I’ve written my first SaaS
After being cancelled by a woke client, I decided I couldn’t go back to that world. I decided that I was going to make it on my own. I’ve been trying to make a SaaS, or a website, or anything at all, in my free time. While I was spending 40+ hours per week having my motivation, energy and soul sucked into a black-hole by an evil corporation, that was never going to happen.
I wish I could tell you that I’ve been burning the midnight oil, passionately working away on a new project, it just hasn’t been like that. I’ve been doing a few hours each day. Most people who do full time jobs only actually do a few hours of actual work in a day, so I just kept that pattern going. I decided that I wanted to focus on more that just working. Exercise, reading good books, contemplating life, and getting enough sleep.
I decided that before I tried to take on an ambitious project with the hope of it earning me money, I wanted to just do the absolute simplest thing I could think of. It doesn’t matter if no one uses it. The purpose is simply to go through the process of deciding on the tech stack, getting the hosting and the domain name, and just actually delivering something. That’s what I’ve done.
notehub.cloud Is now live. It’s literally just a text area. You log in with a magic link, and can view your text notes from any device. The idea was, we’ve all added something to a draft email, just so we can get it from a different device, so notehub solves that problem. The fact that you need your emails to log in makes it totally redundant, but like I said, it’s not really about the product. (Once your have a cookie in your browser, you can just get straight to the website)
I’m feeling a sense of accomplishment, but also a little disheartened that it took me three weeks. I have to remember that this involved learning, and a lot of decision making, changing my mind about things, as well as just the coding. I’ve also got a nice tech stack to use again on the next project. There are a few other tweaks I’d like to make already, and I think I should try to get them done so I don’t just move on and forget about it.
So what’s next
I will need to do some research into my next venture. I have a basic idea of where I’ll be operating, which is to integrate with an API, probably some government service, and make an easy to use app to solve a problem. The big opportunity is solving the ‘making tax digital’ problem. I’m a bit late to the party already, and I’m in two minds if I’m really ready. I think the next milestone should be to get a single paying customer. I think I need to find a smaller app to make, that actually has some earning potential. Again, the purpose is to learn. Learn how to research the problem, know who my customers are, integrating with stripe or similar, and of course, marketing, sales, support etc.
Once I’ve delivered a paid for app and found my first paying customer, that’s when I’m ready to take on a big challenge, that will hopefully earn me some cash.