
Launch HN: Satchel (YC S18) – Guides to the Best SaaS Tools - Fission
Hey HN! I&#x27;m Andrew, one of the makers of Satchel. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com</a>). We write SaaS buying guides. We vigorously test products in different SaaS categories, write reports about our findings, and then try to identify the best product for a typical early-stage startup. Along the way, we uncover and share info that should be obvious (but isn&#x27;t), and point out any caveats and pitfalls you might encounter.<p>We&#x27;re like The Wirecutter &#x2F; Consumer Reports for SaaS, minus the affiliate links &#x2F; paywall (more on this later).<p>There&#x27;s a real information problem in B2B software. Without prior experience, it&#x27;s hard to know how to evaluate a product, figure out what differentiates it, learn all relevant background, and compare against alternatives. Many times, it&#x27;s difficult even to decipher what exactly a product does. As a buyer, you&#x27;re often in the position of having to make a high-quality decision on something you&#x27;re far from being an expert on. If you&#x27;re anything like me, you often don&#x27;t even know what you don&#x27;t know.<p>There are plenty of crowd-sourced review sites out there, but they usually all end up filled with 5-star reviews that boil down to &quot;I used <i>X</i> [and only <i>X</i>] and it was good.&quot; There is also an abundance of startup tool lists and directories, yet the problem is less about seeing what tools are out there and more about figuring out which one to use.<p>We&#x27;re taking a different path, one that others have tended to avoid. We do hands-on testing and write in-depth long-form for each category of tools (with plenty of summaries to make it useful even when skimming), which can&#x27;t be replaced with code (even though we, as engineers, sincerely wish that weren&#x27;t the case). We&#x27;re not reliant on vendors, so we can say what we actually think about a product, both upsides and downsides, instead of being pressured to normalize everything we say around &quot;pretty good.&quot;<p>I see us as fundamentally helping you do something akin to time&#x2F;information arbitrage. If lots of startups are each spending, say, ten hours doing the exact same research and testing, why doesn&#x27;t someone spend 100 hours doing that research and then freely distribute the results? Everyone would save time yet get higher quality information.<p>Right now, we have three longform guides geared towards startups just starting out: store of money (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com&#x2F;store-of-money" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com&#x2F;store-of-money</a>), incorporation service (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com&#x2F;incorporation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com&#x2F;incorporation</a>), and web analytics (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com&#x2F;web-analytics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com&#x2F;web-analytics</a>). We have preliminary results (but not full writeups) for a lot more categories at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com&#x2F;handbook" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satchel.com&#x2F;handbook</a>.<p>We don&#x27;t expect to support ourselves financially in the same way as The Wirecutter (affiliate program) or Consumer Reports (paywall). Affiliate programs are mostly conflict-of-interest-free when rates are standardized across products (e.g. via Amazon for consumer goods), but are a lot harder to execute properly in a fragmented market like B2B software&#x27;s. I&#x27;m also personally opposed to paywalling our work (I spent a lot of my formative years as a bio researcher, and I&#x27;d sincerely claim that open-access was a saving grace). Instead, we think there are ways we can increase the efficiency of the SaaS procurement&#x2F;purchasing process, and intend to monetize there based on value-add.<p>We would love to hear your feedback and your experiences with B2B software. I&#x27;m personally excited to be sharing this with HN, and I&#x27;ll be here to answer any and all questions you want to throw my way!
======
chuckcode
I like the concept. Yet it feels like an echo chamber when the YC saas review
company only reviews other YC based web analytics products after leading off
with talk from YC parter about how everyone is doing it wrong... Do you think
your audience won't notice the heavy YC bias?

~~~
Fission
Actually, I totally agree with you. This is something that we thought hard
about, because our initial three guides are dominated by YC companies.

I think the main explanation is that YC companies, to a much greater extent
than other companies, tend to focus on early-stage startups. As our guides are
currently focused on early-stage startups, we naturally see more YC companies
represented in the guides.

If anything, I'd argue that we're so aware of this that we need to consciously
avoid overcorrecting in the other direction.

~~~
ijpsud
Have you thought about collecting reviews from "real" users of the products to
supplement your analysis?

There's potentially a misaligned-incentives problem with review sites which
themselves do the reviews. The latest episode of the FYI podcast[0] goes
through this problem with the founder of Capiche[1] (looks like a competitor
of yours) and the founder was explaining how firms like Gartner basically have
two sets of customers: The software buys and the software sellers. The
software sellers can actually pay Gartner to get in front of an analyst and
sell them on their product.

