How do you rapidly build SaaS products?
Hey there,
I’m interested in learning how people build SaaS products incredibly fast? Like people doing the 12 startups in 12 months, or other people building in public.
How is it possible to churn out SaaS products so rapidly? What are some tips/tricks you can share to achieve similar speed at delivering products? Do people have like tons of code snippets from previous projects that they just reuse?
I know how to write software, but it just puzzles me how to do it so rapidly. Would love to become better at it to be able to build and iterate faster. Any recommendations welcome!
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Most people give up before finishing the 12 projects actually. Sometimes they found a working project and sometime they couldn't keep up with the consistency. But in most cases, the use a similar boilerplate for basic functionality like Auth, Billing, Database etc. Over a period, this becomes extremely easy to build projects much faster. Some people also use SaaS starter kits to speed up this process. Note that there are people doing this with NoCode tools and Info products as well.
Couldn't agree more about beginning with boilerplate, especially if you have little coding experience. Of course market research is important before starting any business venture but simply starting is arguably more important.
'Start now' is the best advice.
Here is how people build 12 project in 12 months
Few People build a very small projects say like small integrations between 2 softwares
Few people build a simple CRUD based application like Job Portal, Simple Task management app
Few people build software using NoCode tools via drag and drop
Few people start a productized service and just build a min website for the same.
Few people just launch a modified version of existing open source software
Few people launch a small community and call it as a startup
Few people create curated list of something like places to promote your website, list of opensource marketing tools etc and consider it as a startup
Few people launch a consulting service in the area which they are already expert and call it startup
According to me , all of the above is not a startup. It's a min-project that's it.
Building a startup involves
Hey there,
I love how some developers are able to produce SaaS products at such a rapid pace, like participating in the "12 startups in 12 months" challenge or others building in public how are they able to churn out these products so quickly? Are there any specific tips or tricks that can help deliver so much faster? For example, do they have repositories of reusable code snippets from previous projects?
As someone who knows how to write software, I find this pace confusing and exciting. I’m eager to learn how to improve my skills in production and repetition quickly. Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Additionally, has anyone partnered with CONTUS Tech for SaaS development? I’ve heard they have great experience in this area.
Looking forward to input from the public!
Poorly!
Nothing of real value is going to be created in a month.
12 projects in a year is perfect if you want to spend a year building some half-baked ideas, but don’t fool yourself - the chances of any of them making money is very low.
Now, setting aside time to build, practicing coding, trying out different stacks… that’s a smart goal. I’m just saying that it can be tempting to notice loud outliers and think that there’s this lifestyle where people crank out products that people pay for in rapid succession. That’s not reality.
I strongly suggest that you actually join a real startup for at least half a year to see how things of value are created (or often, not!)
One of the best ways to do this: every 1st of the month, Hacker News has a Who’s Hiring thread.
I thought the same. I'm a full stack with over 7yrs of experience, and I'm currently building my microSaaS since more than 9 months. I've read the other comments that were saying 12 products in 12 months and couldn't understand how that's possible.
I personally don't think that you can build something that is super custom and exactly the way you imagine it in such a short time.
That's exactly the point of the one-a-month though. Most devs are too perfectionistic and want to make stuff that's "super custom" and "exactly the way [they] imagine it." In the end they spend months building something that the market then doesn't want. Hence the MVP approach where they're time-limited in order to build the quickest and dirtiest thing they can, and start selling it.
Well, I think your conclusions are too generalized. Of course you could build 10 products in just one month that the market doesn't want any of them or you could build 1 product in 2 years that disrupts the market. It all depends on whether the market wants it or not...or whether you market it well and reach your true targets. But IMHO, the need to build quickly are getting overemphasized these days... to the point where real softwares are getting less built. Any real software engineer understands the need to build in time. But they also understand it takes time to put together a system that truly solves a general problem in a unique way. It's all in the balance. You won't see the need for that balance when all you care about is the money.
Sure, but in general, I've seen indie hackers tend towards the two year build, not the one month build. It's just a way to waste less time. Building good software does not mean it will succeed, as you say, but it's better to not spend two years building something than to spend one month.
Your perspective is understandable. The constant friction between software development and marketing is, in my opinion due to how each perceive a software. The marketing department sees a "product." The software engineer sees an "artwork." It's about each successfully convincing one another on why they need lesser or more time. For the marketing department, the product needs to launch asap for business reasons but if clients (or others) encounter technical problems, they tend to blame the engineer. It's the engineer who knows that some "simple" problems require complex solution in the long run. He only needs to be convinced (or to convince himself) that he needs to find a fix in a very short time. However, he must implement a solution that is scalable in the long run.
I think what determines whether you'd finish in a month or more or less is the complexity of the problem you're trying to solve. It's quite unrealistic to set the same time boundary for every problem. "Oh, that guy had his product in just one week. So I should do mine in a week or less." Without asking if you're solving the same problem? Creativity stops at the point where it's ALL about outrunning each other in time and than in quality. Most software engineers try to find a unique way to solve common problems. Where we usually get it wrong is making things unnecessarily complex. But yes, we believe quality takes some time. Because it's the nature of our job.
It took me 5 months to build my first SaaS from scratch. So, this is why I built a Nextless.js to reduce this time by 80%, so you can build your SaaS in 1 month. The idea is to provide a pre-built foundation for your application, so you can focus on building the core features of your product to save time and resources.
Here is the features included in Nextless.js, so you don't need to implement yourself:
You should find all the common features needed by a SaaS, this can significantly speed up your development process and quickly build SaaS products.
