A consulting company where I worked at was approached by a local charity about helping them out with a breakfast silent auction they run every year. The previous years lacked engagement and they weren’t getting a lot of value out of the donations they curated for their auction. Popular solutions at the time were prohibitively expensive, upwards of $1000 for an auction that might raise $4000.
Another developer and I were between projects and so had some time to work pro bono on a silent auction solution for these guys. This was the beginning of my first ever SaaS product, and I loved it!!
MVP in 6 Weeks!
This was a beautiful time. Myself and a colleague threw ourselves into this exciting new project with such passion, what we achieved in a mere 6 weeks was remarkable. A fully self-serve app for creating auctions, creating auction items, uploading images, user onboarding and email validation, joining an auction, bidding, confirmation emails, and managing the auction close out. I handled architecture, design, UX and data model, and my colleague focused on coding, which i helped out with when I could.
We were using very early versions of Ionic Framework for the front end, .Net Core for the backend and hosted on Microsoft Azure.
First Auction Ever!
My coworker and I were onsite with our laptops, ready for anything. We got plenty of questions and helped a few people out, and I was taking notes furiously on what could be improved. Some people were afraid it would be less social than walking up to the table, when in fact people were constantly chatting about the auction and taunting each other right at their tables. It was a beautiful thing!
Commercialization
Overall, the ‘pilot’ was a huge success, and I was given permission from my employer to see what we could do with this product.
Our First Sale Was Also Our First Refund 🙁
After getting in Stripe and In App Purchase integration into the app, publishing our pricing on the website, and running some experimental ads, we got out first sale! And it was the highest tier!!! I excitedly ran around the office to tell everyone the good news, and we were already dreaming of all the cash we would be swimming in.
The next day, they asked for a refund. Our very first sale. Man as i bummed! But, that just ended up being a weird coincidence, because refunds ended up being a rarity.
Hosting Costs
We started with hosting this platform on Microsoft Azure, and it was pretty slick. You could deploy the application service right from Visual studio and even connect a debugger to the app service. The pricing was ok for the app services, but what ultimately triggered our decision to move from Azure to Digital Ocean was the database costs, and the way they just stopped functioning when you ran out of Data Transfer Units (DTUs). No performance degradation or warning, the database would just suddenly cease to respond.
We either needed to massively increase spend for a still tiny user base, expose ourselves to massive risk with an elastic database, or move to MySQL on digital ocean for peanuts. We wrote some scripts to help deploy the API’s on our Ubuntu virtual private server, and our hosting costs for the silent auction app was on the order of $50/month for the first two years. Azure would have been about 5X that amount.
I guess it’s like no-one getting fired for hiring IBM, even though it will cost 5X what it needs to. Azure seems like a safe. But a big shoutout to Digital Ocean, we ran many apps, services, databases across many droplets for 6 years and i don’t recall a single major outage.
App Store Headaches
Apple taking 30% is criminal, so we ended up removing admin capabilities from the app. I would have like to keep all the admin functionality in, and just remove the ability to purchase packages, but it was easiest to make it a clean break and users didn’t seem to mind. Turns out most auction admins were using it on desktop anyhow