I don't know to what extent this makes Gartner's recommendations less useful,
but it seems like it would make it hard for smaller companies to get on the
radar. I think the fundamental problem is that the analysts are not actual
users of the software.

So I like Capiche's direction, but I dislike the fact that they're a "closed"
invite-only website.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/ARKInvest/status/1261421627717218305](https://twitter.com/ARKInvest/status/1261421627717218305)

[1] [https://capiche.com](https://capiche.com)

~~~
awwstn
Thanks for mentioning Capiche! I think there's so much opportunity in this
space so I'm stoked to see anyone else joining in.

At the very start, I wanted Capiche to be essentially Wirecutter for SaaS. We
ended up going in a different direction, but I'm super impressed with
Satchel's execution here, and as someone who spends a crazy amount of time on
this stuff, I learned a bunch of new things reading through the site today.

I really don't want to hijack @fission's launch discussion, but thought I'd
just reply to your comment on the invite-only thing: our site will be wide
open soon-ish. Just taking our time building a community around high quality
discussion (most of which has little to do with comparisons/reviews), but
eventually will open it all up. Think of it like Stack Overflow's private
beta...just a step in the process.

~~~
Fission
Hey Austin, I appreciate the thoughtfulness and the kind words.

I think even though we're working in different directions, we share a lot of
the same values and see similar issues with the status quo. When (I hope not
if) quarantine's over, let's grab a coffee :) — my email's in my profile

------
AnonC
_> There's a real information problem in B2B software. Without prior
experience, it's hard to know how to evaluate a product, figure out what
differentiates it, learn all relevant background, and compare against
alternatives. Many times, it's difficult even to decipher what exactly a
product does. As a buyer, you're often in the position of having to make a
high-quality decision on something you're far from being an expert on. If
you're anything like me, you often don't even know what you don't know._

Amazing copywriting here. I’m sure this deeply resonates with many people in
tech. I’ll be looking forward to your service expanding its coverage on many
more SaaS providers and their offerings.

Edit: I had a quick look at your site. I wonder if targeting a smaller range
of reading duration could help. Right now it’s all the way from a shorter 12
minutes to a really lengthy 38 minutes, which seems like a huge variation to
me. I get that some services will need far fewer words than others. I like
that the summaries are all short enough, and help decide whether to read the
full article or not.

~~~
Fission
Appreciate the kind comment! To be honest, I didn't really think about that
paragraph too much — I just wrote down my own qualms/experiences in a list,
and eventually decided to consolidate it into a paragraph. It was just
something that I felt strongly about.

> I had a quick look at your site. I wonder if targeting a smaller range of
> reading duration could help.

This is something that we tried to deal with through the overall summaries,
the rating matrices, product summaries, etc. I completely agree that it'd be
overkill for everyone to read a super long guide, which is why we added those
components. However, we also wanted to ensure that if a reader wanted to go
in-depth into the reasoning/background/justification behind something, we
would have the information right there.

Granted, it's not perfect yet (I've spent a lot of time responding to emailed
questions with "actually, we discuss that in this
paragraph/section/sidenote/etc.", so there's clearly room for improvement on
our end), but we're working on it! Any suggestions on this front would be
super helpful, actually.

------
mwseibel
Very excited! One of the most common questions within the YC community is
which product should I use for X. As an avid user of Wirecutter for consumer
items I think this approach is very interesting.

------
Fission
Oh, and I'd like to add — one of the reasons why I'm so excited about this
launch is because it's been a crazy journey so far. I entered YC as a solo
founder fresh out of college, working on a near-polar-opposite product (mobile
3D reconstruction; highly-technical). We worked hard on that for nearly two
years, and only recently made the decision to change directions. If it's
interesting, I'd be happy to give perspective on this decision and my
experiences so far.

~~~
stev3
Congrats on the launch, Andrew! I'm curious to learn more about your
experience in mobile 3D reconstruction. Did you publish anything? I'm curious
because I'm working in the 3D reconstruction space as well.

~~~
Fission
Didn't publish anything. Mainly, we focused on making 3D reconstruction
practical for B2B use cases.

It's interesting, because I personally see the idea of commercializing
academic research to be well-intentioned, but a bit more difficult than it
sounds.

Some more thoughts from a previous HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753553)

~~~
stev3
Thanks for sharing

------
nivertech
What missing is how these services are integrating and interconnecting with
each other. I.e. "SaaS legos". + do they allow easy automation using various
nocode/lowcode tools (i.e. Zapier, etc.).

