5 ms·
Ask HN: I have an initial platform but not a product. Any SaaS ideas?
Recently in my spare time I've coded a small initial platform on AWS. I've set up IaC, CI/CD dev/prod, management (sso, billing alarms), frontend hosting, api, logging, tracing, database, auth etc.
Since it is mostly serverless, I don't pay anything for it (because there is no product/usage).
My idea was to use it to test some product ideas and maybe something will stick.
Do you guys have any ideas for a SaaS product? I know there are probably a bunch of people in the same situation, but it won't hurt to ask.
Thank you
- GianFabien 4y agoI'm on the other side of the fence. I am working on the very early stages of what is planned to become a SaaS product. It would save me a considerable amount of time to use something along the lines of what you appear to have done. If you'd like to chat further, my email is in my profile.
- Mark_Ko 4y agogot it!
- avaldez_ 4y agoMaybe you can create a business on top of that. I'd pay for a ready to go platform to kickstart my own saas.
- Mark_Ko 4y agothank you
- RileyJames 4y agoAs others have said. What you’ve built could be your product, if it means I can deliver my product without worrying about everything you’ve mentioned. But that means I need to be able to seamlessly do so. So your product is enabling me to forgot all those problems exist. At the last startup I was working with platform became a significant blocker (primarily due to lack of people resources) and it was a primary reason the product tanked. Platform people are hard to find. Not sure how that helps. But it’s a space where value can be created. Good luck.
- Mark_Ko 4y agobeing seamless here can be tricky 100%.
- Jugurtha 4y agoCongratulations. Is this something like SaaS Pegasus, "the Django SaaS boilerplate"? https://www.saaspegasus.com https://www.saaspegasus.com We did that as well internally when building our product. The first commits were to make a plug-in architecture so we could build different products easily. Django also started that way. They were building many websites and they packaged things they were writing over and over again. There could be something there.
- Mark_Ko 4y agothank you, will take a look. i wrote a script that creates bunch of resources for aws and configures everything i ve mentioned in several aws cloudformation stacks. after that it is just git push to dev or merge to prod to start developing or rolling out the actual product.
- atonse 4y agoLike others have said, your infra might itself be the product. Look at https://gruntwork.io https://gruntwork.io as possible inspiration. They’ve made a lucrative business by selling infra scripts that others can use. And their subscription model means they keep the scripts up to date.
- Mark_Ko 4y agothank you for the link
- whynotmaybe 4y agoMy spouse sells gift certificates for her business. It's a small volume. Whenever someone pays for a certificate on stripe, she receives the mail and she sends the certificate to the customer's email that initiated the transaction on Stripe. The certificate is a simple word file with a certificate number she increases manually before printing it to pdf. You could write an api that's called by stripe whenever a transaction occurs, validates the transaction with stripe, prepares the pdf and sends it to the customer.
- Mark_Ko 4y agothank you
- maria1998zx 4y agoFre fire
- maria1998zx 4y ago6451937099
- austinjp 4y agoIn standard HN/startup parlance, are you a potential CTO looking for a CEO co-founder? If so, there are doubtless plenty on here. Maybe search for "non-technical founder" or similar here, if you haven't done already. If you're just looking for business ideas, people are notoriously reluctant to give those away - rightly or wongly :) Edit: Perhaps put your contact details in your profile. Edit 2: Definitely have a search, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=non-technical%20founder&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- Mark_Ko 4y agothanks, ive put my secondary email there
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]