skrish

The naming, though may sound cheesy to some, is a great marketing tactic to get noticed. You can of course think of <<fill your favorite trusted source>> person here.

But if you want people to notice & get some traction, knowing where and who would notice it makes a huge difference. I would say it is a nice marketing hack.

@aakil great job guys. :)

EDIT: This got covered in techcrunch!

I think it is shift in focus that is the root cause of this issue. There are plenty of avenues for online gambling as well as real ones, where they extract money out of the wallet.

However, the question is in exchange for what? As long as the focus is on the entertainment quotient I think these businesses do just fine. The moment the focus of business shifts to just extract every possible dollar out of its users, people get smarter & just leave. This is probably what is happening with Zynga.

We use Freshdesk. They have a startup plan that we applied for. Took about 15-20 mins to setup and has been on autopilot so far.

Thank you Cam. Awesome to see specialist in specific area offering to help the community of users.

Reading his response to a comment in his blog changes the context of his perceived smugness. Doesn't it? Here is what I am referring to:

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DHH 10 Jul 12 Kathy, that’s a great point. Also, this pyramid can be applied in finer resolution within your stack. For example, I’m perfectly content to be at the “Well engineered” level when it comes to my use of MySQL, but when it comes to Ruby and Rails, I want to be at “Moving industry forward”.

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http://www.ChargeBee.com - we did a Show HN to ge feedback sometime back and got some very good feedback. Went back and improved on several things and continuing to do that.

We have a good roadmap of solutions to provide you everything you need to run business. Analytics and a few other useful integrations based on customer inputs is in the works. We are still in private beta working with a short list of customers whom we are working with closely (though we are unable to serve everyone immediately as some of the payment integrations are due to be completed by July / August).

We have integrations readily available with BraintreePayments (US), Samurai (not sure if they still do underwrite new accounts and we did this earlier), WorldPay (Singapore). Authorize.net will be ready in another week.

And we support multiple payment gateway integration. We do not have a vault to store card with us and we store in the respective payment gateway.

Here is the link to our API docs: https://apidocs.chargebee.com/

I am one of the founders and will be happy to help. :)

One of the primary reasons is the inability to match the supply-demand cycle. There are a few startups trying to solve this issue in their own way.

I heard one of the founders speak http://www.efarm.in (he runs another site connecting farmers called http://www.efarmdirect.com). His views are quite interesting and he is using IT as an enabler to solve some of the issues. They are trying to use basic mobile phones to gather supply info, feed that information above the chain.

Fantastic answer.

It is not impossible but just takes its own cycle and hard as @diskdoctor has mentioned above.

To add to this there are a bunch of questions that you should answer well before Indirect Purchasing department (yes, the department that makes the purchasing decisions on all items that are to be used internally).

1. What is your business continuity plan?

2. Annual revenue. Would you remain in business long enough?

3. Technology stack - what does it take to maintain it?

4. Does it align with their tech stack recommended by architectural team? (not necessary if there is a good justification).

5. Partnerships / integrations.

6. Customer references of similar scale.

...

The best way for a startup could be the Yammer way - make it very attractive for users within the organization to drive it bottom up or have some real strong partnerships to drive it through.

I disagree. IMHO, there is no better person than the founder to market your startup passionately.

I am not saying MBA skills are not valuable. But what is more important is ability to write pithy blogs, write tons of emails to your potential customers, investors and do lot of other routine activities to keep your startup afloat. None of this requires MBA as such in the initial days.

Your passion, reading some of the best blogs out there on specific topics is more than enough provided you take all the advice as just that 'advice' and tweak it to apply as per your situation & needs.

I wonder what will be the tipping point when 'companies' stop trusting SAAS companies. I understand this is not a business critical function or anything, but my point is about services that could impact businesses due to talent hiring & subsequent shutdown.

In the purchasing department of enterprise companies, there is usually a questionnaire to assess the business continuity aspect.

Unless companies make an upfront commitment establishing their seriousness to run the business without affecting those using them it is quite hard to build the trust in the long run.

Many of the points are not hard to do yet requires discipline to do on a regular basis. Creating engaging content in newsletter and blog I believe is the key.

Probably that is where the VC investment and connections come into play, to get those partnerships in place. These are certain advantages of having VC as a stakeholder in business than just being a profitable completely bootstrapped startup.

Just love the way he said how he got early access to Stripe: "I'm friends with one of the founders + I asked repeatedly." :)

Most importantly he has used access to a key service early and executed it all very well. Congratulations & all the very best Sahil!

Absolutely. My friend and I wanted to quit & run a business. We kept discussing about different ideas over a period of time and then just decided to quit & get started.

Looking back, it was so naive to have written a few business plans, waiting for that 'unique' idea to come up.

I would say, talk to 50 folks (potential customers) about a problem. See if they acknowledge the pain and if they would pay for it to be solved. Try to put a number to solve that problem - how much would it cost (direct or indirect) them without that solution and just build it.

Does not matter whether competitors out there are already building it. Every business would take its own course based on customer feedback and no two businesses' vision will be the same over the years.