For example, I want to incorporate a C-Corp, get a linked bank account, a
business credit card, get an intro to a startup law firm and accounting
service, be able to use invoicing, accounting and payroll software integrating
with above services, etc.

Same with the analytics, CRM and project management software - they should all
play well together.

I would gladly pay a premium for this kind of integration.

------
ianwalter
I love this. Every company I've worked for (mostly startups) have made at
least a few terrible decisions when selecting b2b software because founders /
decision makers have to make decisions quickly to get up and running and can't
necessarily spend a lot of time exploring different services and thinking
about future needs. Those tools become so integrated into business processes
that it's hard to switch away when you come across another, better tool. Seems
like this would be a big help.

~~~
Fission
Yeah, startups are in the position of having to make high-velocity yet high-
quality decisions, yet without too many resources to accomplish either. A
bunch of our own decisions in the early-days mostly came down to asking some
founder friends, throwing our hands up, and mentally flipping a coin.

------
goleary
This looks super useful. I can't count the number of times I've ended up on
one of those ranking sites that feels like an affiliate scam.

One suggestion: for your "ratings matrix" it would be easier to parse if you
kept the "our take" section out of it so all of the ranking icons appear close
to each other. [https://imgur.com/a/PmX1TLu](https://imgur.com/a/PmX1TLu)

~~~
Fission
> I can't count the number of times I've ended up on one of those ranking
> sites that feels like an affiliate scam.

Totally agree. We took a close look to figure out what made some review sites
slimy (and frankly not very useful). It mostly came down to what you'd expect:
all reviews are normalized to be generally positive, lots and lots of
recommended products, etc. That's why we made a deliberate decision to not go
down that route.

> One suggestion: for your "ratings matrix" it would be easier to parse if you
> kept the "our take" section out of it so all of the ranking icons appear
> close to each other.

Appreciate the suggestion, I see what you're getting at. Most design issues
come back to me, so I'll take a look at it and see if we can't make it easier
to compare all ratings at once.

~~~
basch
It might be outside the purview of your product, but it would be useful if it
borrowed some from rtings.com and became an interactive rfp/selection tool.

Allow weighting of whats important and whats not, to re-sort the results.

~~~
Fission
Totally! It's something we've considered, and it wouldn't be too hard to
implement. The reason why we've deferred it is because we've found that most
early-stage startups are pretty homogeneous in their requirements, so a self-
weighing system like you suggested is a little excessive. That said, I think
it's very much something that we'll revisit when we start delving into later-
stage-startup topics.

Thanks for the suggestion!

~~~
basch
Even moreso than just a one person ranking, being able to have a team sign in,
and different divisions and functional groups rank and prioritize their needs,
and having it roll up into an organizational score. That is a place where you
could monetize. [https://www.scoutrfp.com/](https://www.scoutrfp.com/) and
[https://www.loopio.com/](https://www.loopio.com/) play in this space.

There's also the side of vendor management once you do make a selection. Even
a service that manages and negotiates for you.
[https://www.vendr.com/](https://www.vendr.com/)

Do you have a page planned for [https://carta.com/](https://carta.com/) and
the like?

Or talent sourcing? [https://gocatalant.com/](https://gocatalant.com/)
[https://www.hellogustav.com/](https://www.hellogustav.com/)
[https://www.lever.co/](https://www.lever.co/)
[https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance-
websites](https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance-websites)

Smaller tools as well -
[https://www.privacytools.io/](https://www.privacytools.io/)

Once you get bigger, a single page playbook of all the best choices would be
great [https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance-
tools](https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance-tools)

------
Nimsical
Looking at your "The Best Store of Money" – I'm baffled that First Republic
Bank even made the list. We're in the process of switching away from them
because of how broken their web interfaces are, and how hard it is to connect
them to other tools which makes it hard for our accounting team to automated
their work.

I think you really need to do a lot more interviews with people that have been
users of these products.

~~~
Fission
Hey, thanks for the datapoint! I'd like to break your comment down into what I
believe are the two main points, and address them independently.

1\. On whether or not FRB should be in the list — we certainly think they
should. Based on the founder surveys we sent out, we found that FRB was quite-
well represented across the startup community (and I think that your datapoint
adds to that finding). Our inclusion of a company/product is not an
endorsement, but rather a result of what we think would be useful to test for
the community. In this case, we evaluated FRB because we know a lot of
founders (including yourself) have considered/are using them.