PS: I'm the author of Nextless.js
Practice with lots of projects. Over time you will perfect your stack, reuse code from previous projects, have various patterns to follow etc
A month to build a product is not very fast, I have seen a person build one a week, then quickly use paid advertising to test whether the product ROI can return, and then move on to the next. You can build 50 a year, but only a few end up being successful.
bubble
is it actually faster than code though? i mean it just expresses relationships in ui instead of text how is that faster - you drag and select elements and then go through a bunch of toggles an what not, in code you just write some text lines.. i don't get how no-code is faster
It is for non coders.
I summarized a set of building SaaS boilerplate ( https://www.fast2build.com ), which include basic Account, Payment, Pricing, Newsletter, Blog, etc., at the time of starting a new project, these can be reused, Without having to rebuild the wheel. This allows you to build multiple SaaS products in a short period of time.
I copy code from other projects constantly. CSS, Javascript helper functions etc.
Once you have a billing and auth solution, you can just keep re-using it.
You used an accurate term, a puzzle :-) It's like putting all the pieces time after time.
So after working with businesses and startups for a decade we actually created a platform for creating SaaS :-)
As from my experience, they treat startup like a outsourcing Software projects, where they can jump project over project month over month, people like this will not create much value to customers.
They used that idea to their SaaS and called Product, and happy to share what they earn, I don't see much they can earn for them as well as for their users.
Software & Products IMHO is the hardest thing, where you have to spend most of your passion, your efforts with enough time, before you can see the Values bring to users then to you!
The right technology really matters when you want to build things fast. This oldie but goodie post by Paul Graham gives food for thought http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Not sure about how people come up with ideas, but regarding building tech MVPs using stater-kits will reduce your build time significantly.
I'm working on a rails 7 starter kit currently that comes with
https://github.com/tarunvelli/rails-tabler-starter
I won't focus on "building 12 products in 12 months," but here are two tips for building products rapidly:
Most people who are quick at building projects use technologies that they're comfortable with or are experts in.
My go-to stack for building projects is Vue.js (Nuxt.js) on the front end and Node.js on the back end. I know both of these well, so rapid prototyping is easy for me.
You should have boilerplate code for common functionality.
On my GitHub, I have a backend scaffold for authentication that I can plug into and edit for new projects (derived from previous projects).
For the frontend, I recommend using a CSS pre-compiler like SASS. This way, you can have variables, mixins, and other useful features that can be transported to new projects and easily modified.
At the end of the day, the more things you build, the more efficient you become as a developer because you tend to see patterns after some time.
Have a great day.
Deji.
This.
I have created a boilerplate for myself, and I build every app on top of that, it saves a lot of time.
And most people who are creating 12 products in 12 months are following the MVP approach which is quite "trendy" these days. It also saves you a lot of time and gives you the resources you need to keep going.
What is the MVP approach?
I'm currently attempting the 12 startups in 12 months thing. Up to number 5 atm.
You just gotta remember that startups all start with a very simple MVP so really what is built within a month looks more like a simple side project than a full blown SaaS that you see companies make. Adding the month timeframe really helps work out what is necessary to build and what isn't.
In terms of building it, I do have some code snippets from having built many projects before starting this but also there are so many no code and low code tools that make it super easy to build things now.
Five months ago, I decided to do this challenge to learn how to prioritize and build things faster. Today, although this challenge hasn't made me much money ($45 total revenue), I've learned a tonne around how to move faster and iterate on that idea quickly. So as far as to what I'd recommend for you is do this challenge too. Or just start building things with a timeframe in mind. If you have an idea, start thinking of what features you actually need if you had to release within a month, what about a week or a day? You'd be surprised how many things don't require authentication or databases to start with.
Have to give a big shoutout to Blitz.js. Really awesome toolkit that makes a lot of decisions for you so you can focus on building. Already built one product with it, working on another.
for your first project you will have to make lot of decisions on how to authenticate, how to authorize, how to take payments etc. which are not directly related to your app but are necessary for fully functioning saas. After sorting these things for your first project, you can just copy paste it for your next project and start iterating quickly.
Alternatively you can use readymade starter kits that have all the functionality you need and you can concentrate on your actual app functionality.
Having said that developing product does not seems to be the bottleneck for SW engineers its marketing and getting users to buy your product.
Depends. Sometimes I code, sometimes I use no-code. Here you can see my thought process live whilst building an MVP + marketing website in about 90 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NU4F3ZzuNU (sound is kinda loud).
Another thing is most software is not unique in functionality. There are many "patterns". You have your two-sided marketplaces; "swipe" apps based on proximity; things that essentially are a CRM; etc.
There's a big chance what you want built already exists, and you just need to change colours and logo for the MVP (specific functionality can come after being exposed to the market).
And finally, you also have saas starters/boilerplates, I will plug my blog if that's OK: https://saasstarters.com/blog/2022-10-21-how-using-a-saas-starter-can-save-you-thousands-of-hours-of-development/
I have something I use as a starter made by me, but I also test some of the ones you can find at: https://saasstarters.com/starters/
Highly recommend supastarter! (the owner is on IH)
I personally have built a lot of things and so I always have snippets of code that I can re-use. Getting a landing page up with authentication and some simple CRUD, SEO etc. doesn't take longer than a few hours because of that. You also gain experience each time you build something, so similar problems you encounter in the future will be solved much quicker.
For MentionFunnel I also used Prisma and tRPC which makes building everything so much faster. I also didn't write any tests until launching the MVP as I wanted to move fast and wrote code that works instead of code that is "clean".
TL;DR: build more, re-use code, find a stack that allows you to be super productive and prioritise shipping over perfect code.