{"id":9358,"date":"2016-02-21T09:52:37","date_gmt":"2016-02-21T14:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/?p=9358"},"modified":"2024-11-12T17:38:28","modified_gmt":"2024-11-12T22:38:28","slug":"from-a-side-project-to-business-overnight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/from-a-side-project-to-business-overnight\/","title":{"rendered":"Crossing the tipping point on a dare"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was just another reluctant SaaS business in beta that didn’t know if customers were willing to pay for my referral software. \u00a0On practically a dare, that all changed overnight.<\/p>\n

Free \/ Non-Charging Beta<\/h2>\n

During our Referral Rock’s beta program. \u00a0I had customers using the software for free. \u00a0They were setting up programs and having their customers refer their friends and I was feeling pretty good about myself. \u00a0At this time I had other sources of income and was not working full time on Referral Rock, so there wasn’t a concern that it wasn’t making any money.<\/p>\n

I was chatting with a longtime startup friend of mine (Alex Black) with great excitement about everything I had done with Referral Rock, and he burst my bubble by mentioning this wasn’t a business unless I charged people.<\/p>\n

It didn’t feel ready and I had my doubts. \u00a0The typical doubts where I felt the software wasn’t ready or the software didn’t deliver enough value or generate enough referrals for my customers.<\/p>\n

In hindsight I didn’t HAVE customers because no one was paying. \u00a0Also as long as I wasn’t charging, I was in my own bubble of thinking I had a success since people were using the software and generating some referrals. \u00a0In reality, I hadn’t proven as much as I thought.<\/p>\n

The Overnight Challenge<\/h2>\n

I recalled Alex challenging me to do it overnight (he says he doesn’t remember that moment…) but\u00a0I’ll be honest, part of the reluctance was the dev work involved. \u00a0In the past I’ve implemented stripe and it took at least a week of development to get all the hooks into the database, webhooks and user interfaces. \u00a0 In a past life I’ve even done good ole “Authorize.net”. \u00a0Even will the past experience implementing payment systems, I was not excited about doing it.<\/p>\n

So I started it all with a challenge of a code sprint and test my resourcefulness. \u00a0How could I implement payments overnight? \u00a0I could use other tools but given they won’t be too cost prohibitive. That’s where services like Stripe<\/a> have changed the game.\u00a0 Since they were well setup for recurring payments, they had just about everything I needed to charge for my referral software.<\/p>\n

Within an hour I had payment forms and plans hooked up to Stripe, along with all my preferences. \u00a0Now I could have stopped there and handled the rest manually with each paying customer, but I was able to write a simple call to their API to check if an account was in good standing. \u00a0So that handled validating a paying account and managing a cancel. \u00a0CHECK and CHECK.<\/p>\n

I also wanted to be able to easily change plans and pricing\u2026 so I use the form URL as settings in config files in my app. \u00a0So I could easily change it and even send people links to a custom plan.<\/p>\n

So setting that all up practically happened overnight and I was happy to see if this referral software had wings.<\/p>\n

Did Customers Pay?<\/h2>\n

So with that, all new signups were now required to pay to make programs active\/live. \u00a0Within 2 days I had my first paying customer. \u00a0Two days later, another! Then it took a lot longer for the next one but I eventually found a middle ground and gave customers a 14 day free trial.<\/p>\n

8 months later we had over 80 paying customers.<\/p>\n

Always left wondering<\/h2>\n

There have been a few times I’ve gone back to think about it. Little moments like this.<\/p>\n

    \n
  • What if Alex didn’t challenge me and give me that nudge?<\/li>\n
  • What if I didn’t get a paying customer in the first two days?\u00a0 (BTW thanks “Raluchukwu Ozoemenam”)<\/li>\n
  • What if two more months went by without a sale?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    I’ll never know what I would have done in those cases but I’m thankful they happened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    (June 2015) Just another reluctant SaaS business in beta that didn’t know if customers were willing to pay. \u00a0On practically a dare, that all changed overnight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2591],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-under-the-rock"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"Josh Ho","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9358"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38220,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9358\/revisions\/38220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}