2\. On whether our evaluation reflects your experience — this is the more
interesting point for us. We have data from ~15 founders re: FRB, ranging from
full-blown interviews to anecdotes. In general, we didn't hear anything
substantially negative about their core banking service, but we aren't going
to conclude that they're perfect from that data alone. That said, the founder
data was informative enough to draw some directionally-accurate conclusions
from, although additional data points help us both realign as well as shrink
or expand our confidence interval.

If you're willing to email me about your experience with FRB, we'd very much
like to look it over and take it into account when we update the guide.

~~~
Nimsical
On 1: this is because they've done a great job with partnerships. Cerkly's
corporation set-up becomes free if you sign up with FRB – this was a YC deal
we used. So this doesn't mean much.

2\. I recognize that this is generally a hard job. Our original
product/company was along the same lines as Wirecutter
([https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ask-suto-
launch/](https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ask-suto-launch/)) and it's an
extremely tough path to take. I do feel that it's easier for businesses since
the value-props/features are a lot more distinct in how businesses make
decisions.

------
jayparth
Very interested in seeing how you try to make a business out of this!

I spent ~3-4 hours a few weeks ago deciding what analytics products to buy and
I ended up creating a cost/benefit sheet on each option. If you guys existed
back then I could have just linked to you instead.

------
stanislavb
Disclosure: a self-promoting plug. Have you heard about
[https://www.saashub.com](https://www.saashub.com). That's the product I'm
working on. I'm trying to solve the same problem - a marketplace with as
objective as possible software alternatives. The lists are based on an
aggregation of articles and directory mentions from everywhere around the web.
That makes it more difficult to skew the results. For example, one product
might be subjectively promoted in one list; however, when you take the average
of 10 lists, the best options will end up at the top.

------
welearnednothng
If this is done right, this would be a fantastic asset. I read two of the
articles and they seem quite well done and seemingly more objective than I'd
expect on similar sites. I'm in the process of launching my own product, so
all of the existing comparisons are relevant and appreciated.

One small problem: on my 10.5" iPad the table of contents are cut off and I
can't even horizontal scroll them into view (despite the fact that the page
does horizontal scroll). Even in landscape, the layout isn't quite right. The
content itself is viewed no problem, though.

Kudos!

~~~
Fission
Appreciate the feedback. Our goal is really only to be useful, which naturally
ends up with us covering a lot of background (e.g. for store of money: what is
a cash sweep, how is yield determined, what are the underlying incentives for
various startups, etc.). Plus, by holding ourselves to a standardized set of
criteria, it's a lot easier to stay objective.

I'll take a look to see if we can't address formatting in the mid-range of
window sizes.

------
kkotak
What is your business model? I see the value in what you're doing, but
struggling with how you'll make money and scale enough for YC to justify
funding you.

~~~
Fission
This is going to be a bit of a roundabout answer, so please bear with me.

Our first task is to prove we there we can provide sufficient value through
objective info, and in helping people figure out which tools to invest in.

This is a bit of a convoluted way to say that we aren't 100% sure on long-term
monetization, but we do know it probably won't be wirecutter-type affiliate
nor paywall. We fully subscribe to the pg thought process behind this:
[http://paulgraham.com/good.html](http://paulgraham.com/good.html). That said,
if we can accomplish our goal, we believe we can make money somehow, whether
by offering value-added services or something else. Keep in mind that we're
software developers ourselves, so we're in a position to build something once
it becomes clear where the opportunity is; we're not just review-writers. For
now, we're focused on producing as much value as we can by writing useful
reviews. Speaking of which, we'd really like to hear what would be most useful
to you in evaluating SaaS products!

~~~
kkotak
Got it. Thanks for the detailed answer. I formed a company early this year and
using - ZenBusiness for incorporation, Gusto for Payroll, Bill.com for
invoicing, Radius Bank for online banking, Stripe for payments, Shopify for
storefront, etc. You may want to start segmenting reviews for the needs for
types or applications, types of businesses, stages of endeavors (eg. early
stage vs. growth), etc. One of the areas I see is for helping tech startups
evaluate their cloud provider (AWS vs. Azure Vs. GCP Vs. other) options based
on the product they are building. Just my 2c. Good luck!

