Startup marketing, billing, pricing, AI monetization by Arnon Shimoni
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The 5 stages of SaaS death
Last week, I met a founder who’d just lost a pretty big M deal to a 3-person startup with a half-finished product (I call these “3 Stanford grads in a trenchcoat”). He was annoyed they didn’t even have a basic dashboard or settings page. I think he wasn’t angry about losing the deal, but mostly…
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Pricing AI Proofs-of-Concept: free pilots will kill you
You know that sinking feeling when a “promising” proof of concept drags on for months, burns through your engineering resources, and ends with “we need more time to evaluate”? Yeah. That’s the PoC death spiral. And I’m seeing so many agentic companies falling into this trap as we help them monetize their agents at Paid.…
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🐙 The 14 pains of billing for AI agents
(Basically, why the octopus grew new tentacles for agentic billing) A while ago, I wrote about the 14 pains of building your own billing system – that was back when billing was “just” complicated. It got mentioned quite a bit around the internet, and ended up #2 on the front page of Hacker News which…
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How we built a mini podcasting studio for under $10,000
The podcast setup at Get Paid was upgraded, focusing on quality and budget-friendly equipment for both remote and in-person interviews. Key choices included the Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K G2 for video, Shure MV7+ microphones for audio, and an organized storage solution. Comfort in the studio environment also significantly enhances interview quality.
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🤔🔍 B2C billing is actually harder than B2B billing
We all love a B2B SaaS ❤️. A few months ago I wrote about 14 reasons why building your own billing system (mostly for B2B SaaS) is hard. Here are 6 more so that we can round it up to a nice 20! While we all really do love a B2B, we often neglect to…
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🦑 The 14 pains of building your own billing system
Trying to cobble together your own billing system is like wrestling an octopus that’s armed with tax codes and invoices instead of tentacles. It’s a beast of complexity that can tangle up everything from customer support to compliance. I have 14 points on why it’s hard.
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You’re pricing your SaaS wrong but that’s probably OK
Previously, I wrote about how important it is to Design your pricing and tools so you can adapt them later – now I want to give a little bit more material on that… I’m going to assume that you’re some sort of SaaS founder, or perhaps even a product manager for pricing, growth, or monetisation.…
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Design your pricing and tools so you can adapt them later
In this blog post I’ll talk about three pricing architecture concepts that I think are really important in modern billing – designing pricing and packaging to be adaptable. I’ll build upon the experience our billing infrastructure team had at Pleo, which has allowed us to expand to new geographies, currencies, and adapt pricing very rapidly.…
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How we built a Cashback system with Stripe
Recently, at Pleo, we built a cashback system that uses our internal payments infrastructure, as well as Stripe. So while there are other components at play to actually move the money around, Stripe is what drives the cashback events for the most part. Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch, but it is doable! I’m…
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Printing to a POS-5890K thermal printer from a Raspberry Pi
For a small project, I wanted to print some graphic receipts from a Raspberry Pi. I bought the cheapest one I could find on Amazon, the POS-5890K. (I paid €43 on Amazon.de). It’s not a very high quality device, but the price was hard to argue with. However, printing to it was a bit more…