🗞 What's New: Diversify your payment gateways

Here's an underrated hack for founders:

• Diversify your payment gateways if you run multiple online businesses. Why? Payment processors sometimes ban people, often arbitrarily.
• SaaS boilerplates help your users get to market faster. Explain the ROI in terms of time, money, and energy saved.
• $6K MRR with very little paid marketing. Vika Loskutova leveraged speaking engagements, and her strengths as a writer, to grow Olympia.

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by Jay Tan

If you run multiple businesses online, it might be worth using multiple payment gateways!

Business boom

What is payment diversification? Say, for example, you run four businesses:

• Business A runs on PayPal.
• Business B runs on Stripe.
• Business C runs on 2Checkout.
• Business D runs on Paddle.

This is doubly important if you make money primarily from monthly subscriptions. Why? Because with SaaS subscriptions, if you lose your payment processor, you lose all your subscribers.

Your MRR starts from $0 again, and there's no migration process to save you.

Why bother?

Payment processors ban people, often arbitrarily, and it happens more often than you think. You can have a few friendly fraud disputes on record, and all of a sudden, your payment processor puts you on the ban list.

And yes, payment processors ban people (they blacklist your social security number), not accounts. This means that if you have five Stripe accounts, and only one has an elevated chargeback risk, all five will be banned at once.

Eliminate a single point of failure

If you make a living online, this is probably the most important thing to take care of if you want to build a robust, resilient, sustainable business.

You don't want to be in the same situation as a corporate employee, where you're beholden to just one person for your entire paycheck. You want multiple platforms to cut you a check every month. If one goes down, you have four others keeping you afloat.

Here's what you can do:

1. Set up redundancy: If you sell digital goods, list your products simultaneously on 2-3 different platforms. If one bans you for any reason, switch to another immediately. You'd be surprised how long it takes to get approved on a new payment gateway, and you don't want to have to wait to be paid in the meantime. Ideally, create custom domains for each product you sell, so you can redirect that URL to whatever platform you want, and swap them out if they ban you.

2. Use different payment gateways, even if you only have one business. For Zlappo, I use Stripe for subscriptions and AppSumo for LTDs. For Zylvie, I use Paddle for subscriptions, AppSumo for LTDs, and Stripe for commissions. So, not only do I diversify my revenue model, I also make sure that each revenue channel is handled by a different payment processor.

3. Use a subscriptions aggregator like Chargebee. I haven't personally used Chargebee, but I've only heard positive things. Basically, it acts as a load-balancer, spreading out your subscriptions across different payment gateways in the backend. So, instead of putting all your subscribers on Stripe or PayPal, it puts some of them on 2Checkout and Authorize as well. It's very unlikely that all your payment gateways will ban you at once.

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🏈 The five best Super Bowl ads, and the biggest flops.

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from the Trends.vc newsletter

Problem

Each SaaS has the same core functions, like notifications, payments, analytics, and user authentication.

Solution

SaaS boilerplates help you get to market faster. You can build core functionality in hours.

Players

SaaS boilerplates:

• SaaS Themes: Laravel SaaS boilerplate themes by Simon and Albfort.
• ShipFast: The NextJS boilerplate to build a SaaS, AI tool, or any web app by Marc Lou.
• Divjoy: SaaS codebase generator by Gabe Ragland.
• Gravity: Build a Node.js and React app at warp speed by Kyle Gawley.
• Launch Today: Production-ready boilerplate for startups by Paul Waweru.

How to build

• Build in public to get early feedback.

• Build a waiting list to gauge interest and get contact information.

• Pre-sell to validate demand and get early users.

• Piggyback on market trends by adding AI to your boilerplate.

How to grow

• Explain the ROI in terms of time, money, and energy saved by using your boilerplate.

• Share testimonials to build trust. Show that developers approve of your tech stack and functionality.

• Build a lead magnet to attract warm leads.

How to monetize

• Charge per project and per seat.

• Offer lifetime updates to boost perceived value.

Predictions

• We’ll see no-code SaaS boilerplates. Non-tech customers will build SaaS without code.

• SaaS boilerplate generators will help users get boilerplates on demand.

• We’ll see more open source SaaS boilerplates.

Haters

“It’s hard to keep the boilerplate up-to-date.”