------
fishtoaster
This could be very cool, but I'm interested in your business model. I'm sure
you're unbiased now, but ultimately you'll need to make money, which has a
tendency to bias things. One of the reasons I've trusted The Wirecutter in the
past is because they're pretty up-front about how they support themselves.
Being vague about that seems like it'd make it hard for Satchel to build that
same kind of trust.

~~~
Fission
Thanks! I shared some thoughts on this earlier
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237147)),
but I also wanted to take some time to discuss the points you made.

Completely agree that The Wirecutter's up-front-ness and monetization is well-
aligned with the end customer. Wirecutter's affiliate model works well with
consumer goods b/c affiliate rates are mostly standardized (mainly by Amazon),
which mostly mitigates conflicts of interest. This doesn't work as well in
SaaS because vendors are so fragmented. This means that there would need to be
a lot of checks and balances to avoid bias in B2B software. That's why any
eventual monetization likely won't look like Wirecutter's.

Once we settle on a way to make money, we'll make it transparent. I'm just
being vague right now because we don't know what exactly that is, so we're
being... transparently vague :)

------
slantyyz
I think the idea for this is great, as it has the potential to save a lot of
time and effort researching tools.

Some minor quibbles though.

I'm not getting any younger, and I find that the non-white background combined
with the light weight of the font hard to read (Windows/Edge Chromium). I
can't put my finger on it, I can't tell if it's the readability of the font
itself or simply the weight. Text is a little easier to read on the purple
background for the Summary section for some reason.

As a sanity check, I hopped onto the Wirecutter, which I frequent a lot, and
they have a non-white background, but the serif font they use for the body
text is a little heavier and much easier to read for my aging eyes.

For the Analytics article, I think adding screen grabs would help break up the
monotony of long streams of text, and give people an idea of what the UI looks
like for the product(s). One of the first things I look for on any SAAS
landing page are screenshots, so I can see what the UI looks like. Adding
screen grabs in your reviews would save some time for me.

~~~
Fission
Thank you for the comment — feedback like yours helps us continuously find
ways to improve!

I'm really interested in digging in a bit deeper, as you've expressed some
thoughts we haven't heard before, and I'm hoping to improve the site more.

> I'm not getting any younger, and I find that the non-white background
> combined with the light weight of the font hard to read

This is interesting. The text color is #000, and the background color is
#fafafa. This is a higher contrast ratio than the wirecutter, hn, etc. Since
the purple background is easier to read on, it might be that the text is
actually too high-contrast. It probably doesn't help that our font is a bit on
the narrow side. I have a couple of ideas on how to fix it, but don't have a
great idea on how to test it.

> I think adding screen grabs would help break up the monotony of long streams
> of text, and give people an idea of what the UI looks like for the
> product(s). One of the first things I look for on any SAAS landing page are
> screenshots, so I can see what the UI looks like. Adding screen grabs in
> your reviews would save some time for me.

This is particularly interesting for me to hear. Would you be willing to
elaborate a bit more on how exactly you use screengrabs in your decisions? In
my personal experience (emphasis on personal), screengrabs don't provide much
value because they're mainly used as feature demonstrations.

We try to take an approach where we don't focus on the features, but rather
the overall impact in aggregate (e.g. we won't focus on who has the best
funnel analysis, but will ask who has the best core analytics functionality).
We strongly believe that this synthesis approach is more useful, but it also
means that features overviews are lower priority.

However, I'd be curious to know how you use them, as it sounds like you get
value from them beyond just feature understanding. With a better understanding
of how you use them, we can go back and get screenshots that best fit the kind
of value that you get from them.

~~~
slantyyz
For the fonts:

I think the stroke of the font is just too thin, or maybe it's the font's
letterspacing as well. As far as sites go in general, my eyes struggle with
reading the text on Satchel in particular. It could also be Windows' rendering
of the font. I see that you're using Avenir Next? For what it's worth, it
looks a little bit better on Firefox for Windows. Edge Chromium and Chrome
look the same. I opened up the inspector and changed the body color to #fff
and it is an improvement.

The contrast in numbers might be better than HN or the Wirecutter, but I find
that HN's font and the Wirecutter's font easier to read. In short spurts, the
font is somewhat fine, but because reviews are so text heavy, it becomes
harder to read.

Keep in mind that all of this is highly subjective and based on my personal
vision.

For the screenshots:

It's hard to explain, but I want to see how stuff is organized on the screen,
etc. And while I would like to say looks aren't important, I'd be lying if I
said that stuff didn't matter. If you are reviewing multiple products, I
definitely want to see comparative screenshots for the same function. What
would be even better would be short animated gifs showing how navigation work
between apps.

Oh, another thing I noticed. Your Consumer Reports style icons in the Ratings
Matrix are great, but when I hover over them, I don't get a tip as to what
they mean. IIRC, CR puts a legend for the icon on top of the pages that use
those icons.

