SaaS Topics & Resources

• Analytics

  What business metrics should you monitor? What range should your conversion rates fall in?

• Automation

  What can be automated? What should you automate? How should you automate?

• Billing

  What payment processor should you use? How should you handle billing? Monthly or yearly?

• Building

  How should you choose vendors? How should you prioritize your work? What tools do you need?

• Business

  How should you work with customers? How should you communicate when things go wrong? What should you outsource?

• Cancellations

  How can you reduce cancellations? What can you learn from cancellations? How should you handle failed payments?

• Churn

  How can you reduce churn? What insights can can analytics provide about churn? How can you help unhappy customers?

• Cofounders

  Do you need cofounders? How do you find cofounders? How should your skillsets complement each other?

• Communication

  How do you handle internal and external communication? How transparent should you be with customers?

• Design

  What tools can help with the design process? How do you test and validate your design ideas?

• Development

  What processes should you establish? How can you learn and iterate more quickly? How can you work with integrations and APIs?

• Documentation

  How should you organize documenation? How do you keep documentation updated?

• Email

  How do you ensure your emails get delivered? How should you configure transactional email? What emails should you send?

• Feedback

  How should you collect and organize feedback? How should you respond to feedback? How should you handle criticism?

• Finances

  When should you quit your day job? How much money will you need? Should you share your finances publicly?

• Funding

  What options do you have for funding your business? How do you handle projections?

• Growth

  How do you break through plateaus? How should you spend money on marketing and advertising?

• Infrastructure

  How do you manage the necessary but invisible tools in your stack? How should backups work?

• Integration

  How should you evaluate vendors within who you have to integrate? Should build or buy tools?

• Launching

  What should you think about for your alpha and beta? How should you run launch day? How do you build anticipation?

• Marketing

  What are the most effective strategies for marketing and advertising? How can you generate awareness?

• Operations

  How can you optimize for rapid iteration? How does monitoring fit into your day-to-day tasks?

• Pricing

  How should you structure pricing? How much should you charge? How can you raise prices?

• Projections

  How conservative should your projections be? What kind of growth should you expect?

• Prototyping

  What are the benefits of prototypes?How much should you prototype?

• Research

  How do you validate your idea? What’s the best strategy for research? How many customers should you talk to?

• Sales

  Where do you find your first customers? How do you make time for sales in the early days?

• Security

  What are the most important security areas in the early days? How do you stay secure over time?

• Selling

  How much is your business worth? How are deals structured? What do buyers want? Should you talk to a broker?

• Shipping

  When should you launch? How do you know when you have product-market fit?

• Starting

  Where do you start? When can you quit your day job? What’s the best way to get started quickly?

• Support

  What’s the difference between customer support and customer success? How much time does support require?

• Sustaining

  How do you keep going? What happens when fraud or spam begin affecting your business?

• Tools

  How do you know which tools to use? What’s the most important aspect for choosing tools?

• Trials

  How should trials be structured? Do you need a free trial? How can you improve onboarding?

• Vendors

  Should you build or buy certain tools? How do you choose the best vendors?

Podcasts about SaaS and Startups

• Startups for the Rest of Us

  The podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product or are just thinking about it.

• Indiehackers Podcast

  Raw conversations with the founders behind profitable online businesses. Hosted by Courtland Allen.

• The SaaS Podcast

  The SaaS Podcast is focused on helping early stage founders and entrepreneurs to build, launch and grow their SaaS business.

• Build Your SaaS

  What does it take to build a SaaS application today? Jon and Justin share their experience bootstrapping Transistor.fm from scratch.

• Ramp

  Ramp is the SaaS analytics podcast that explores the stories of how people use data to transform and rapidly grow their business.

• The Startup Chat

  Unfiltered insights and actionable advice straight from the trenches of startup and business life from serial entrepreneurs who have founded multi-million dollar SaaS startups.

• Bootstrapped Digest

  A transparent account of bootstrapping an insurance business as a solo founder.

Communities for Software Startup Founders

• Bootstrapped.fm

  Forums for independent software companies to share and discuss trials and tribulations.

• Indie Hackers

  Real stories, advice, and revenue numbers from the founders of profitable businesses

• Microconf

  The world’s biggest conference for the world’s smallest self-funded software companies.

• Hacker News

  A link-aggregation and discussion site for all things relevant to founders and hackers.

• Barnacles

  Barnacles is a link-aggregation site for small, self-funded businesses that define success on their own terms.

• Lobsters

  Lobsters is a computing-focused community centered around link aggregation and discussion. It requires posts to be tagged so taht it’s easier to filter the links based on your interests.

• Y Combinator Startup School

  Learn how to start a startup with YC’s free 10-week online course.

Books for Software Startup Founders

• Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

  Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley wisdom leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love.

  
• Traction by Gabriel Weinberg How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

  Traction organizes and explains nineteen channels you can use to build and grow a customer base and how to evaluate them to choose the right channels for your business. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each channel, you can more strategically test and evluate their potential for your specific business needs.

  
• Startup Life by Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur

  Real life insights on what it takes to make it in a relationship with an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are always on the go, looking for the next startup challenge. And while they lead very intensely rewarding lives, time is always short and relationships are often long-distant and stressed because of extended periods apart. Coping with these, and other obstacles, are critical if an entrepreneur and their partner intend on staying together—and staying happy.

  
• Hello Web Books by Tracy Osborn

  Tracy Osborn has created a collection of books and video courses to help you understand the design and development side of creating web applications. Design shortcuts and fundamentals aimed for programmers, developers, marketers, and non-designers. Learn just enough design to be dangerous.

  
• The Single Founder Handbook by Mike Taber A step-by-step guide for bootstrapped software entrepreneurs.

  The Single Founder Handbook provides a roadmap for minimizing the risks involved in building a business by leveraging your knowledge of software development and learning from the mistakes that are common across many bootstrapped entrepreneurs.

  
• Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling A developer's guide to launching a startup.

  Start Small, Stay Small focuses on practical, step-by-step instructions used by hundreds of developers on the road to launching their startups. Whether you have a product idea or are still looking, this book takes you through the process of finding an idea, testing it, converting visitors to buyers, and attaining profitability as quickly as possible.