(2018-01-23) Hillman Richard Had Built Over A Dozen Apps What Was Different About Stunning

Richard had built over a dozen apps. What was different about Stunning? His SaaS Stunning has recovered an impressive $1.7 Billion+ (yes, with a B!) in recurring revenue (ARR) for his customers. And that’s what matters.

Stunning wasn’t Richard’s first launch. He’d launched before, with mixed (and mostly disappointing) results

I launched my first app in 2006, when Ruby on Rails was just starting to take off. It was targeted at a bunch of problems in the restaurant space that still exist, and which will always exist

there was a huge missing piece: none of the people who I was trying to sell it to cared one bit about solving those problems (or even considered them problems to start with). (compelling)

Like many people, I was trying to come up with good ideas that could potentially probably maybe one day make money.

In 30x500 I learned how to identify real problems, and that there is a market of people who are willing to pay for those problems to be solved. I just had to work on products that solve them

I have a lot more confidence in my business because I know that if I start with Sales Safari and follow the system, I can be confident that people will want what I’m building before I write one line of code

I was researching people who owned and ran SaaS apps. Since Stripe.com was so new at the time, I was finding that people with more mature SaaS apps were switching to Stripe and realizing that some things were missing that they needed on day 1, such as receipts and dunning emails.

I had the realization that I could make a product out of the dunning code I’d already written for Are My Sites Up! I just needed to extract that code and make it usable for anyone’s app.

It looked like newer apps didn’t even know what dunning was, much less that it was a problem. And even if they did know, failed payments weren’t really become a problem worth automating until they got to a certain scale.

the first version of Stunning was even more bare-bones than I remembered. It literally just sent dunning emails. You signed up, connected to your Stripe account, edited the email templates. That was it! You could be saving customers within 10 minutes, because we provide default email content for every type of email that we send.