Suggestions
Alexandru Dodon
roastmysaasproduct.com | Founder @ Starlab Zone, Market-Ready Features For Your SaaS at 10x Speed
Alexandru Dodon is a writer and contributor at The SaaS Maker, where he focuses on building, buying, growing, and selling SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses. His work emphasizes practical strategies for entrepreneurs looking to succeed in the SaaS industry. Dodon is also involved in growth marketing, helping founders validate their ideas and develop minimum viable products (MVPs) efficiently. He has experience in acquiring users and scaling businesses, having helped clients achieve significant growth within short timeframes.145
In addition to his writing, Dodon has a background as a freelancer, reportedly earning over $1 million and now aims to grow his software studio to seven figures while continuing to build SaaS products.56 His insights often draw from firsthand experiences in the tech sector, particularly around product-led growth (PLG) strategies.23
Highlights
EDIT: Reached out to support on Twitter, they escalated for a manual review, and confirmed my account!
Now it's my turn to get impacted by Stripe :(
Just opened an account for WorkSwift as I'm getting ready to paywall it, provided information about the SaaS (hybrid between project management and CRM for freelancers), and they said it falls under "Restricted Businesses."
So the solution is to close down this account.
I haven't even started processing anything, but I don't really understand how a project management SaaS can be a "Restricted Business" 😅
Can someone help?
I've never had this kind of issue when integrating Stripe for our clients 🤔
#stripe
July 2024 Profit & Loss Report for Starlab Zone
Sharing these monthly statements for 2 reasons:
-
Full transparency in what it takes to build a software dev studio.
-
Easy and thorough documentation of our progress.
Context:
- Main focus was on serving existing clients to increase their LTVs
- Providing a WOW experience even at the expense of extra revenue
- Last 2 weeks of the month I was mostly focused on finding a long-term place in Dubai Marina, viewing apartments, dealing with the contract process, and moving to the new place (posted about it a few days ago)
- My time is not included as an expense in these calculations, so the margin will drop once I replace myself
Income:
- Product Engineering: $10,125
- Roast My SaaS: $1,125 (10 at 50% off during my promo; 2 at 25% off; 1 at full price)
- WorkSwift: $0 (pre-revenue) Total: $11,250
Expenses:
- Stripe Fees: $515.43 (~4.6%)
- UX Engineer Freelancer: $2,800
- QA Engineer Freelancer: $750
- WorkSwift Hosting: $60
- Loom: $15
- Google Workspace: $21.6 (downgraded from last month)
- QuickBooks: $30
- DocuSign: $15
- Twitter: $0 (canceled because of Musk's latest behavior) Total: $4,207.03
Profit: $7,042.97 Margin: 62.6%
Year-to-date revenue: $106,577.14
July was hovering at around 40% of the current capacity between the 3 of us, but I'm not looking to scale the team until we get between 70-80%.
I want to avoid the mistakes I did in the past when I hired people really fast and accepted every client that reached out. It ended very poorly where I had to reimburse my team out of pocket, but that's a story for another time.
We haven't released our subscription method yet and we still don't have a website.
I published several teardowns of SaaS products and that, along with a limited-time promo I ran (50% discount), brought a few sales, but I haven't plugged our main offer since all were technical founders that don't need help with product engineering.
Plan for August:
-
Keep on providing an amazing experience for our existing clients, so they NEVER stop working with us for reasons other than "I'm shutting down my business" 😅
-
Publish 3 teardowns a week on Roast My SaaS YouTube channel.
-
Come up with a complete value ladder for Starlab while focusing our Done-For-You offer only on continuous product engineering for SaaS businesses that have gone through the initial validation.
-
Publish a ton of free content around finding profitable SaaS ideas, validating them, product strategy, building MVPs (no-code, yes-code, hiring freelancers), improving onboarding, etc. to get founders to a point when it makes sense to work with my team at Starlab.
-
Launch a 90-day educational program under the WorkSwift brand to raise money for the SaaS product we're building.
August is going to be a very busy month.
But now that I've got a long-term place to stay here in Dubai, I'm very excited for it!
So follow me if you're curious about what's next.
#buildinpublic
