We spent six months in beta testing our B2B SaaS platform, and last Tuesday, we finally launched out of beta with a massive marketing push. We were thrilled. By Thursday morning, we had onboarded 50 paying customers on our $99/month plan.
On Thursday afternoon, I was doing a routine review of our database logs and my heart stopped. I noticed that a change we made to our API authentication right before launch had accidentally bypassed our multi-tenant architecture. Essentially, if a user knew exactly how to format an API request, they could pull data from other companies' dashboards.
I felt sick to my stomach. This was a catastrophic privacy breach.
We immediately took the entire platform offline to patch the hole. For 6 hours, our site displayed a "Scheduled Maintenance" page while I sat in a cold sweat fixing the logic. We patched it, brought it back online, and then I had to do the hardest thing I've ever done as a founder: write an email to those 50 customers confessing the mistake.
I saw seven hours of video about AI income challenge. However, I bought VIP ticket but the content was available for all viewers.
There was only 5-10 testimonies which were shown again and again to increase FOMO. Finally, i understood that tactics as EARN WITH FOMO AND PRESSURE SALES ENVIRONMENT.
I don t know I was wrong or right. What should I do should I buy or not ?
Any other suggestions
I have created a lot of accounts on many different payment gateways including lemonsqueeay, paypal etc. Now I realize, it was just a waste of giving information to those companies as I do not use them at all. Paypal even suspended my account permanently. I came across this platform called dodopayments, and it wasn't very strict on completing kyc for accepting your first dollar. I know that it will not let me withdraw money unless kyc is done. I was very confused as to what everyone does regarding this? What do you do commonly with these payment gateways?
I m a technical founder. I can build a product, fix a database, and debug an API in my sleep. But sales? I hate it.
We needed revenue, so I decided to try cold emailing. I bought a list of 2,000 leads from a B2B database, wrote a 4-paragraph email explaining our features, and set up a sequence to send them out from our main company domain. I figured if I hit enough inboxes, someone would eventually buy.
I was wrong. Here is the exact result after 30 days:
2,000 emails sent.
3 replies (two of which were "unsubscribe," and one was an angry person telling me to stop spamming).
0 demos booked.
And the worst part: Our main domain got flagged by Google, so now all my transactional emails (password resets, receipts) are going to spam.
A few months ago, we were in talks with a mid-sized company for a $500/month contract. Their team was swamped, so they asked if we could extend our standard 14-day trial to 30 days. Wanting to close the deal, I said yes.
A month later, they still hadn't onboarded their team, and asked for another 30 days. I agreed again because the deal was "so close."
By the time the 60-day trial ended, we had spent over 15 hours in support calls helping them set up, built two custom CSV imports for them, and basically acted as their dedicated onboarding team for free.
When the trial finally expired, the VP told me they decided not to move forward. His reasoning was baffling: "Because you kept extending the trial, it felt like there was no urgency to actually roll it out to the team. We just kept putting it on the back burner."
There was a lot of talk in 2023 and 2024 about startups using a one-time payment model, but earlier this year, I started to see founders going back to subscriptions. What do you think?
Every bug report, logged. Date, user, severity, what broke.
The pattern was not what I expected. Half of them were not bugs at all. They were confusion. People using the product in a way that made sense to them, hitting a wall, and reporting it as broken.
