Build Your SaaS

This week, Jon and Justin are wrestling with some heavy startup founder topics:

• What should your SaaS company's gross margins be?
• How much is bandwidth going to cost us? How does it affect our margins?
• Example: [Account A] does 495,000 downloads in a month, average file size is 8 MB, that’s 3960 GB of bandwidth in a month. If bandwidth is $0.01 per GB, that’s $39.60 just for bandwidth for that one account. And that’s if we can get it that cheap. Otherwise, we’d pay $198 on AWS, or Azure. If we used Google Cloud it’d be $316.
• The burden of keeping our service up rests on Jon's shoulders. How can we reduce the risk?
• How can we increase platform resiliency, automation, and improve our internal customer service tools?

★ Thanks to our sponsors:

• Alitu.com: Alitu removes all the tech headaches associated with producing your podcast. They take care of processing, editing & publishing your podcast. Go to Alitu.com and check out their video demo.
• Podcastinsights.com: If you want to get into podcasting, check out Podcast Insights. They’re a great resource for folks who want to start and grow a podcast. Podcast equipment guides, how to make money. Join millions of readers learning all about how to start, grow, and monetize a podcast at podcastinsights.com.
• GetRewardful.com: Guess what? Affiliates is providing almost 30% of our revenue. Rewardful makes it easy for SaaS companies to start an affiliate program on Stripe.

Show notes:

• LeadEdge Capital: “Gross margins for SaaS typically range from 60% to more than 80%."
• Quora on SaaS gross margins.
• Most users don't realize how much bandwidth costs (Twitter)
• An explanation of bandwidth
• Is 1 GB equal to 1024 MB or 1000 MB?
• Z-cast closes up shop
• We're talking to someone at Cloudflare (tweet)
• Jamie's blog: Implementing Impersonation

You can reply to this podcast here:

• Leave a comment on Breaker, the podcast app for Android and iPhone.
• Leave a comment on CastBox, the podcast app for Android and iPhone.
• Otherwise, get us on Twitter: @transistorfm or email us: mail@transistor.fm
• Create your own podcast at transistor.fm

Thanks to our monthly supporters:

• Alitu.com
• Podcastinsights.com
• GetRewardful.com
• Darby Frey
• Samori Augusto
• Dave Young
• Brad from Canada
• Kevin Markham
• Sammy Schuckert
• Dan Ericson
• Mike Walker
• Adam DuVander
• Dave Giunta (JOOnta)

Want to start a podcast on Transistor? Justin has a special coupon for you: get 15% off your first year of hosting: transistor.fm/justin