Ask HN: Would a SaaS tool to handle webhook delivery be useful? It seems like delivering webhooks to customer endpoints, handling retries, logs and failures is a common problem every app needs to solve. Would you find an ultra low cost SaaS option that handles URL registration, delivery, logs and retries for you useful? |
Only coders with no time to spend will want to use that... and they will feel bad because they haven't code the stuff and probably they would be able to code it.
If you want to sell to coders, make libraries and sell support and services around (think about Cucumber, or Sidekiq for instance).
For other kind of people, sell outcomes instead.
If you have a webhook that notifies you someone has unsubscribed from mailchimp, DO SELL that insights to a marketing company. Either as a SaaS or as a one-shot operation.
Outcomes sell much better than technologies.
In general, customers who want to pay $0 tend not to be good for business.
Good luck.
If you can sell them something in that range, they won't stop paying you (even if they don't use the service).
10 customers @$999 / month that don't make you work at all....
In terms of presentation for B2B, I think "high value" in the elevator pitch is better than "low cost." Low cost tends not to distinguish between value and price. And low price is a risk factor because low priced services tend to make the service provider less financially stable...and service provider stability is valuable for an enterprise.
In general, I agree with you but this particular statement can go both ways. If you only have 10 customers, losing 2 customers means losing 20% of your revenue which could be huge. Also, sometimes it may not be bad to sell something at $10/Month to a huge number of customers if the support needs are minimal. So it depends.
The downside: that’s reason not to offer webhooks at all (that “every app needs to solve” them is not accurate), and certainly not to put much effort into them - maybe not even enough to migrate to your product. That’s a low ceiling on the amount of value you can add.
The upside: prospective customers aren’t likely to seriously consider building an equivalent, so their choice is not offering them, offering them with relatively little visibility, or using your thing.
I think it's a fair point though that only a small percentage of customers actually use webhooks, so the value is further constrained by that.
I've seen bills coming for backup ISDN lines located in offices dismantled several years ago. Why? because the cost was small and it was already pre-aproved in the budget.
Only after a huge review we found out cases like this. But, that kind of reviews are unusual and expensive.
If you can afford to invoice a company and make them pay the bills for small quantities, you've got a business.
I do agree that low cost is a bad idea to start with, unless you can own all the market and start raising prices... BUT in that case you open easily the door to new competition and since your customers are price sensitive, you're asking them to churn as soon as possible.