FAQ

Who's behind this project?

The initial work on B2B SaaS Kit was done by the team at Fogbender, with Yaroslav Lapin (@JLarky on Twitter) leading development. We underestimated the effort roughly by a factor of six! If you want to get in touch with us, send us an email to hello@fogbender.com.

Why does this project exist?

While working on Fogbender - which is a customer support system for companies whose customers are teams, not individuals - we realized that quite a few startups end up building B2B SaaS products without team management. This means all users at a customer organization share a login - like dev@company.ai - which is suboptimal for all sorts of reasons, one of which is rendering products like Fogbender - where identities of users are very important - completely useless.

We also realized that B2B-focused services like ours, or Doppler for secrets management, or PropelAuth for authentication, face significant adoption challenges with startups that already have something working, even if it's later discovered that the alternatives are probably superior. Replacement costs are high even for a proof-of-concept stage product, let alone one that's established and growing.

Our thinking is that marketing an open-source template with a fully-built example might be not as soul-crushing as marketing a "user authentication service", or a "secrets management service", or a "customer support service". We built this toolkit to make it easier for day-zero B2B founders to discover B2B-focused services.

Who is this project for?

This project is aimed at seasoned or aspiring technical or semi-technical B2B SaaS founders who want to spend as little time and money as possible on things that aren't core to their business, while steering clear of PHP.

How come Prompts with Friends is an actual working app with payments enabled?

We thought that the only way to convince a B2B SaaS founder that a starter toolkit is real is to show how an actual, relatively complex app can be assembled in a matter of minutes. We wanted to avoid a scenario where the note-taking sample app seems to be working, but one must hire a full-stack developer for six months to implement billing.

Did you build this just to drive Fogbender signups?

Yes?

Why does it include so many services?

We've taken many trips down the "roll your own" road over the years, and we definitely appreciate the sentiment. However, we believe the B2B SaaS ecosystem has gotten to be mature enough where outsourcing all non-essential services to third parties is a winning strategy for founders without an infinite R&D budget.

Why does it include so few services?

The kit is missing important pieces, such as an error tracking service, a transactional email service, and a queue, off the top.

We plan on expanding the offering with additional options, as well as making it much easier to rip stuff out and swap in alternatives.