SAASify - Finally created my landing page ! Its ugly but I hope it conveys the message
Side Project: SAASify - A Pre-Built SAAS app in Node.js
URL: https://saasify.netlify.com
I have created at least a dozen side projects but never stuck with them long enough to make money. Finally I have created something that I like. I am a developer and not a designer (which should be obvious from the landing page), but I have decided to release it and iterate based on user feedback.
It is targeted towards indiehackers and I think this is the best place to receive feedback. I am not charging anything yet and will be happy to give away in exchange for feedback.
I am also looking for a co-founder who can do business stuff. Hopefully somebody in the Bay Area.
Current features:
- Sendgrid integration for emails
- AWS S3 for image upload
- [Registration] Register
- [Registration] Registration Confirmation
- [Registration] Resend Verification Link
- [Login] Login - Form
- [Login] Reset Password - Email Request
- [Login] Reset Password - Form
- [Profile] View Profile
- [Profile] Edit Profile
WIP:
- Stripe integration
- PayPal integration
- Full course style videos
- Collection of email templates
[Copied from my comment]
How is this different from other projects?
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Build an ecosystem around SAAS + Node and provide other components like email templates, legal documents, llc related information, etc.
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Make UI loosely coupled and make it highly customizable. Developers can use their favorite framework and styleguides.
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Make this beginner friendly with full course style screencasts.
The landing page should focus more on why than what. You need to tell me why I need your service rather than what features it has.
This 👆
To add to this, if you're having trouble thinking about the "why", one trick I learnt from a friend is this: list out all the things that could go wrong if a developer doesn't use your product.
Some examples might be:
Also, hire a designer if you can afford it to make those components and landing page look great.
Not only is this an additional thing you can add to your "why list", you'll be surprised at how much it improves people's reactions and adoption of your product, it's a form of marketing in itself!
Nice, haven't thought of it like that b4
Great advice, thank you!
Great information, thank you
As it is targeted towards developers, I wanted to focus more on features. By doing that, it looks like I have missed out on explaining "why I need your service". I will keep this in mind for the next iteration. Thanks @qkls
Hey there, nice project, but you should definitely invest $50 in a theme.
It will give you some guidelines to organize your content (and thoughts), and you will be happy/proud to look at your landing page.
Also when you are no designer, keep it simple and spaced. Boostrap examples are a good place to find inspiration to organize content (http://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.1/examples/product/)
For the next iteration, I will definitely use a theme. It took so much more time than I anticipated to build this landing page!!
Hey there. Congrats on putting yourself out there....lurkers like myself have yet to take the plunge.
I think a similar service, Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co/), does an excellent job of talking to developers about why they need their service ("Bullet Train is a Ruby on Rails SaaS-in-a-Box that saves developers weeks of effort").
You might want to use it as a benchmark for messaging and track how they attempt to convert users.
Good luck!
This one is a bit tough for me since it includes not just one but two tech stack choices I tend to avoid at all costs—NodeJS on the backend (as opposed to just for part of the front-end tooling or for SSR) and MongoDB.
I care about data integrity and an easy debugging experience! I'd rather see something using Postgres for the DB. Since PG supports JSON datatypes, it can do pretty much everything Mongo can but it can also be used for more structured relational data, which I'd definitely lean towards. Something statically typed or with immuatbility & pattern matching on the back-end also goes a long way.
Also, just in terms of performance, which is a big deal for a lot of SaaS businesses, I'd lean towards something else like Java/Kotlin/Golang/Elixir/Rust, etc.
On a pure market-analysis side, Node and Mongo are both medium to large, but both also probably hit their heyday 2-5 years ago.
Node and mongo are still hot among ReactJS developers because you can use one language - JavaScript on both the front end and backend. I think this is still a popular choice for tech stack as shown by Githut.info .
I do agree this is for developers who are comfortable with node . As they say, build your saas in the language you are familiar with; doesn’t matter what it is.
I think it does matter. I worked with Node full-time for three an a half years before ever really digging into Rails. I was startled to realize that after three weeks, I was already able to build MVPs more quickly in Rails than in Node and the same was true for debugging after not much more time.
That experience finally broke me of the fallacy that all languages or frameworks are equivalent in a way reading an essay never could. And of course there are times when supporting large numbers of users in a free or ad-supported app is more of a priority than developer productivity, where there are other technologies that make more sense.
