There’s this tricky part to making a SaaS that making the SaaS is the tiniest part of it.
I made this simple service – after setting up an SMS template, you can queue SMS messages to send to people. It’s simple and powerful, and is intended to drive customers to re-engage your service provider in an intervals time.
Examples:
- Ordering flowers the next year
- Reminder to book car in for service after 3 months
- Getting house pest sprayed
- (A hundred things like that).
I think it might end up as a Xero plugin, just bolted up to outgoing invoices. I finished working on the app to a reasonable level probably a week ago, and have since been setting up the ancillary pieces an hour at a time. There’s so much.
Buy domain, deployments, set up email, create ~15 pages, create a blog & structure, create documentation infra, create a status page, create a contact form. It’s all fiddly shit that would just be plugins in WordPress.
The intention is that after creating these once, the SaaS can again be the focus later and I don’t have to work on all these junk pages, I can just fetch from the templates. So it’s a bit of pain now to hopefully get back to where we need to be later.
The app is hosted at https://www.getrecustom.com. It allows creating an account, defining templates, and creating scheduled SMS messages against those templates. Recustom should be useful for set and forget decrease of customer churn.
I’m slowly working through the pages to be added still. I’m not betting the farm that SMS notifications is the one way to go. It’s a minimum viable SaaS – some guy somewhere might pay for it. Once I’m finished working on this, I should be able to pay the annual domain renewal, throw up the odd blog post, and hopefully forget it exists. And.. Delete this post.