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I mean I think a lot of people want to build a SaaS, but it's a lot of work. You need to build a landing site, set up pricing plans, integrate with Stripe, buil

by a13n 5y ago

I mean I think a lot of people want to build a SaaS, but it's a lot of work. You need to build a landing site, set up pricing plans, integrate with Stripe, build user authentication, build company accounts + team invites, and that's just for an MVP, not including the product itself. If you can get all of that for free (to start), and that saves you months of building, that's pretty worthwhile. At $1m ARR you're only spending $30k/yr on the platform, which is roughly what your AWS/Stripe bill is anyway. There can definitely be more features too like user permissions, A/B testing, CMS, analytics/tag manager integration, etc, etc that continue to deliver value / save you time/money/effort as you grow.

bsid 5y ago
It's hard to build alll those things you mentioned in a deep enough fashion to make it something people would use (Which is where I think this template lands). Entire companies are dedicated to each vertical. These all things we wanted to tackle at Clerk (https://www.clerk.dev https://www.clerk.dev) as a SaaS. The first thing we hit down that path is user authentication -- and that opened up an entire can of worms we're still working through. User authentication alone has been tough enough because you can't just build yet another Auth0 clone and brand it "passwordless"... you'll have a tough time competing against the incumbents. This has led us to session management, which proved tricky to get right across local development and production environments, and has led is to the disparate ways people authenticate, which is a massive API design challenge. However, we think it could be a game changer, especially with all the Next.js / React advancements as of late. Especially the component-ization of the frontend in conjunction managed backends, session management feels like something that ties it all together. I'm certainly excited for the next decade of developer tools :). Things will get dramatically easier with all these commoditized verticals.
- a13n 5y ago
  Yeah it's definitely not a company you could bootstrap with 2 people. You'd need funding to build the team and product. But once you've actually built everything and gotten traction it'd be really hard for competitors to catch up because nobody is ever cancelling... Great VC business tbh
  - tigroferoce 5y ago
    Yeah, don't tell me. We are two people and we are trying to do that, open source. I can confirm it's pretty hard :-). If you want to have a look, it's http://github.com/saasform/saasform http://github.com/saasform/saasform

by a13n 5y ago

bsid 5y ago

It's hard to build alll those things you mentioned in a deep enough fashion to make it something people would use (Which is where I think this template lands). Entire companies are dedicated to each vertical. These all things we wanted to tackle at Clerk (https://www.clerk.dev https://www.clerk.dev) as a SaaS. The first thing we hit down that path is user authentication -- and that opened up an entire can of worms we're still working through. User authentication alone has been tough enough because you can't just build yet another Auth0 clone and brand it "passwordless"... you'll have a tough time competing against the incumbents. This has led us to session management, which proved tricky to get right across local development and production environments, and has led is to the disparate ways people authenticate, which is a massive API design challenge. However, we think it could be a game changer, especially with all the Next.js / React advancements as of late. Especially the component-ization of the frontend in conjunction managed backends, session management feels like something that ties it all together. I'm certainly excited for the next decade of developer tools :). Things will get dramatically easier with all these commoditized verticals.

a13n 5y ago
Yeah it's definitely not a company you could bootstrap with 2 people. You'd need funding to build the team and product. But once you've actually built everything and gotten traction it'd be really hard for competitors to catch up because nobody is ever cancelling... Great VC business tbh
- tigroferoce 5y ago
  Yeah, don't tell me. We are two people and we are trying to do that, open source. I can confirm it's pretty hard :-). If you want to have a look, it's http://github.com/saasform/saasform http://github.com/saasform/saasform