[frankdilo]

That's not the whole list. We spend around $500/month if we include everything.

We used to host our own stuff to spend less, like having our own Mailtrain instance instead of paying for an email marketing solution.

But if you do too much of that, you'll find yourself spending a lot of your time doing sys admin stuff, instead of working on your product. This can kill you, especially at an early stage.

As we scale our[1] revenues (currently at $5k MRR), that $500/m cost will become a lower and lower percentage and be almost negligible.

[1]: https://mailbrew.com

[maccard]

Maybe it's worth waiting until you've scaled your revenue before committing to those outgoings? As someone else mentionrd, 10% of that is for scheduling meetings, with a team of 3!

[zwayhowder]

If you have a lot of meetings with external parties (it's not about scheduling between the 3 internal) a good calendar scheduling tool is worth it in my opinion. When I was a sales engineer at a software startup we probably spent 10-15 minutes per lead sorting calendar times out. Considering only 1 in 10 leads turn into sales this was 2.5-3 hours per converted lead.

By having a self service scheduling tool we already filter for the non serious people "I'm not wasting my time finding time in your calendar" and improve our lead quality while reducing the back and forth nonsense that no one enjoys.

[wolco2]

Might be offtopic but adding friction might seem like a good time balancing matrix but what you are doing is filtering not the worst leads but probably the easiest ones to convert. Those willing to go back and forth on time will build muscle memory and make a deal easier. The others are still cold.. they will take additional effort during the sales calls.

[aparsons]

You may also need to hire more people as you scale. With API-based billing, this is fine as you can still allocate a certain expected revenue per user as a cost. With head-based billing, what used to be a fixed cost now grows linearly, yearly, with headcount.