This is another way to boost perceived value. Take the burden off customers to keep up with security patches, bug fixes, and best practices.

“I can make more money with software development services.”

While custom development services bring more money, SaaS boilerplates are digital products. They scale better than your time. You can offer both to get the best of both worlds.

“If I can build SaaS faster than competitors, why should I help them do the same?”

Others are turning their SaaS development expertise into boilerplates. People can buy from them and catch up with you. The difference is that you won’t get paid; others will.

Links

• Making $200K with a SaaS Boilerplate.
• Building a Report on SaaS Boilerplates.
• SaaS Boilerplates and Starter Kits.

Related reports

• Digital Products.
• Software Development Services.
• No-Code.

Become a Trends Pro Member to get the full report on SaaS Boilerplates, or get the next free Trends.vc report here.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

by Rob Hope

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips!

Implement smooth scroll in your long-scrolling landing page.

Clicking on a navigation pricing link and jumping straight to the pricing section can feel like a fast page load to your visitor.

Implementing smooth scroll will gracefully transport them to the relevant section, while reminding them about additional content. It can even prevent them from hitting the back button.

Subscribe to Rob's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

by Vika Loskutova

We started our bootstrap startup journey in May 2023: Olympia is a winning AI team for solo founders and small startups. We soft launched our beta with a waiting list, and started collecting emails from those interested in trying our product, tapping into our own social media networks and online communities.

The numbers

• MRR: $6K.
• Subscribers: 141.
• LTV: $343.
• Churn: 12%.

Beta launch

We asked family and friends (~30-40 people) to test our MVP and give feedback, leading us to implement changes to our software. Then, we sent private invites to our waitlist subscribers. Interacting closely with our early adopters allowed us to refine the product and gain first fans.

Adding Olympia to AI directories was a hit. After adding a listing to There's An AI For That, our waiting list skyrocketed by 5-10 pages of new email subscribers per day. At this point, we were actively sending private invites, and the number of customers was growing fast. We found our product-market fit pretty fast.

We also began posting on socials, and sending out a newsletter outlining our updates and plans. People loved it.

Hard launch

In September, we rolled out of beta and raised our prices. As a token of appreciation, we left the initial prices untouched for our early adopters.

At this point, we hired a customer support rep, improved our website, refined the product, implemented our marketing plan, and added new features. Futurepedia and There's An AI for That gave us good results, so we bought an ad on those platforms. We were invited to a couple of X Spaces to talk about AI and business, sponsored drinks and snacks at two events, and spoke at a couple of others.

My cofounder and I are both writers. We wrote articles on Medium, Indie Hackers, Entrepreneur, Hacker News, and HackerNoon. Previously, I ran my own PR agency, so I launched a PR campaign working on brand awareness in media. We also asked our clients to send us reviews, and added them to our website.

Our Product Hunt launch was pretty successful, and gave us a significant boost in traffic and sales. By the end of the year, we had more speaking gigs at events, and closed a cool partnership with a company well-known in the startup world. Networking and speaking at events have proven to be very beneficial for us.

We also tried targeted ads, but that was a fail.

What's next

Since the start of the new year, we've expanded our blog and newsletter. In one of our articles, we did a comprehensive comparison of Olympia to ChatGPT, and that one has brought the most engagement so far. I believe that adding real use cases of our product will further increase credibility and trust.

We do our sales calls ourselves, and it works pretty well. As CEO, I contact all customers scheduled to churn to see if there is something we can immediately fix to meet their needs, getting them to stay with us. Through this, I've recovered some of the churned revenue.

We started working on third-party integrations to make our AI team do more. Our team of three humans and 14 AI assistants is pretty creative! We came up with a banger idea on how to increase our revenue and boost sales, which I will definitely share soon.

There is a significant drop in the churn rate, and our customers' LTV increased a lot within the past few weeks. We will continue shipping new features and adding third-party integrations, creating partnerships with relevant businesses, speaking and networking at events, writing articles, and treating our customers like family.

We also plan to launch an online community, with monthly virtual and offline events. If you happen to be in Mexico City, reach out! I'll send you a free invite to our next offline event.

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by Tweetmaster Flex

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Jay Tan, Darko, Dru Riley, Rob Hope, and Vika Loskutova for contributing posts. —Channing