and B2B (where multi-tenant B2B SaaS includes most, if not all, of large and very large enterprise solutions, as well, like Salesforce and SAP). What you are talking about in the first paragraph above is essentially a very specific case of SaaS private deployments. I'm talking about a general de facto standard in the industry.

Hard pass on anything that involves Mongo.

You beat me to it. Maybe early on it made sense but not now, especially if you’re using typescript. Not keen on vanilla node either. Criticism aside, they were able to finish writing a book. That’s something.

what's the problem with mongo? which document database would be better if you'd use typescript? I'm using mongo with typegoose in development and I'm happy with it. I'm open to better alternatives

1. You end up doing more work in the end with mongo. Instead of SQL, you have to reinvent the wheel with new logic 2. It's not as reliable as a relational database 3. There are several ORMs in node that make using databases even easier like typeorm 4. A lot of databases support JSON now 5. Databases still perform better than Mongo in general 6. If you really need NoSQL, Cassandra tends to be better imo

1. Debatable, but my (biased) experience is the ease of change in an agile project favours databases with a flexible schema.

2. Reliability is not a pure function of whether you use SOL or NoSQL

3. ORMs hide but do not remove the need for schema management in SQL dbs. They often create more problems than they solve.

4. SQL databases support JSON because it my accurately reflects the programming model that programmers want to use. This is making an argument for NoSQL.

5. Which NoSQL you use is a matter of personal choice in many cases. I prefer MongoDB (I would say that though, I work there). Cassandra has some challenges as it is eventually consistent by design (and default). MongoDB is strongly consistent by design (and default) which makes reasoning about your programs easier.

1. As cludgy as SQL is, having to reimplement basic SQL queries ala reinventing wheels isn't very smart imo. It's worse than having an inflexible schema

2. I was only referring to mongo and not to NoSQL as a whole. Cassandra worked just as a advertised.

3. You don't have to use an ORM with a relational database just as you don't have to for mongo. There are other alternatives

4. JSON is no longer an advantage for NoSQL since it's supported by relational databases. It also means that relational databases as a whole can adapt to the market.

5. Which NoSQL you use and for what purpose matters, and it's not just "personal choice". NoSQL in general aren't the generic swiss army knives that relational DBs are. Each NoSQL project has different use cases, which in turn also have different levels of reliability and performance.

You guys use stripe for payments in the book but what about taxes? I feel a good addition to your book would be to mention Paddle as they operate as a merchant of record so taxes are accounted for.

And TaxJar, Avalara, etc

I was prepared to buy this and then I sorta stumbled across the Builder Book

They look very similar? But they're different? According to the docs this one is more focused on advanced patterns? Does a person need to buy the first to get value from the second?

Very confusing UX IMO

I think you don't need to buy first book to understand second book if you already built a simple web application with this or similar stack.

Later this month I plan to somewhat re-write first book, many packages push changes often (Next.js and Material-UI) plus many explanations can be improved and I need to do better job with diagrams. First book, Builder Book, is either for junior developer or someone who wants to save time to learn this particular stack.

I hope this helps.

Perhaps it's a great book but the price is crazy.

$99 is absolutely not crazy, especially if it really does save weeks of time (as billed).

Co-author here. We find it to be ok price for us.

- Quantitative evidence, we have over 150+ pre-orders in the last 3 month which is more than good for us. No advertising, no social media. We sold first book 700 times. So that's 100-120 people out of 700 who pre-ordered second book.

- Qualitative evidence. We have way more polite customers after raising price in the past ($49 -> $99) for our first book. More polite emails, more feedback and less emails asking for support.

EDIT: My co-author says that we have evidence that higher percentage of people who bought the book at higher price point actually read it.

PS: Price will go to $199 on Sunday midnight PST, that's when pre-order period ends.

I don't think there is any problem with the pricing but OP's point might be valid for people who live in low income countries where the cost of the book is equivalent to a month of salary.

Steam and other platforms employ prices based on purchasing power of the buyer which I think is good but also require more work which might not be worth it for smaller teams.

We haven't implemented any discount system from the beginning. We are only two and we do books only part-time.

We do get emails asking for discounts but I personally feel that it is unfair to the previous buyers.

But I am keeping an open mind about it. Is there reliable way to charge people in other countries different price?

One time discount links is what I use for special pricing. I validate request, make and send.

This seems kind of irrational: the time and effort you spend validating every request personally probably costs more than the actual giveaway.

For me it rarely comes up. When it does I've already spent at least 60 minutes with my prospect and I respond with "no" and move on. Some folks are persistent and maybe, case by brief case, I pick.

Sometime I choose to give a deal to a person for my own reasons, so my one-off pay portal is used there as well.

Or one-off a client for additional money.

It took less than an hour to build, years ago, the functionally it's a one off invoice just tightly integrated with my business and optimised to two inputs. #bpaftw

As one person living in one of those countries with greatly reduced purchase power, I really appreciate the way Wes Bos[1] has done it for his courses (I've bought a couple of them).

He's got an episode on his podcast on how he implemented it [2].

It does sound like some work and I'm not saying you should discount or give away your work though.