~~~
Fission
re: fonts — I booted up my windows machine, and you're right, it renders
abnormally narrow and is hard to see. No CSS rendering options could fix it,
so I think it just comes down to how Windows handles the font. We'll try to
swap it out for something more legible, but big thanks to you for bringing
this up either way.

re: screenshots — I think I see the point you're trying to make. We'll get
something up and running and see how it works.

re: tooltips — just pushed something to add them

------
inopinatus
Ethical considerations are a significant factor in my SaaS (and stack)
selections, and seem to have been entirely omitted from these analyses. If it
helps guide your content direction any, I give a great many shits about a)
user privacy (super relevant to analytics), and b) socially responsible
investment (again, but for capital holding) and so forth.

It tends to be a binary consideration. For example, I said no to React; not
because viable alternatives exist, but ruled out of contention entirely
because the vendor is the Philip Morris of tech.

Just as the rag trade can get by with excluding sweatshops from their supply
chain, I think it’s incumbent on those of us privileged enough to be able to
start/run a tech company to navigate our preferences as much by a moral
compass as any other. So I’d value the opportunity to make better informed
decisions in that dimension.

~~~
inopinatus
_Note to self, for future reference: the comment above was upvoted during
European daytime and downvoted during US daytime._

------
dard12
I love this, I've spent time researching a lot of these topics before and I'm
looking forward to saving time in the future.

One small feedback is to visually highlight the top pick more. My workflow
with reviewers like The Wirecutter is to scroll straight to the "our pick"
section. This assumes I have some level of trust in the reputation of the
reviewer as being thoughtful.

Caveats:

\- The top pick is noted in the summary but it's always one of many bullet
points.

\- It's also the first row of the summary matrix, but that wasn't immediately
obvious to me.

\- I may be more of a skimmer than your target user.

------
shireboy
Really like this idea. As a consultant I often get asked “what is the best
payment processor/analytics/hosting/etc”. I often feel a little dirty saying
“Stripe/Google/Azure or AwS” because I haven’t _really_ evaluated them all and
determined which is “best” by any measure other than “it’s what I know”.
Googling “best payment provider” just reveals sales pitches. Definitely a
market for exhaustive analysis on this stuff. One thought: it changes by the
month. Keep it current testing new features and services.

------
saadalem
I know someone who reviews website builders and do 44k $ /m with affiliates,
I'm curious on these business models ! You did a very good job guys ! Good
luck and I'm sure it will succeed.

------
OoTheNigerian
Feedback.

1\. I like the idea and like people have said, it would be good to go beyond
the YC "echo chamber".

2\. It is important to have some fairly establish (boring) players but there
are good reasons why. Longevity amongst others.
See:([https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23244624](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23244624))

3\. It would be a good idea to have an open source option in each category.

------
jorde
As a fan of Wirecutter, this looks really useful.

Small nit: dashes over underscores on URLs and looks like you don't have
metatags properly set (Facebook, Twitter etc)

~~~
Fission
Appreciate the suggestions. You're right about dashes, will look to fix. Lack
of metatags comes down to the lack of any social media accounts.

~~~
basch
Another nit: Page titles are all just Satchel. The tab name (or when I hover
over a tab, the tooltip) should tell me what page I have open.

~~~
Fission
Pushed! Thank you for the suggestion — completely forgot about some meta tags.

------
billme
Super confused (YC S20) is about to start, Satchel posted three reviews for
all YC companies, and were part of (YC S18) — how is this company related to
YC? Maybe it’s me, but if the company you pitch on demo day does not make it,
appending YC batch to the startup regardless of if the founders were part of a
prior batch to me feels like well I don’t know, but at the very least am
curious what is going on.

~~~
Fission
It definitely is a bit confusing, I'd agree with you there — I'll try to
explain it:

Put shortly, this is the exact same company that YC invested in back in S18.
The product may be different, but the underlying company (in the legal sense)
is the same.

When a startup pivots, they usually have two options: 1. shut down the
company, return money to investors, and start afresh; or 2. continue with the
same company, just with a different product. You'll hear varying opinions on
the "right" way to approach it, but in general, YC startups usually take the
latter option as YC is generally of the mindset of investing in the founders
rather than the idea.

This is why Retool, Brex, Segment, GOAT, etc. are considered YC companies,
despite completely changing what they were working on (the latter two
substantially after demo day).

------
Axsuul
Congrats on the launch! Are you specifically focusing on startup software or
will you be eventually expanding to other verticals like e-commerce?

