Good feedback. I agree with your first point. I think that outside of Silicon Valley we actually have a crisis of lack of access to early-stage capital for entrepreneurs (and hence the multi-decade decline in new business starts).
There are a lot of both underserved and underrepresented entrepreneurs right now and and it's a real challenge to define the area of focus.
Point is well taken about not just writing a check. I don't get into it in this specific post because the pitch is basically Typical Earnest + a focus on underrep'd founders. But Typical Earnest already includes a community, shared resources, and access to an awesome group of mentors: https://earnestcapital.com/about/
Hello Hacker News, looking for feedback on how we could expand our "funding for bootstrappers" model to better serve underrepresented founders. Suggestions, comments, critiques, all very much welcome here. Thanks.
The merchants needs to have a copy of the Google Maps API on their site and need to follow Google's terms of service in that regard. If they have a ton of traffic they may need to pay for a license.
Not including my time, a few hundred dollars a month for servers and other services (like intercom.io). Gross margin is over 90% which is probably typical for micro-SaaS.
Yes, it's an annual subscription the renews each year. Most of the time with SaaS annual billing you are pre-paying for the full year, so if you cancel you don't get a pro-rated refund. Customers are ok with that as long as you're clear about it.
Generally speaking have you had many customers asking for refunds (monthly or annually?). Currently in my product, the monthly charge is about ~200. But I'm thinking of doing a yearly option of a $1,000/year. Any advice on something that high of a price point?
If I were paying ~2400/yr and was given the option of ~1000/yr, I would think I've been grossly overpaying for the monthly option. In your shoes I would offer one month free for 2200/yr rather than 7 months free.
It's a great point. I struggled with how explicit to be about this. E.g. - do you email all the early adopters and tell them how lucky they are they are on a lower plan? Does that comes across as too sleezy? How do you translate this into NEW users? Do you put above the "sign up" button "Buy now before prices increase!"?
Maybe it could be added to the monthly receipts, showing the current price for new users minus their "discount"...
First, you could send an email to existing customers telling them that you are raising prices but that you are grandfathering them in and their rate won't change. Danger here is that you then go on record and may never want/be able to raise prices without losing them. YMMV.
Second, change their monthly invoices to show that they WOULD be charged a higher rate if they weren't grandfathered in. Loyalty discount. If you don't want to show a discount on the invoice, just rename their pricing tier to "Loyal Customer - Pro Edition" (or whatever). This lets you do it stealth and leaves options open for price changes in the future.
>> First, you could send an email to existing customers telling them that you are raising prices but that you are grandfathering them in and their rate won't change.
This is the approach I took, but worded similar to how cable companies word their advertising - that the discount is only valid for x amount of months. After that period, they could be subject to a "change" in price. The wording is left vague so you don't say there will be an increase, simply that the rate could change after their discount expires.
This was usually after a 12-24 month period. After two years of discounts, I finally increased the monthly fee, but only by about 8% which still left them paying less than new customers - which is an important point. Yes, they're paying more than they did, but it's still less than new subscribers, giving them the impression they're still paying less - when in reality, I'm just making back the discount I was giving them.
