Billing First Customer
In the spirit of building as little as possible before getting the first customer, I do not yet have a subscription page for my SaaS application.
What's the best way to bill my first SaaS customer when I don't have the subscription page set up in the app?
I'm thinking I should send them a quote with a link to a Stripe page to enter their payment information. Is this is a good idea? Anything else that works better? Sending an invoice wouldn't work because they haven't yet signed up for the service, right?
Been there... the short answer is "any way the customer can pay you".
I did manual Stripe invoices for my SaaS since I was planning to use Stripe for the service. Basically did everything manually internally to flag the account as active, and then when I got more formal billing, it all fell right into place.
My wife's consultancy, she just gets people to PayPal her.
Stripe's probably your best bet, but honestly any way you can remove the friction, even if it means taking Venmo or some esoteric service that the customer prefers, is going to be a win to get those first customers.
Since you're probably still going to be doing stuff manually, I can't imagine their lack of an account would matter too much, but depends on how you plan on doing stuff internally.
Thanks, this is helpful. Stripe seems to be the way to go.
As a follow up, I'm wondering about the mechanics of asking for payment when the customer hasn't yet decided that they want to buy.
I do have a live Stripe account. I just tried looking for a way to embed a link into a "quote" that I would send the customer. I don't see a way to do this. It looks like the only thing I can send is an invoice. I would prefer sending something that communicates, "hey, if you like my product, click here to sign up". The invoice is the closest option I see, but it communicates something a subtly different, "you owe me $X,000". I prefer not to signal this to the customer.
What's the circumstance that you'd be sending them an invoice w/o them committing to buy already?
In my early days on HolidayAPI.com I pivoted from free to premium and reached out to my most active free customers. Different circumstance obviously since I had people using the system and I needed them to convert.
I would imagine if you're actively talking to people, you'd just need to ask them if they want to upgrade and send them an invoice / some means to pay you.
Not sending an invoice, no, but like a quote showing how much it would cost. Something they would pass around in their hierarchy to get it approved by the person making the financial decision.
This is a high-ticket B2B service, that if I custom built it for them it would cost $XX,000, that they would hopefully see the value in "renting" as a SaaS service for $X,000 per month.
I actually did research on this a few weeks ago. I have a WP site, and also just wanted the easiest way to get a customer to enter CC details and run the transaction through stripe. I also wanted to have the ability to create recurring subscription payments .
I went with WP Full Stripe, which is fully functional, seems to work for thousands of others, and at $39/year is a very low cost investment that also has low switching costs: https://paymentsplugin.com/