That said though, It was also free for me to get as part of the AppSumo deal. If I had paid $20 for it, I would probably have been disappointed — as I didn’t feel like there was that much there that I didn’t already pick up from reading through the MicroISV on a Shoestring archive. No one ever said the final price though, so for all I know it will go on sale for $5 — which is a level I would have been comfortable paying for the content.

Keep up the good work.

I have had my fair share of “tyre kickers” interested in “doing deals” that rarely amount to anything. It seems to go with the territory. Talk is cheap I suppose. So I prefer to concentrate my efforts on selling direct to customers.

You know, when I first added a business model to Mixergy, you were one of the few people who encouraged me to keep going and figure it out. I remember being on the phone with Kareem Mayan when I launched saying, “Nobody thinks I should do this.” And he said, “Not true. Check out what Patrick said on Hacker News.”

It kept me going.

The truth is the first membership program I launched had issues, but I kept going because of your encouragement. Today, while it’s not perfect, people love it and the revenue pays for help, which enables me to do a new interview every day.

Thank you Patrick.

Great read as always. I’m very curious about the progress on AR not just because it’s a great product, but because I can relate better than BCC (as it’s a SaaS product). I’m also very interested because you are a single founder doing things alone, and I feel that’s the way to go for me as well. I’ve started several projects with other founders (from 2 to 7) and it never worked out, however many people say you can only succeed with 2 or 3 founders. Could you please someday write about your views on single founder x multiple founders for micro ISVs / lifestyle businesses? I would love to hear what you think about it.

https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing

In case it’s useful, here are the features that Bill.com implemented that might be relevant for your situation:

First, you can create a free account that’s enrolled in Bill.com’s Accountant Program (http://www.bill.com/accountants/) that has an extended free trial (60 days versus 30). I did not avail myself of this extended free trial, and I did like the idea that a reseller gets superior benefits.

Second, once you have an Accountant Program account, Bill.com allows you to create “Client Companies”. When you log into your Accountant Program account, you go to a central Console where you see a hyperlinked list of your Client Companies. When you click a Client Company named (say) Acme Widgets, the top-right area shows you are logged in as So-and-So of Acme Widgets. You can also click a hyperlinked “Change Companies” link to go back to the Console and change your Client Company. It’s really awesome to not have to remember 10 separate username/passwords and constantly have to log in/out of the service. I can’t stress enough how awesome this feature is for a super-user reselling to multiple Client Companies.

Another great thing that Bill.com does is that you can set it up so that each Client Company can be directly billed for its service (you can also pay for them and then separately bill them a marked-up price). Moreover, the Client Company does not have to pay a per-user fee for “super user” users.

I should mention that, as a super-user who subscribes to a bunch of SaaS services, I’m totally OK using a SaaS product that has branding on it, i.e. it is not important to me that the SaaS product remove all branding with an actual “white label” product. Also, if the SaaS service requires me to contact them to be a super-user, I would likely not bother. I vastly prefer to just sign up for a service and see if it works. So I do think it’s important to offer a frictionless option to create a super-user level account (with a free trial) similar to how Bill.com does it.

I’m a big fan, feel free to email me directly if you have any questions!

Thanks for the post. It’s encouraging to know that even successful entrepreneurs have struggles.