A 30 day trial period with user engagement at the end of trial asking them if they need additional time to evaluate will work better. Offer them 15 day extension if they need.

There are two advantages to this approach: 1. engage in conversation with user asking for feedback and understand their needs. 2. treat them special with an offer to extend trial, earning their respect for personal attention and better chances of conversion.

Absolutely. The cool features like remind me if there is no reply in the next 2 days has been one of the many features I use everyday. I have recommended this to so many folks now.

We are in private beta and requested for feedback on the website. The title has been changed by moderator I guess and it doesn't reflect the original intent. Thanks for all the feedback.

Great feedback. Will work on each one. Yes the blog menu really needs rework and we had been planning on migrating to wordpress with a design same as that of website.

Thanks.

Thank you for the detailed feedback. Will address each one of them.

Braintree provides great customer service, payment processing and recurring billing. We specialize in specific needs of web app subscription billing.

Certain functionalities like Dunning management (follow-ups for card failures), proration logic, readily available custom hosted pages, coupon code support, metered billing etc., In all we have tried to build ChargeBee as an extension of your app specializing in subscription business needs.

We will start providing extensive reports, integration to accounting, CRM systems to help manage entire accounts receivables function. Hope that helps.

Valid points that we keep getting asked about.

Our thought is: how can I build the essential tools to help you manage entire accounts receivables for you? What reports, integrations can I provide so you are able to focus completely on core product and marketing functions.

This is our first entry into building a business and our focus is to add more value on the side of merchants than the processor end.

Thanks for the input. Will definitely keep this in mind as we add features to our application.

Thanks for the feedback. Will fix it.

Thanks for the feedback.

1. As you pointed out we do not control the prices of underlying partners. However, our price guarantee is for the subscription billing solution that we provide.

We understand that we become an integral part, an extension of customer's application to manage billing. And that is a lot of responsibility. Will clarify on the price guarantee part by rewording it correctly.

2. This is one of the things we want to focus on immediately with our customers on-board. Thanks for the reference. We intend to help manage the entire accounts receivables piece for you, so you don't have to even worry about integrating info back to a Freshbooks or Quickbooks. Coming soon. :)

3. Will ensure we document the portability part very well upfront, so you know we have a plan in place.

Thanks again.

Not with Zaakpay due to RBI regulation. (For the wider audience: Reserve Bank of India has a regulation in place for last year+ that all credit cards in India need to go through 2 factor authentication including a one-time-password that is generated by card issuing banks. This makes recurring billing non-viable for Indian payment gateways).

We work with 2Checkout to make recurring billing work for companies registered in India. And you can use multiple gateways eventually via ChargeBee as you build traction for the business.

When your business has equal split of customers from India and abroad that is when you might prefer to have a local payment gateway offering 3 months, 6 months or 12 month subscription via Zaakpay. Some of the businesses does this successfully. One of the use cases we (intend) to solve with Zaakpay is

Good point. We do not store the card ourselves. We intend to store it with established gateways like Authorize.net or gateways like Samurai that have an open vault.

And when we build the vault ourselves (if business demands it) we'll totally let you transfer card information freely without ever holding data as hostage.

Thank you. Valuable points.

- Will have the English fixed quickly.

- Just submitted my comment with API link. Here it is: https://apidocs.chargebee.com/docs/api

- We gave lot of thought to our pricing. Because of our cost structure, we think we are priced it optimally. One thing we founders are very clear about is stick to the price customers sign-up for and only apply new price for newer customers.

- We intend to bring value adds like integration to a third party tax API, integration to CRM, accounting system etc., and use that to generate additional revenue than dump it on 100% of our customer base, making it an integration add-on.

But as you rightly pointed out pricing is something we should think about, especially how it is perceived (premium product or not!).

Thanks again.

EDIT: Updated pricing clarification.

We are a bunch of folks experienced in building cloud apps for the last several years. Myself and one of my partner were college classmates. We stayed in touch and kept discussing about quitting and building a business of our own and eventually did.

On hindsight, we should have quit & started lot earlier. It took 10 years working in the industry and 2 years of thinking about quitting, dabbling with different ideas before we eventually did. :)

We quit our jobs last year along with two other friends who complement in areas of expertise and started working on this together.

We have first hand experience of subscription billing issues building multiple products in previous jobs and felt we could definitely do a good job of solving this problem.

So, here we are. We just started our private beta and have few folks testing our app and integrating with us.

We build out API doc framework ground-up (design inspired by docco, used by Stripe as well) and our auto-generated doc doubles up as documentation for our code.

Here is a link to our API documentation: https://apidocs.chargebee.com/docs/api

Help us with your review comments. Thanks!

Agreed. Like it is said in Immutable laws of Marketing book:

If you can't be first with an idea, be the first in a category. If not create the category and be the first in it.

It is good information. It makes sense to go with Android app, if you are building B2C applications that needs to reach out to large numbers.

What will be interesting to see is the distribution in the B2B space with apps focusing on enterprise segment, SMBs.

Is your question about the acquisition itself or that service will be continued?