Ever get sick of the 2,358 SaaS products it takes to run your freelance or startup business? I did. That's why I created Stablocks.
Hi 👋 I'm Morgan Spencer, Founder and Core Developer for Stablocks! I want to share the backstory of how Stablocks came to be, what it is trying to solve, and how it's going to do it.
The Why
Before Stablocks I had a side hustle doing freelance web development, mostly for local clients. Most of my time should have been spent working on the projects for clients, but I found (as most do) that there is a ton of other things to manage when running a business.
Activities like responding to client emails, managing finances for the business, trying to find new clients, invoicing, project management, and so much more. Plus, trying to plan for the future. Do I grow my business? How would I manage an employee or two? Do I need HR? How do I recruit employees? How do I manage inquiries and issues?
It can all become a lot to think about, especially for a team of one!
Solutions?
Naturally, I started looking for a solution for my problem and I found some. But here's what I found: we have micro-niched so far down to solutions for each individual problem that we forgot the bigger picture.
I found one software for invoicing and finances, another for project management, another for recruiting, and yet another for customer relationship management. And those were just half the problems I wanted to solve.
I was getting overwhelmed again just by the thought of managing all these separate systems.
Costs abound
And here's the other thing when it comes to individual services: each one has a subscription. Five dollars here, $15 there, and suddenly I'm spending hundreds to solve my problems while creating more headaches.
Freelancers and bootstrapped startups do not typically have the money to spend on business services like these. So why was there no affordable solution for this area?
What now?
I got fed up and naturally I wanted to find a way to fix this, not just for me, but for others in my situation. I set out with a purpose: freelancers, startups, and other small businesses should have an all-in-one solution to manage their business that doesn't break the bank.
The How
Easier said than done, right? I had my why, now I had to figure out how I was going to accomplish this.
Just the basics
I've heard many software products claim to be an all-in-one system, but usually it's an enterprise level product that costs thousands. I also knew while starting out as a development team that comprised of just me I would need to manage the amount of features that went into the final product, at least starting out.
I decided to identify the one or two core features of each sub-product (or module) and focus on those. Using the good old 80/20 rule: the 20% of the features that achieve 80% of the results.
Open-source
Open-source is a very polarizing topic
A truly free tier
Most SaaS products with a free tier have one of two caveats: either you don't get access to all features and have to pay to add them or you get a free trial that last for a couple weeks or a month after which you get charged.
Why are those the only options?
What I'm proposing with Stablocks is potentially a radical shift in how SaaS software does business. I see it as a modified (for the better) version of the WordPress model.
WordPress is an open-source project as well. Anyone can view the code and contribute to it. You can download it and host it yourself or you can pay to have WordPress, or a third-party provider, host it for you. That sounds great, but let's extend it one step further.
Self-hosting your own WordPress instance is free, except for the costs of hosting. Plus you have to manage everything if something goes wrong. Yikes, I guess free isn't really free!
I want Stablocks to be truly free and you only pay when your data becomes very large. How do we do this? Using the free tiers of other products! The free tier of Supabase's database infrastructure and hosted on Netlify's free option. Add-ons like connecting to finances use Plaid's free tier.
When the usage becomes more than the free tier of any of these products you can pay a small fee to upgrade to the next level. As of writing this, the cost of upgrading Netlify and Supabase to the next level would be $44 per month... combined! That's as much as some SaaS products that provide only one of the features.
Heck if you're growing to where you need to upgrade these underlying services, maybe you're ready for a bigger system that isn't Stablocks. And honestly, we would be happy to see you go! It means we did our job. We want you to outgrow us because it means we helped get you to be a more successful business!
Eventually, I want to make a hosted-by-us version of Stablocks in case you don't want to setup the structure yourself (but it's super easy to setup, just check out our docs). My main focus is one the free version and the paid option will come later.
It all just makes sense (and cents)!
Owning your data
The What
All of this became Stablocks.