Everything else

Everything
Else
Rachel Andrew | Slides @ bit.ly/rachel-ltvconf | Tweet! #LTVconf @rachelandrew

Remember when
you thought you
would spend all day
working on your
product?

I spend all day
working on my
product

Documentation, Support, VAT, Systems
Administration. Filling in bafﬂing forms
from HMRC Replying to the accountant
about those forms. Writing talks, giving
talks (like this one). Posting to Twitter.
Posting to Facebook. Building marketing
sites. Keeping up to date with the
industry ... just working on our product.

You are going to ﬁnd
yourself with new
things to do

You will completely
suck at some of
them

Bootstrapped
products grow
slowly

How to sell
a product

Digital Delivery
Make the sale
Deliver the download

SaaS delivery
Set up a subscription
Allow access to the product

Then it begins ...

Can I pay in USD?

I'm in the EU and
have a VAT number,
can you deduct the
VAT please?

How much tax is
due?

In my country we
don't like credit
cards. Can I pay a
different way?

My payment was
rejected, what now?

I want a refund!

Accounting

Stripe
In the UK, unless you have real
currency accounts will only pay
into a GBP account

PayPal
Keeps each currency in an
individual "pot"

Xero has saved my sanity
→ Create invoices in Xero via the API
→ Reconcile statements against that
→ Deals with multi-currency
→ Creates VAT returns, EC Sales lists,
MOSS reports

Hosting

Shared hosting is
generally terrible

Cheap hosting is
generally terrible

Your site is
Fast
Available
and ...

Where is data being
stored?

How is data being
backed up?

Downloading an SQL dump
every so often
is not a backup strategy.

Check you can open
your backup
archives!

Availability &
Uptime

What is your
disaster recovery
plan?

Use conﬁguration
management
software

Consider a host with
full managed
support

Digital
Assets

When do your
domain names
expire?

Who has access to
the social media
accounts?

When do the SSL
certiﬁcates expire?

Marketing

Not a natural ﬁt for
nerds

We have a tendency to get too
technical

No-one can
sell your product
the way you can

Don't build
it in house!

I want to build it
because otherwise I
pay the 3rd party
every month

I want to build it
because of insert
very speciﬁc
requirement here

It's part of our
competitive edge!

Do build it
in house!

What dependencies on
other businesses are you creating?

Stripe
Not just a Payment Provider ...

Stripe
→ subscriptions
→ payment forms
→ mobile payments
→ taxes
→ shipping

The API might not go
away. It might
instead become too
expensive

The service might
fail to support new
legislation

VAT MOSS
the thrilling
adventures of
VAT Girl.

3 months before
the deadline
No third party solution had anything
in place to help people comply.

You cannot rely on
getting much
warning of changes
in the law

You cannot rely on
your third party to
comply for you

"a user can ask for an explanation of an
algorithmic decision that was made
about them"
-- EU Regulations on algorithmic decision-
making

Should we step up online censorship

Who owns your
data?
Can you export that information
easily?

Own your data
Use webhooks or import to
maintain a copy of the data

Know your
dependencies

Invite the
chaos monkey
to tea

"Chaos Monkey is an open source
software tool for DevOps [...] The
software works by intentionally creating
different failures and tests the ability to
survive them."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Chaos_Monkey

Think of a service
you rely on

How quickly could
you move to
something else?

Does something
else even exist?

Would you lose any
data in the move?

As you grow keep
checking those
dependencies.

Look for
dependencies that
are built on top of
standards

→ Cloud Storage using OpenStack
→ Support systems built on top of your
regular mailbox
→ Mail providers using SMTP

Turns out
there is a
lot to do

You don't
need to be
an expert

But you
need to
show up

I trained as
a dancer.

Focus on
your
weakness

Understanding
makes it easier to
delegate when you
can

Learn to love the
everything else

Thank you!
@rachelandrew
http://bit.ly/rachel-ltvconf

Image credits (Flickr Creative Commons):
→ Aranami
→ Shawn O'Neil
→ Nathaniel_U
→ Aron Elal
→
→ Scott Schiller

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