Ask HN: Advice for a solo SaaS founder dealing with a customer?

2 points by anon7331 1 year ago | 9 comments
I am a solo founder/developer of a SaaS product. I have many customers (enterprise, small, medium, etc). I have never had this issue before now...

I have a customer that agreed to pay in N-days which is common for enterprise sales. However, this customer used our subscription/plan and refuses to pay (ghosting me at this point).

I believe the next step is writing a demand letter before officially bringing this to court. Does anyone have advice for a situation like this?

I have spoken to lawyers and they don't want to help (not quite enough cash for them to care, but a bit too much for small claims court as well...).

  • bob1029 1 year ago
    My initial gut reaction is to not chase this one unless the amount of money is going to make/break your business. The amount of time & mental energy required to chase things like this can almost immediately overtake the original loss. Just do a simple calculation: Your hourly consulting rate X total hours spent dealing with this bullshit = The additional cost this asshole customer has incurred so far.

    My red line for a 1-10mm USD business would be 25-50k USD. I would seek recovery at that threshold, and only if I had skin in the game (aka some substantial marginal cost per customer). If I got screwed out of "here's my enterprise pricing menu and here's some demo API access to the sandbox DB instance", I would not be so upset. However, if I got screwed out of hundreds of hours of deep consulting work, I would almost certainly lawyer up.

    • anon7331 1 year ago
      I understand-- what about the use of a debt collector? Wouldn't it be better to settle for N, where N is greater than 0? Especially if the collector does all of the work/time investment?
    • t312227 1 year ago
      if the amount of money you are talking of is not "world-shaking" for you:

      just get over it!!

      it makes no sense to go to court / take legal actions - its just not worth your money and time.

      write it off as "premium of apprenticeship" or whatever it is called in english - in german we say "lehrgeld" -, if you lose money due to your own mistakes but got an opportunity to learn something.

      idk ... write them a formal letter, announcing you are deleting their accounts / accesses / data in 2 or 3 months if they do not pay until n days in the future and move on!!

      in the end: large companies have more money, can afford them better lawyers than you - if they are for example a financial-institution, maybe they even have their own business-unit filled with lawyers, who don't have anything else to do than to fight your claims and they are already on the companies payroll...

      just my 0.02€

      • anon7331 1 year ago
        I can somewhat understand the idea... but I don't see this as my mistake. A person agreed to pay for something. They signed an agreement. The payment terms were specified (N-30). The person used the product but decided not to pay.

        Not sure what I can learn here, besides not allowing an enterprise access even if they have agreed to terms and signed the agreement... but that is not common. As far as I am aware, it's common to give an enterprise access as soon as the agreements have been signed.

      • kjs3 1 year ago
        bit too much for small claims court as well

        Disable/delete their account, make a note to never deal with them again and move on. If it's too small for small claims, it's too small to waste time on.

        • anon7331 1 year ago
          The debt is too much for small claims court, not too little.
          • kjs3 1 year ago
            Ack. Misread. My bad.

            Still...fire that client hard.

        • accrual 1 year ago
          Can you just drop/ban/block them?
          • anon7331 1 year ago
            This has been done, but they already used all of the plan that was agreed upon.