Jay Smith, Dev Team lead for Salable
We’ve been working hard over the past 12 months to solve all the problems we had in running our SaaS business. This was everything from taking payment, paying our taxes, licensing our users, tracking sales, marketing and analytics through to building the core functionality of our apps.
We found that there are a bunch of great tools out there to help solve each piece of the SaaS puzzle; Stripe, Paddle and many others for taking payments, Hubspot, Salesforce for tracking customers, Segment and Google for analytics etc. The list goes on…but each tool needed us to sign-up, on-board, learn and understand its specific interface, implementation methods and functionality. This meant having to log into multiple dashboards, linking data up from one tool to another and many other pain points. And whilst each tool itself is very powerful and a great experience, running the SaaS product as a business was horrible — multiple tools just don’t join up properly.
When we had built multiple apps — each with their own use cases — sometimes Stripe was the payment processor of choice, sometimes it made sense to be Paddle. And then maybe some targeted marketing using Hubspot, other times we wanted a simple email newsletter using MailChimp. For each product our development team had to learn yet another API, another set of documentation and add more overhead, latency and code in our apps. The process for tracking sales was different in Stripe than to Paddle. We had some customers in Hubspot and others lived in a database which eventually made it to a central CRM. We needed lots of automation, scripts and jobs running to combine and make sense of the data in a consistent way.
We thought there must be a better way, a centralised tool for running everything SaaS. There wasn’t (that we could find.) So we built Salable.
Salable’s long term aim is to give app vendors, developers and business owners a one-stop-shop experience, tool and API to integrate into their apps and build upon. We offer many integrations with other tools, ensuring the data flows through Salable giving a consistent experience. We plan to give developers the tools and easy to use APIs to allow them to focus on delivering core production functionality without having to get slowed down implementing payment integrations, authentication, analytics, user accounts and more…everything needed to run a SaaS business.
It doesn’t matter if you have 2 apps; one taking payment using Stripe the other Paddle, the data looks and feels the same through Salable. The two apps can live next to each other in unison, so developers only need to learn a single consistent API. We do the heavy lifting to make taking payment easy.
As we add more integrations you’ll be able to slowly combine your entire SaaS business into a single place. Manage marketing campaigns, analytics, customers, sales and storefronts all within Salable. If you’re a larger product company or maybe an ecosystem, you’ll be able to build marketplaces for customers to find and use your apps. If you offer a developer ecosystem your developers will be able to list and sell their apps using your marketplace built on Salable.
We’re in very early stages and so far have Stripe and Paddle implemented, we’re expanding integration into other tools soon and focusing on our developer experience as we grow. We’d love you to test it out, or even just login and pretend you’re building an app. If you’re planning to build an app soon, or have an app which is currently free or you plan to add payment to it soon we’d love to hear from you.