Open Startup Report - October '24
Freelancing as a source of SaaS inspiration. Or why I got distracted
I’ve focussed on my freelancing the past two months. I added Stripe consulting to PriceWell’s website earlier in the year and it’s been a hit. I’ve had a steady stream of 30 minute calls booked with companies looking for help with their Stripe account setup, issues with Stripe payments or setup of Stripe Billing.
One of those calls turned into a freelance gig generating a custom report for a client. The client is in sports. They have information in their tournament system and the payment information in Stripe. The challenge was to marry the two and work out who had paid, who still owed money for the season and when to skip a payment because there wasn’t a match that week (for their weekly customers).
It’s a tricky task and I took it on with the hope of finding something that could be turned into a product. As with all client work, it’s dragged on as new requirements come out the further down the line we go. Luckily I quoted an hourly rate! Right now the client is happy with the report (which I deployed as a dashboard with a download option). But as of yet I think the problem is too niche to build a product out of.
Panning for gold
One theme that has come up during this freelance gig and from PriceWell support conversations is some kind of login system for their customers in Stripe. A lot of customers don’t have a database and are using Stripe as their source of truth. We have an email login system for sending them to the Customer Portal but they want to restrict access to content via a login that’s linked to the Stripe customer. Of course those customers aren’t aware there’s anything in Stripe with their email address, they just purchased a product on the Stripe checkout.
The question now is, do I build a full blown login system for Stripe customers? Like memberstack but without storing much additional info in our database, just using Stripe as the source of truth.
Another idea that came from a customer is gated content with support for organizations. Example: Allowing a company to buy a license for 10 users to access a course.
It would be self serve for the customer who would buy the license and then get access to a portal which lets them add their own users (up to the limit they paid for).
All of this is like panning for gold. I have had conversations where customers show interest in such features but never anything concrete like trying to pay me to build it faster etc. All this to say, I’m yet to come up with the Mother Lode. A younger version of me would have built these features already but wise old me is holding on for now.
Back to the patch with my pan…