benediktdeicke

Oh crap! What a horror story.

We recently migrated from Heroku Postgres to Crunchy Bridge and can totally recommend it. So maybe set up your new database there instead.

When my co-founder Jane and I started working on Userlist a couple years ago, we set out to build a better behavior based email tool for SaaS companies.

We wanted small to medium size SaaS founders (like us) to be able to send targeted emails to their ussrs based on their behavior. The right message at the right time instead of a stupid stream of irrelevant content.

After building the product on the side for quite a while, we launched in late 2019 with and allowed our customers track key usage metrics for their individual users.

However, we quickly realized that this doesn't cut it for most SaaS businesses (especially B2B). More often than not, a company account has many users of different roles, and in some cases a user can even be part of many companies.

It was a pain to manage these relationships in Userlist and almost all other email automation tools we looked at.

Today, this changed for Userlist, though. We just launched company account support in Userlist.

Our data model allows tracking users, companies, and relationships between them. You can model one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships and even track relationship properties (like the user's role in a company) or company events (like billing events).

Our automation campaigns allows you to send messages to users (or subsets of users) based on things that happen in the companies they're part of.

Ultimately, we hope this allows SaaS business to send less, but more relevant emails to their users.

Are you as excited about this as we are? We're looking forward to hear what you think about our solution to this problem.

- Benedikt & Jane

P.S. We've been looking for that "what makes you better than X" argument — and we hope we finally found it. Maybe that's how our small team can outperform VC-funded tools? Fingers crossed :D

That's a good idea. I'll experiment with that. Thanks!

I'd probably bill Metallica a lot more than that… ;)

I usually design directly in code without a CSS framework.

Yes, that's the UI I did.

My tip to improving your design skills: Try to replicate designs you like. Pick one and analyze every pixel (literally!) of it and try to build it yourself. The techniques you learn in the process make it easier to come up with a nice design of your own eventually.

It's a great exercise and helped me a lot in the past.

Even if you don't convert anyone from the mailing list, you're still better off than without it. You know that there is interest in your product and that there will be more people looking for a solution like yours. It's very unlikely that all potential customers ever will sign up to your mailing list long before your launch.

I'm happy to hear the article resonated with you :)

Thank a lot for your feedback on this!

Based on my past experience the storage limits are well over the actual needs. It usually only grows when bands have a lot of photos on their website. At the moment I'm implying that a band with a lot of photos has been around for quite some time and is probably also somewhat successful by then, so they'd have to choose a larger plan anyways (because of increased traffic).

Yearly plans is definitely a thing I'm going to add in the future. :)

Yeah, it is hard to understand. The regulations for VAT on SaaS products got insanely complicated a few months ago.

Thanks for the feedback, though! I'll try to rephrase it without losing the gist of it :)

Thanks for the feedback! I agree that the pricing isn't perfect, yet.

I'm currently segmenting by visitors/day as it seems to be the only way to separate bands into the different plans based on their popularity and success. It's also directly bound to the costs on my side (more traffic -> more server resources).

I'm happy to hear suggestions on how to make sure a band making tons of money doesn't end up on the smallest plan, as well as costs for infrastructure not bankrupting me. :)

The websites don't have a fixed structure. As a front-end developer/designer you're able to define templates with a set of elements (text, image, datetime, concerts, twitter integration, collection of other templates, …). The schema of the templates define the forms in the content management section of the CMS.

I hope this screenshot helps to clarify things a bit http://drif.tt/1KfpfoI :)

Yes :) I do some of the design on my own (like the UI), work with a designer (the marketing website) and my customers usually work with a designer for their website design.

Oh wow! My post made it on Hacker News!

Thanks so much for the nice comments. I'm glad my story inspired some of you :)

If you have specific questions about anything or would like some more details about any part of the story, please let me know. I'll happily answer them.