~~~
Fission
Thanks. Focused on info for the earliest stages of a startup for now, but
we're continuously progressing towards later-stage topics.

------
underdeserver
What's missing for me is your business model. If I don't know how you (plan
to) make money, how can I trust your judgement?

------
soozzoos
Hey! Love this idea, how can we get Blook.io added to the incorporation
services? We are a stripe atlas / gust alternative :)

~~~
Fission
We'll take a look.

------
judlaw
On a side note, and no pun intended, I find it interesting that you find the
need to mention that you are a ex-YC company to draw attention towards your
offering. I'm curious to know how many upvotes this launch would have have
gathered once you take that out. Just saying.

~~~
projectileboy
We’re on HN. Mentioning your company’s YC class is less like “free attention”
and more like “full disclosure”.

~~~
judlaw
Not sure I agree. I've seen many repeat founders showcase their product
without mentioning their credentials. Here are the D3js founders showcasing
ObservableHQ, and commenters discovering the team post a background check, no
mention of their background anywhere:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16274686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16274686)

------
doorman
This is super well done! One thought: big companies that make a lot of
purchasing decisions would probably pay for a special tier of access, perhaps
one that includes phone calls with your team that have actually done the
reviews (reminds me of what GLG does).

~~~
Fission
Hey thanks, appreciate the kind words! It's definitely something that we
thought about (and are continuing to think through). There is also the
question of service vs. product businesses, although there are certainly a lot
of comparables for the former.

For now, however, we're mainly focused on making ourselves useful for early-
stage companies. Certainly something we're thinking about however!

------
nathan_f77
This is really awesome! I've personally experienced optional paralysis
multiple times when trying to evaluate different SaaS products. I will be
keeping an eye on all of your recommendations!

~~~
Fission
Thank you, appreciate the feedback! Would you be willing to go into some more
detail into how these decisions played out for you in the past?

~~~
nathan_f77
Sure! I've mainly struggled with decisions for live chat, project management,
product analytics, and bookkeeping.

For live chat, I started on Drift, and then I got really tired of their buggy
iOS app. I saw that you also mentioned their history of engineering issues in
the handbook, and I've personally experienced a lot of these issues. I
switched to Intercom, and they've been much better. However, I'm still very
disappointed in the iOS app, because I can't tag any messages. This is a
critical part of my workflow, because I use a new tool called Savio
([http://savio.io](http://savio.io)) for tracking feature requests and
customer feedback, and they have an integration with Intercom that relies on
message tagging. Otherwise, Intercom has been great on desktop. (Except for a
really annoying issue with Turbolinks, because the Intercom widget "bounces"
on each page load. I've reached out to their customer support about this.)

For project management, I was originally using Trello. Then I briefly tried to
use Airtable, but that didn't work very well after a while. Then I had a great
product management consultation with the founder of Savio (Kareem Mayan -
highly recommended by the way!
[https://www.reemer.com/](https://www.reemer.com/)). He helped me get set up
on Clubhouse.io, which has been awesome. I've also really enjoyed having a
"feedback triage" layer in Savio, so that I'm not just adding every idea
directly into my todo list. My only issue with Clubhouse is that I wish there
was an easier way to add a new task directly from each column in the kanban
view, similar to Trello's "\+ Add another card" button.

For product analytics - This is a bit embarrassing, but the option paralysis
has been so bad so that I just didn't make any decision at all. I was just
using Google Analytics on every page and tracking a few events, but "Evaluate
Heap vs Mixpanel vs Amplitude" has been on my roadmap forever, and I would
read Quora answers and try to figure out which one I should be using, but then
I would just give up. Also everything is extremely expensive! But anyway,
thanks to your article, I finally set up Heap analytics! But here's one thing
I couldn't find any answers for - should I be adding Heap to all of my pages
(including landing page, documentation site, blog, etc.). Or should I just add
it inside the application, only for signed-in users? I was thinking that it
would be nice to get more visibility into how people are reading the docs,
because I'm working on a developer tool where the documentation is a critical
part of the onboarding process. And I definitely want to know if someone signs
up after reading through the docs. But on the other hand, maybe I don't want
to track all anonymous users, because if I blow past their free plan limit
then $500/mo is extremely expensive. Oh, so maybe I actually want to use
Amplitude!

