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by paxys 2004 days ago
SavvyCal looks interesting, but for a "lean operation" can you really justify paying $12 per month per user for a service to schedule meetings? All of GSuite starts at $6/mo, and already does this.
5 comments

Heard this one before.

"Netflix is $10/m, so why would I buy Mailbrew (the product we make) for the same price?"

Apparently hundreds of people are happy to pay for quality indie software that solves their problems. We are among them.

"Netflix is $10/m, so why would I buy Mailbrew"

No, that's not the argument being made though.

The argument is 'why is a team of 3 paying 3x$10 to 'schedule meetings'. There's only 3 people, i.e. a reasonable questioning of the value being made.

Honestly, $10 is not that much, but why on earth would it be needed is a fair question.

That's not really the argument either.

If you cost $100/hour, it only takes 6 minutes of saved time per month to pay back for it. Plus lost opportunity if a potential customer doesn't schedule the call with you. Reducing the friction to talk to customers is pretty big in my books.

The question is if the value you get out of the service is higher than what you pay for.

Depends how confident you are of the cash flow.

100/h is noce. It is so much nocer if it is going for a year, decade.

If you are worth $100/h but are not getting paid - that is you have cash flow problems, then these are a lot of SaaS to be paying for.

That is a oversimplification but it is (almost) all about cash flow in a small business just getting going

I've been Calendly user for a while, which addresses the same niche. It doesn't replace scheduling with your internal peers. What it does is enable scheduling with people outside your company without doing any multi-stage dance of listing potential times and getting confirmation, sending out an invite, rescheduling because the even though you clearly stated it, the recipient didn't account for the timezone, dealing with schedule changes and more. My primary use case is coordination with interview candidates, vendors, and customers. A service like this replaces an executive assistant (at least the scheduling part) rather than gsuite.
They might be scheduling meeting with clients?
Netflix doesn’t offer the features of mailbrew and more?
Thank you. I felt like I was the only one confused by the comparison.
You really can’t say if they can justify it or not. Only they can. If I can save 15 minutes per day, that would more than pay for $12/month. Time is your most valuable asset.
If you are a 3-person SaaS startup and your team is spending 15+ minutes a day just scheduling meetings among themselves, and need additional software just to manage that process, I'd say that's a problem in itself.
If that's internal meetings, absolutely, that's an issue. But I think a company that size that's trying to iterate on their offering should be booking a lot of meetings to talk with customers and potential customers, and that could easily take 15 mins a day in my experience.
Someone said this in a comment above, but in a 3-person SaaS, everyone works sales. It's likely they're scheduling a huge number of meetings with external folks.
The tool in question is (mainly) for scheduling meetings with third parties.
I have 0 meetings with anyone that works with me. We’ve essentially eliminated all internal meetings. At least scheduled recurring ones.

I do, however, have roughly 10 meetings per week. These are with potential clients, existing clients (for feedback), external consultants (legal), investors, etc.

We are a startup, and as such, we all wear 10 different hats. Which means doing sales, admin, business, etc.

Pedantically: Time is not your most valuable asset.

Time is a flow not a stock. It is only worth what you get paid for it.

> made by a solo indie developer that we're happy to support.

That would be a good reason to pay well for a nice product imo.

Easily. It's about reducing the barrier to entry when someone wants to look at your demo. Every extra scheduling email you send is a chance to lose someone in the funnel. $6 extra a month? Irrelevant. Product probably underpriced because the guy can't demonstrate how many calls he's saving them.
Right. $27/month per user for email filtering and meeting scheduling seems absolutely crazy. While I applied the idea of supporting other small startups, lots of the items in this list seem frivolous!
> $27/month per user

How does this even matter from a budget perspective? You are already paying probably in the $10-20k / month range for per-employee salary.

Seems a lot like complaining about a dripping faucet while you have a water main break.

> You are already paying probably in the $10-20k / month range for per-employee salary.

If you're in the west coast US. This company appears to be italian, so the reality is more like €3k/month, and as they're a startup it might be even less. The other option is looking at it that they're spending 10% of their recurring revenue on SAAS products, which as a 3 person team seems crazy.

Because you can only play the "this is trivial compared to the employee's salary" card so many times before the numbers add up to a nontrivial sum.