You’d think in today’s software landscape there would be tools to simplify or automate the part or building a SaaS business that everyone needs to do.
He mentions Stripe for payments of course, but isn’t there anything broader to get set up more quickly? Like a shopify for SaaS businesses?
A few critical ones off the top of my head
- payments (subscriptions, cancellations, invoices, etc)
- authentication (signup, login, invite, forgot password)
- transactional emails (confirmations, etc)
for enterprise:
- permissions, access controls
- audit logs
- gdpr
- reporting, monitoring
- single sign on
other common saas-y needs
- notifications
- error monitoring
- performance monitoring
- admin tools (impersonate, deletions)
- feature flagging
I'm surprised a "SaaS in a box" hasn't really gotten traction. I think part of it is the tech stack dependencies - frontend frameworks, backend languages & frameworks, infra, databases, 3rd party tools
Then you have headless CMS-es on top of which you also can build stuff.
So you can plugin your email provider, payment provider, single sign on. It does not take much code but you still have to understand how to integrate stuff.
Then you have wordpress where people basically install all kind of plugins and you can have all what was listed in CMS, but then you get "wordpress developers" to hire so I don't see much difference.
This is Paddle. As a one-person startup, there's no way I could go with Stripe. The tax implications alone are too much.