I already ran into a free plan limit with FullStory recently. I wanted to
start tracking a page that was getting a lot of traffic, because there was a
bug that was really hard to reproduce. I accidentally blew past the free plan
limit and couldn't use them for the rest of the month, because their paid plan
started at 5 figures per year.

I started on Bench.co for bookkeeping, and they were great for a year, but I
could start to tell that they weren't the best choice for a SaaS business.
They also referred me to an accounting service that hasn't been very good.
(It's been very hard to get a response from them, and I actually still have no
idea if they've even filed my taxes for 2019. I think I might need to sue them
soon if I don't hear anything.)

So I moved to Pilot.com this year, and they've been awesome! It's so much
nicer to have my books in Quickbooks Online. I'm planning to start using
Flightpath Finance at some point
([https://www.flightpathfinance.com](https://www.flightpathfinance.com)). I
had an initial call with them, and they talked about all the reasons why
Bench.co wasn't a great choice, I should be using accrual accounting vs cash
accounting, and having my books in Quickbooks makes it much easier to work
with accountants and other services, etc. I think I might even fire my current
accountant and just use Pilot's tax services this year.

I think that's about it for now, and would be happy to answer any questions!

P.S. I searched everywhere to see if I could find Satchel on Twitter. I think
Twitter would be a perfect marketing channel for Satchel, because I would
definitely follow an account that regularly tweeted about this topic and
shared links to your reviews.

~~~
gorkemcetin
Nathan, did you check Countly? (which is at the top 10 analytics platforms on
Google Play, according to Appfigures), and is not prohibitely expensive.
Thought you may give it a try. (shameless plug: I am one of the cofounders).

------
tomhallett
What is your process/disclosure when signing up for these services? When they
look at onboarding you as marketing instead of sales, does that affect things?

~~~
Fission
Insofar we haven't outed ourselves as doing reviews, so we mainly used our own
accounts or some burner accounts (we've got a few email addresses that will
remain private). This allows us to get the actual customer experience.

------
santiagobasulto
This is very interesting! Tiny issue report: the link for Amplitude in the
handbook, under the web analytics section, is broken (it points to Mercury).

------
0az
Feedback on the tables: the vertical table headers are hard to read. Consider
tilting them at an angle, or just switching to horizontal.

~~~
Fission
Appreciate the suggestions. To be honest, we spent a decent amount of time on
table formatting, but we'll take another look. We think horizontal headings
are out of the question though, b/c we don't see a way to preserve the table
format going that route.

------
krmmalik
Actually really like this. Those other review sites are too heavily gamed but
this is a great approach.

------
michaelbuckbee
I view this as more akin to a Gartner/Forrester style analyst service coming
"down" to the general SAAS market than coming "up" from the Wirecutter B2C
arena.

Gartner, etc are all very much the paywalled exclusive access and strict
control of reports that OP mentions.

What's not mentioned is that even with their incredible amounts of funding how
difficult it is to do an evenhanded analysis of these truly complicated
systems.

It's honestly just tough categorizing these things properly so you can get
decent comparisons. Case in point Notion is on the front page today, their big
selling point is that they can more or less do what would take half a dozen
other more specialized SAAS to do. How do you slot them in against those?

Edit: case in point about categorization being hard: the 'web analytics' list
is really about 'event analytics' (per the article) - which is fine but you
still need web analytics services as well.

------
jakaroo
The web analytics guide is questionable as the author/s repeatedly state in
the preface that Google Analytics can only be used for page views not even
tracking, which is false.

~~~
Fission
We actually have a sidenote that mentions that GA can be used for event-based
tracking, but we've decided to skip over it in v1 of the guide because it's
missing some critical analytics functionality. We're focused on the big three
event-based analytics tools for now, but are going to add more info on tools
that can be used for event-based analytics, but aren't primarily designed for
that purpose, e.g. Pendo, GA, etc.

~~~
hanezz
Also, there's no mention at all of GA App+Web (launched August 2019) - which
is clearly the future of Google Analytics and uses an event-based model.

~~~
Fission
Thanks for bringing this up. Just to clarify, the base version of GA provides
an event-based model. GA App+Web is a feature of GA that's aimed at
sharing/consolidating info between websites and mobile devices. We're focused
on the web side of things, as we've insofar only written a web analytics
article. We suspect GA becomes a bigger player when we take a look at mobile
analytics, but we haven't fully delved into that yet.

------
ashkonfarhangi
I love it!

