Ask HN: Interested in SaaS Metrics for PayPal? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Interested in SaaS Metrics for PayPal?

21 pointswebstartupper16 comments

About SaasyMetrics: SaasyMetrics provides you metrics and actionable insights to better run your SaaS business with subscriptions running through PayPal.

Why I am building SaasyMetrics: I run a small software company in Mumbai, India. When my SaaS business (DomCop) had only a few customers, I was using the Excel SaaS metrics dashboard created by Christoph Janz. This was great while I was just starting my business but as the business grew, it became quite painful to update the spreadsheet manually. I needed an app that would automatically get all my data and calculate the metrics I required. While there were many really good SaaS metrics & analytics apps in the market, there were none that would integrate with PayPal, which ran all my monthly subscriptions. That's essentially why I decided to create SaasyMetrics.

If your business runs on PayPal, I welcome you to join our early access list and help us build an extremely useful tool that will help you grow your business.

What you get as a beta customer:

- Inputs in deciding the roadmap for the product

- Early access during the closed beta

- A 50% lifetime discount to SaasyMetrics

What I get: Early access to you, the most important customer I will ever have.

Next Step: If you are interested, please do sign up for the beta at https://www.saasymetrics.com

As my PayPal hate comment wasn't too constructive, here's some more constructive feedback from someone who has designed a fair amount of landing pages:

- Change the heading font to something sans-serif, it feels very default, and look at typographic hierarchy, all those fonts are white and make it look a bit of a wall-of-text.

- Safari hasn't looked like that for a long time, get some up-to-date screenshots, your making your product look outdated already.

- Two screenshots one over the other is making the page needlessly long, use a carousel or similar so you have just have one that you can scroll side to side.

- You want people to sign up but the box is buried down the bottom of the page, work out a way to get that raised up.

- The pricing plan structure feels a bit empty, if you're not offering more functionality for more money, try and make the higher end ones more persuasive by doing something like indicating what kind of savings you're getting by choosing a more expensive plan.

Thanks for the feedback. The comments make sense.

We accept payments via both Stripe and PayPal, and I have to say, trying to find a baremetrics-esque solution for us has been insanely frustrating. We're still calculating LTV, churn, etc. by hand since surprisingly none of these services actually support both, and by looking at the metrics from only one payment source we're missing out on the bigger picture.

So glad to see someone finally made one for PayPal, but without support for other payment systems, I don't see it being able to compete with what's out there. This would only be useful for a company accepting payments from JUST PayPal, which as others have pointed out is probably a rare case these days.

ChartMogul claims to be working on PayPal support, so hopefully that will come through. In the meantime, I still think there's a huge hole in this market for supporting PayPal + other services.

That's exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for - the kinds that helps in finding direction for the app.

I'd love to chat with you about making this work for both Stripe and PayPal (as well as about how you use the metrics in your business). If you are interested, you can sign up at https://www.saasymetrics.com/ or just shoot me an email (email in my profile)

Clickable - https://www.saasymetrics.com

Nice idea.

Constructive criticism:

* You need to make the signup stand out more. Even put it at the top of the page.

* Some top nav links to items further down the page are required. Looks like they have just got lost somewhere.

* Offer more features under the payment plans. Things like ssl by default, Real time metrics, 30 day rolling contract. Any thing that explains what you get for your money.

* About page. Include more images, make it a little less corporate and wordy.

* About page: without sounding racist some people will be put off you are based in india might be worth just stating your a startup and you noticed X problem.

Thanks for the feedback, Matt. Makes a lot of sense.

About your last point, could you give me a little more information on this? I already stated that I noticed X problem from running my other business. Anything else I could put in there to maybe build some trust for those who might be a little uncertain of dealing with a business in another country?

How about something like:

Instead of having an about page why not just remove it and make your contact page a little more personal than just an email link?

After looking over it I really dont think the about page is really going to offer much value to your service. But a more personal contact page would be where I would spend the time. On the contact page explain that saasymetrics is a startup and that you are trying to solve X problem and you encourage people to get in contact with you.

Nice app! How do you plan to handle the paypal's rate limit?

By staying within the PayPal rate limits :)

We are definitely going to face technical challenges scaling up, but at the moment the rate limits do not seem to be an issue. If you'd like to chat more on the technical aspect of the app, just shoot me an email. (my email is in my profile). I'm always happy to talk tech.

If your business runs on PayPal, I would welcome you to do everything you can to change that.

I really dislike these type of comments. Yes we all like to hate on PayPal. It has questionable business practices and its products aren't necessarily cutting edge as compared to say Stripe. But let's just pause and recognize this http://www.datanyze.com/market-share/payments/paypal-vs-stri...

So there's nothing wrong in creating a business that serves a wildly large number of customers out there. PayPal dominates the market outsides of startups and the valley tech companies, and as such a huge market to build a product or company around.

Thats a really constructive comment.

For a lot of people paypal is just fine and does the job they need it to do.

Its like the mac fan boys who comment on windows being crap. But for 90% of joe public it works and works well allowing them to edit word documents and browse the interweb. Its just the loud mouthed 10% who like to cry their balls off and tell people what they are using is wrong.

Yes, I appreciate it's not constructive. To be honest, they've been fine for me for a long time, it's only recently when I've been scammed and now have to deal with their support team I've realised how much they're not "for the buyer" or "for the seller", they're very much just for themselves. I've had awful customer service from ISP's, mobile phone networks, online retailers and many more - but all of those combined wouldn't add up to equate how terrible the service I've had from PayPal. You know a company is shady when there are dedicated hate websites setup to warn people against using it.

I'll be moving to Google Wallet + Stripe in all of my personal expenses and personal projects where possible.

Changing is very hard and can be very expensive. You can't just convert paypal to Stripe. You will have to let the customer providing their credit card.

Unless you build your payments on a service like https://spreedly.com. Then, changing from PayPal to Stripe or any of 70+ other processors and gateways involves changing a single token in your code. Once you have a sizable customer base, avoiding lock-in with any one payment processor makes 3rd-party vaulting like that a no-brainer.

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