For the next few weeks, I’ve decided to share with you the journey of building Limpid.cloud.
Once a week, I intend to present a feature I’m working on and answer questions such as:
- Why did I choose to work on that?
- Who needs this feature?
- How did I build it?
- Which challenges did I encounter?
- What’s the initial feedback from my users/customers?
etc...
Committing to doing this once a week will push me to ship features & iterate FAST, which is absolutely key when building a startup.
I spent this week building a long-awaited feature: Enabling users to predict the renewal dates of their SaaS & Cloud providers.
🧐 Why I prioritised this: From the conversations I had with my users, forgetting about costly renewals was one of their biggest fears. This feature also didn't seem that hard to build, so the "Impact On The User" x "Effort To Build" score was quite interesting.
👨💼 Who is this for: Mostly CFOs & CEOs of companies who use a lot of SaaS / Cloud services and who are having nightmares about forgetting an annual renewal (they may end up losing thousands of dollars because of it!)
🛠️ How I built it: I integrate with the API of an Open Banking provider (Plaid) to easily add connections with thousands of banks. I then match my users' expenses against a database of SaaS / Cloud Providers, and look at the dates of each transaction to estimate the next renewal date + amount.
🤯 What I struggled with: Finding the right Open Banking provider for this. The market is quite crowded and each of them has their specific features / coverage / pricing. I settled on Plaid because it’s a trusted brand + it's not too expensive + their coverage was in my target market (North America and Europe).
🔜 Next steps: I'll probably extend the coverage by adding integrations with accounting tools such as Pennylane, Quickbooks, and Sage. To build this quickly, I'm considering using a unified API like Codat or Merge to integrate with plenty of tools from day 1.