So I'm not very technical, I am very much so a noob when it comes to Saas, sure ive coded other things, data scrapers, bots, automations, many other things collecting dust in my dev drive...
But there was one idea on my mind that was close to my heart cause it was genuinely a massive problem for me.
I have a background in marketing and funny enough marketing other peoples products, apps, and one no-code Saas that got all the way up to $1.1 Million ARR at the time of me leaving the company because my boss was so hell bent on AI but not really giving me the budget for it since back then the tokens all got burnt on slop, literal slop until the paywal and I wasn't confident that paying for the tools would be any better especially since the models were fresh at the time but he was hell bent on it cause some guy made a lego video and for some reason lego videos worked so well with ai at the beginning and even now as Iran has shown us over and over again.
But I mention this because my same boss told me that it was annoying to pay me, literally, and at the time he was my biggest client as a contractor cause again I was a marketing contractor in a bootstrapped no code saas. It was annoying to pay me because I had and still have to use Paypal because thats the only international payment option available to me, I am not supported by stripe, wise, et cetera et cetera...
Not to mention I live in a poor country where the banks literally by the laws of our reserve bank, put very hard limits and very low forex amounts for online payments and you know... escaped the economy by learning how to make money online.
Moving on... I tried, I really tried, I looked at PayPals requirement and setup to make auto recurring subscriptions to me not to every other vender but to my account and it was too tedious even as a normal user. I looked at the API, I looked at the documentation and said HELL NO. No, just no, it was too scattered, too hard to follow that I didn't know where to start so I left it at that...
Anyway, long story short I ran into one of life's miserable misfortunes with my personal health and I blew all my cash on... trying to keep myself alive? I can't find a shorter more clearer way to say that....
I was gutted, I was out of work, I was broke, I was recovering from my ailment that really did put me in the emergency room... but I was depressed, I didn't know what to do and every late night I spent awake going through it all made me so angry... I was part of a marketing team that helped a boot strapped founder take his Saas to $1.1 Million ARR
That fact haunted me... and I'd catch myself mumbling that if I had a product of my own maybe I could make a million dollars too, maybe, so in my recovery time I just went through it, thought of my one unique problem:
Always chasing my clients for payments, every month, hunting them down, waiting, waiting, double texting, triple texting... Silence. I was always on edge, always anxious thinking about my bills and what I'd eat, I felt trapped honestly.
So I sucked it up, I opened PayPal again, I went through the documentation, I mocked up the front end and tried the backend even though the best I could do at the time was make front end only but through trial and error, so help from free tier ai to fill in what wasn't obvious to me and bug hunting like I was getting paid to do so... I finally have a working MVP
But that's the problem, I have a working app on my local machine and sandboxed PayPal.
I don't have adspend, I am kinda terrified to put it on free tier services and run into a paywall I know I can't pay when free users do their thing... you know what I'm talking about... vapour users, abusers of free tier, the headache guys, I've done enough freelance marketing and networking to have the horror stories of free users eating through budgets, and budget I do not have.
So I decided I should setup a landing page with a payment link into my paypal with a legally binding contract between my Saas and my user for a LIFE TIME DEAL
My thinking was that maybe I could raise some capital to get going and have some runway cause I know there are thousands of people like me who can only use PayPal to get that sweet sweet first world currency, LATAM, Asia, Eastern Europe, all of Africa because Stripe and other platforms don't support these regions without tedious work arounds like a cousin you think you can trust that's in the states or higher economic Europe.
Or even using an agency to setup an llc offshore is not a simple straight forward task at all...
So I made the app that makes using PayPal so much easier, setting recurring payments to your clients so you don't have to chase them ever again, setting up hard limit seat payments like in the case of webinars and ironically... Life Time Deals...
I made it for freelancers, agencies, coaches, consultants, every service professional servicing the same clients month after month, constantly chasing down the annoying ones that always seem to be busy or "forget"
I call it PingPay, cause that's all we ever want to hear... Ping, money arrived. No stress no hassle.
Low-key cause everybody on youtube flexes? Let me not paint it like that but like people do show their dashboards of recurring payments and I was always looking like damn... wish that could be me... wish I had access to financial rails like that... maybe I'd eat good too...
So that's where I'm at, I finally have an app, but posting in other reddit groups gets flagged as promotional and all the comments have to be rage bait I swear... or some unsolicited hate.
I've tried facebook groups... I'm yet to try linked in, I stopped myself from posting on product hunt cause I heard it's brutal if you're launching an app people can't access yet.
But whether I should press on wit my Life Time Deal strategy or use free tiers and hope somebody converts before the app freezes is where I'm stuck...
It's a hard spot I'm in and I don't expect you to believe me on that but I have a Saas app finally and all I'm asking for is some insight on what I could do...
Thanks in advance...🙏