Product Overview
Kickplan is a pre-seed SaaS product designed to simplify the complexities of pricing, billing, and feature entitlements for early-stage companies. Our mission is to create a Stripe-alternative that gives engineers complete flexibility over their billing system and revenue models. Unlike Stripe, which requires companies to conform their backend to a rigid setup, Kickplan offers freedom in how billing is implemented and managed. Through a cloud-based infrastructure, customers can manage everything from pricing plans to feature entitlements and value metrics in one centralized space.
With a small but rapidly growing customer base, Kickplan is gaining traction daily, and we are positioning ourselves for a seed round by Q4 2024. Our product is still evolving, but with early customer feedback and a strong focus on usability, we’re committed to optimizing the design and user experience to scale with our audience.
Challenges
Since Kickplan is a pre-seed product with a limited user base, our biggest challenges revolve around:
• Designing a flexible and intuitive pricing and billing interface for early-stage SaaS businesses without feedback resources.
• Benchmarking our product features against established players in a small market.
• Balancing rapid growth with a need to create consistent feature flows as we refine our offering.
• Working with limited resources, as we are a four-person team, meaning that each of us wears multiple hats. I’ve been directly involved in product strategy, all things design, customer feedback loops, and helping establish our design system.
Approach
To better understand the space and identify where we could differentiate from existing solutions, I conducted competitive benchmarking against similar tools in the SaaS monetization space, particularly Stripe. Key insights included:
• Stripe’s rigidity: Although Stripe is loved by many, we saw a clear opportunity to provide more backend flexibility for engineers.
• Simplifying complex billing flows: Early-stage SaaS founders often struggle with setting up complex pricing structures, especially when dealing with multiple feature entitlements or tiered pricing models.
• Friction in scaling: Stripe’s setup can become cumbersome as SaaS products grow and need more dynamic pricing models. Our goal was to make scaling easier.
We understood early on that Kickplan’s strength would lie in its ability to adapt to the specific needs of different SaaS products. To achieve this, I focused on creating a modular design system that allowed users to:
• Easily customize and update pricing plans.
• Define and manage feature entitlements based on customer tiers.
• Monitor and adjust value metrics dynamically without needing to restructure the backend.
• The interface needed to be powerful yet intuitive. We designed a dashboard that gave users full control over their pricing and billing system, but with minimal setup friction.
Since our user base is small, we adopted a lean, feedback-driven approach. We reached out directly to customers for feedback on usability, pain points, and feature requests. Early feedback revealed:
• Desire for more flexible feature management: Customers loved the idea of having complete control over feature entitlements but wanted clearer guidance on how to set them up effectively.
• Concerns around scaling: Some customers wanted reassurance that Kickplan could scale as their SaaS product grew. This feedback helped us prioritize scalability and performance optimization in future releases.
With feedback in hand, I set up an evolving design system in Figma and Storybook, which allows for consistent component design across our product. Some of the core elements we’ve focused on include:
• Interactive pricing sliders: Users can quickly adjust pricing tiers and feature sets for different customer segments.
• Dynamic feature toggles: A simple, visual way for users to enable or disable specific product features based on customer plans.
• Real-time metric tracking: A dashboard that updates in real time, allowing users to monitor how pricing adjustments are affecting revenue and user behavior.
To ensure our product can grow as we gain more customers, I’ve established a design system that’s both scalable and flexible. Our storybook includes animated components to make the interface more engaging and improve user interaction, helping customers visualize changes before they implement them.
As Kickplan grows, we’re establishing a regular cadence of feedback sessions with users to understand how the product is being used and where we can improve. This will become especially important as we onboard more customers and gain additional insights into the various ways different SaaS products manage billing and pricing.
We’re also planning to refine and expand our design system, adding new components and workflows as we introduce new features. Our Figma and Storybook libraries will continue to serve as the centralized source of truth for both design and development, allowing us to move quickly and maintain consistency as the product evolves.
Barriers
• Limited Customer Base: With only a few customers at this stage, it has been challenging to get comprehensive feedback on all features and use cases. However, we’ve been proactive in engaging with early users and refining our product based on their needs.
• Balancing Flexibility with Simplicity: While we wanted to offer complete backend flexibility, we also needed to ensure that the product was simple enough for non-technical users to manage.
•Building a Complex System with Limited Resources: As a small team, we’ve had to focus on what’s most critical and prioritize effectively to ensure steady growth without overwhelming ourselves.
Outcomes
• Growing Adoption: We’re seeing daily growth in our customer base, and as of now, we have several early adopters actively using the platform. Feedback has been positive, particularly around the flexibility we provide compared to competitors like Stripe.
• Evolving Design System: Our Figma and Storybook libraries are continuously evolving, helping to maintain a consistent design language as we add new features and onboard more customers.
• Customer-Centric Feedback Loop: Although still in its early stages, our customer feedback loop is becoming a central part of our product development process. This ensures that our product remains aligned with the needs of early-stage SaaS founders.
Next Steps
• Regular Customer Feedback Sessions: I plan to establish a more formal feedback process to ensure we are continually iterating based on real-world use cases.
• Refining the Onboarding Process: We’ll be focusing on simplifying the onboarding experience, making it easier for new users to set up their pricing and billing systems without requiring a technical background.
• Scaling the Design System: We will continue to add more components and design patterns to our design system to accommodate new use cases and features.
Conclusion
Building Kickplan has been an exciting journey, offering new challenges and learning opportunities every day. By focusing on flexibility, customer-centric design, and scalability, we’ve created a product that is poised to transform how early-stage SaaS businesses handle pricing and billing. As we continue to grow, our design system and feedback-driven development approach will ensure that Kickplan evolves alongside the needs of our customers, providing them with the tools they need to scale their revenue seamlessly.
