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I'm building mine since September, I can confirm. 1) Using all the knowledges and skills I developed during 5 years as an employee to finally build my own SaaS
by ggregoire 10y ago
I'm building mine since September, I can confirm.
1) Using all the knowledges and skills I developed during 5 years as an employee to finally build my own SaaS is a very great feeling.
2) Building a one man SaaS forces you to leave your comfort zone. I've learned new languages/frameworks. I've learned about security and infrastructure (I use a dozen of AWS services, I've never touched AWS before that). I've written a CLI to deploy my front-end on S3. I've learned how to integrate a billing system. I've learned to study my market and my competitors, to make a roadmap and prioritize the tasks, to find a good domain name, to find my first beta testers. I've learned how to create a legal entity in France and get some financial helps. I've never learned as much as in the last 5 months.
3) Being able to work when, where and how you want is an amazing thing. Not having to debate during long meetings and convince all your colleagues about every business, UX, technical or design choices feels so much more productive. Having to make all the tough decisions alone teaches you a lot.
Even if my SaaS doesn't become successful, I will regret nothing, it's the best experience in my career.
- shostack 10y agoCan you share a link?
- ggregoire 10y agoNot yet. I'm polishing for the release (probably end of February).
- swalsh 10y agoYou say "polishing", which implies minor details. Could you cut a bunch of stuff, and release next week? The real adventure doesn't start until you've deployed. You might even find out that the polishes don't even matter that much, and something that wasn't even on your roadmap is everything. Unless your previous experience was as the first engineer at a startup, your previous experience was probably preparing you to iterate on an existing product (late phases of phase 1 or phase 2), or a new product for existing customers. You had a base level of expectations. Previously, you were forced to released a polished version, but you had the resources to do it. In your new capacity, you (probably) don't have that. There's something to be said for just throwing out there a minimum version of the product, and polishing it later. You'll save weeks of wasted effort probably.
- ggregoire 10y agoThank you for the tips. :) Actually the app is online since 1 month. It was necessary to integrate with AWS, test everything in prod and let people play with the product. I deploy new commits every day. When I said "I'm polishing for the release", I was referring to: - make a minimal website to present the product (right now I don't even have a white page but a "Could not resolve host") - finish to integrate the payment system - fix some bugs I don't want to have for the public release
- jcrben 10y agoIf you release something before it is ready, that'll make a poor impression and the people who try it may never return.
- backmail 10y agoOne of the best comment i had read regarding launching. Lots of people often under-estimate our past experiences here. Almost all of the s/w job teaches us to release a bug free, polished version . But to launch a side project, you need to overcome your urge to release a polished version, and launch a barely working version to get feedback and iterate. It is one of the major reason of mine to never release a side project till now !
- searchfaster 10y agoNot the OP and not a link to my product directly.. but a demo built on top of it, without any mention of my currently One-Person SaaS. http://searchreddit.net http://searchreddit.net