[1]https://wesbos.com/ [2] https://syntax.fm/show/233/hasty-treat-purchasing-power-pari...

> More polite emails, more feedback and less emails asking for support.

Obviously. If I were to run a restaurant I would rather choose/open as expensive as I could so I wouldn't have to deal with people without proper manners and education sufficient to appreciate my fine culinary skills /semi-sarcastic

By the way. Here had already been some posts by free software authors devastated by rude and ignorant people demanding support and/or bullying them by e-mail. I find it very important for all the authors (regardless of whether they code/write for free or for serious money) to learn to just ignore (without any emotional response) the correspondence from this kind of people. You don't alienate them this way, they already got what they are eligible for for free or for their money, personal support should be a premium, for nice people only :-) Yet, there actually are many nice people for whom $100 (let alone $200) per book is a way too much. Some of them even living in the US, not necessarily in an utterly poor country.

Maybe a rent option?

No, the idea of rental of digital content is artificial and plain ridiculous, as is the idea of dividing the Internet into countries.

Except that textbook rentals have been a thing since before the internet.

Indeed. That was before the Internet. Many things were before something yet would look bizarre (which doesn't necessarily imply completely impossible) today.

Actually textbook rentals are probably even more used now with higher costing textbooks. Yes you can still rent textbooks.

Sure, this is a well-known problem. Sooner or later this bullshit business model will be eliminated.

I can't see the two links above "Boilerplate", "Reviews" and "Log in" except for a few pixels so I know there's some content hidden at the top. My browser is about 1/2 the width of a 1080p desktop.

Small nitpick, but the hamburger menu bar on the top right is unresponsive on Safari (iPhone 11 Pro iOS 13.6)

Abandon the hamburger menu.

Many blue collar users have no idea it exists, and it cripples your app for that percentage of users.

Probably not too many blue collar users interested in building a SaaS product, though.

Tons interested in using them - if they're "easy" and don't "get in my way"!

Can you cite some proof of this?

As a counter-point, I work for a large national telco and our mass-market site and mobile app (usage in the tens of millions of unique users across all demographics) both use hamburger menus and our internal stats show that almost everyone understands that it's the menu.

I made the cardinal error of speaking broadly from my locale (the US).

My evidence is anecdotal - though repeated - in US fleet/manufacturing/facilities maintenance, and other labor industries.

P.S. I was trying to get in touch with you a few months back, and was unable to find an avenue. Any place I can send an email/PM? Thanks for your time.

Twitter in my profile, DMs should be open.

Thanks. Just to clarify a problem. Does it not open and/or links don't work?

Not OP but i can confirm this too. Works fine if i test in my brave browser but totally unresponsive on safari. It doesn’t open up at all, the blue highlight when selected doesn’t even show.

I’m on 11 Pro Max iOS 14 beta

The responsive design is not encouraging. The page does not shrink to the size of my screen, text is overlapping and it generally looks slapped together without a concrete methodology. For two hundred dollars I don’t even get to own the book? Yikes.

Would you consider doing an addendum that uses PostgreSQL instead of MongoDB?

I've been looking for something exactly like your book, but I need to use a SQL database.

I can't promise since I don't know how much time it would take. I plan to start partially re-writing our first book (Build Book) later this month plus a new feature for Async. So no time really in the near future.

Is `sequelize` a good library to use for PostgresSQL?

It is a big pain in the butt but it is definitely the standard/most popular. I can't imagine boilerplate using another ORM.

heard of typeORM?

Actually hadn't heard of it. It has about half the downloads of sequelize but really nice to hear there's a popular alternative. Will check it out for the next project.

You could use Knex.js but it's not an ORM. TypeORM is the go-to from what I hear (I don't use ORMs).

Can you clarify if the reviewers paid full price or not?

Reviewers bought book at the full price of the book at the time.

Do we go to 25k LOC of our own code or including libs?

If the first, I guess my side-projects were too small if they need 25k LOC just for the boilerplate.

I laughed hard.

Your own code.

Yes, the name "boilerplate" is deceiving here. Not sure where to draw the line. This boilerplate does have some features - websocket with rooms, working with Markdown, S3 file uplod, API Gateway with AWS Lambda, webhook from Stripe and many more.

Is there name for boilerplate with "popular" features?

The book's code is actually free and hosted here:

https://github.com/async-labs/saas/tree/master/book

We charge for book's content which is bunch of explanations and diagrams.

Boilerplate + Features I've heard called Skeleton.

> Is there name for boilerplate with "popular" features?

"batteries-included framework"?

For me, the 'Pre-order book for $99' button is un-responsive. Latest Chrome + incognito

Wow weird. Works for me but web app is slow now and I don't think it is a good idea to redeploy right now.

After clicking button, you should be asked to log in and then redirected to checkout page hosted by Stripe. Would you try later again? You can also email us if you prefer email, at team@builderbook.org

I like that you put the buy button inside the content of the book but you should also put a straightforward buy button on the site and add some fluff on the front page.

How do you ensure 1 person does not buy the book and resell for cheaper or distribute for free?

Huh. I was hoping this would be about everything except building the product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com