3 builders who never spoke to each other

Fulfil the billing by hand before you build it

An admin checkbox, a payment processor product and an emailed invoice will carry your first subscribers, and one founder lost close to nine months building a billing backend he then threw away. Sell the paid feature before it exists and deliver it manually until the sales justify the work. Once volume forces it, the plumbing worth investing in is the mapping from entitlements to features, because that is what makes every later pricing experiment cheap.

The method

1. 01

   Before you can sell recurring plans you need accounts, so ship accounts first and sell them to users on their own merits, such as no waiting on email and a saved history of past work.

2. 02

   Fulfil the first subscription manually: an admin checkbox plus a Stripe product, plan and emailed invoice is enough, and you skip the whole billing build.

3. 03

   Sell the paid feature before it exists and deliver it by hand until the sales justify building it.

4. 04

   With no trial mechanism built, hand someone a trial by selling the monthly plan and refunding the charge.

5. 05

   Do not build your own billing. Buy a subscription billing service and spend the months on distribution instead.

What it returned

• $200

  Zue added user accounts and a single admin field in under fifty lines of code, roughly four hours of work, and let Stripe invoicing collect the $200.

• 30

  Gave one user 30 days free by asking them to subscribe monthly and refunding it afterwards, since MDX.one had no trial option.

• Zue added Place Card Me accounts with a page listing every set of cards a user had made, explicitly as the step before recurring plans.

• Zue's Chat Stats pro upgrade advertised a daily automatic refresh that was not built; he sold three of them and kept a morning calendar reminder to refresh each paying customer's chats manually

Sources

• July 2021: Retrospective & Income ReportBhanu Teja · bhanuteja.dev · What happened in July · undated
• AI is Eating my LifeCory Zue · coryzue.com · Pegasus · 2023-04-21
• Place Cards, Profits, and my 15 Minutes of Internet FameCory Zue · coryzue.com · Place Card Me · 2020-03-01
• Getting my First Subscription Revenue - in Five DaysCory Zue · coryzue.com · Days 4 & 5: Shipping with Duct Tape · 2020-01-16
• I'm finally going solo*Cory Zue · coryzue.com · Server-side configuration · 2021-07-02
• Doing the bull dance, feeling the flowCory Zue · coryzue.com · What’s up next? · 2018-04-23
• Growing a SaaS to $4k/month in a Highly Competitive MarketNick Sawinyh · failory.com · During the process of building & growing Seomator, which were the worst mistakes you committed? · undated