BTW, I don't doubt that JS is extremely popular due to the growing importance of the front-end, but the link you shared has no data past 2014.
I moved from Rails to node. I think Rails with gems like devise, cancancan, rolify is also good for quickly building SAAS apps 👍. I don’t use it anymore because i prefer nodejs now.
I initially moved away from Rails because I did not like the way it worked with angular and react. I know they have support for webpack now but I haven’t used it.
That's definitely the more common direction, due to concurrency limitations with Ruby that matter more as apps get larger. Laravel (also very productive compared to Express) hits the same problem at a slightly larger scale.
You can use Angular, React or Vue, etc with any back-end. If you're just building SPAs (also something I'd generally hesitate to do until scaling up far enough to hire a team of 3-5), then the back-end does much less and I'd focus more on performance and stability. For 95% of bootstrappers, it's probably not a good idea to be investing engineering effort into making SPAs before even finding product-market fit, though.
I've encountered more successes that started from WordPress sites and a teetering pile of Zapier integrations than those that started by building a front-end comparable to that of a funded startup. IMO nothing matters as much as speed of iteration at the beginning.
Anyway, I realize there's a lot of path-dependencies and you can't easily change your tech stack choices. Just giving my 2 cents of feedback as a dev. I suspect Node and especially Mongo is a tougher sell and your customers will have less success than would be the case with a lot of other choices. Only way to find out is to build it and see how it goes and I wish you good luck with it!
Thank you for taking the time to discuss and give your comments. I appreciate it.
I don't like node.js on the backend. I might be interested in starterkits in Java, Kotlin, Rust (e.g. languages that have higher cost to entry and having a well written kickstarter code would be awesome). But of course it makes sense for you to do node.js if that's what you know.
Some other thoughts:
1, Mongo? Never, it's always PostgreSQL for me.
2, Is the AWS S3 direct uploads? You should clarify.
3, Does it come with an awesome test suite that is setup for everything including browser testing?
4, What about setup script? Vagrantfile would be nice.
5, What about 2FA logins? API tokens with OAuth? Social logins? Just email + password does not bring so much value.
It seems you are targeting beginners which might work. Experience devs like me need a bit more I think (and don't need the tutorial).
On a more positive note the idea with legal/email templates is great!
Anyway good luck to you and keep us updated. I too was thinking many times about creating a similar product :).
Hey-ho, congrats on your launch!
It's very basic for now but if you don't give up, you will be probably rewarded! (Hello from your competitor :)
Todo: Talk to Zencentric in the future .
I will not use it personally (I prefer other stacks etc.), but I am interested whether you will succeed in monetizing it.
I created some "starter" code bases before:
Again, would be interesting to know if there is demand from makers for more sophisticated starter kits :-)
Good luck!
@Zencentric If you're ever considering launching a paid version of saas-boilerplate check out https://sugarkubes.io/ and see if that could be useful
Thanks, I don't want to charge for the github version, I just created a separate version.
Nice stack haha!
I don't have the time to participate currently, but good luck!
Thanks!
As @qkls mentioned, put a nice strong call to action at the top with a why they need this. Show them in hard numbers how many hours and development time this will take them. Then show how your price will seem cheap in comparison. Put your email signup near the top and make sure it's very visible (standout colors). You'll want to keep it simple to the why they need this now and the cost benefit of buying vs doing it themselves.
I won't get into all the details, since you already plan on buying a template. When you do have one, just give it a good once over. A lot of them like to throw in hundreds of js libraries and 10MB of css :). You'll want to optimize some things.
I just put out a first version lander of a landing page service I'm working on...
https://lando.cloud
...Might give you some more inspiration on messages to convey.
Happy to help if you ever have questions.
How would you convince a developer that the code quality and structure are good without them seeing the code ?
Also what if I don't want to use Mongo but go with Postgres ?
Are you sure you won't end up creating yet another framework like Sails.js, only this time not open source ?
Good question. I plan to release the code walkthrough video or a sample of it without requiring users to buy anything. That way they can see a sample before buying.
The DB related code will be minimal. I will only provide Mongo code initially and you will have to modify it to change the DB.
I plan to be different from frameworks by adding more application related code related t auth, payments, emails and other stuff common to all SAASes.
No mention of price?
I want to price it for first time SAAS builders. So, $19 for code + videos. $29 for everything else.
As 'they' like to always say - price it higher. In all honesty, I think that's too low.
You can easily show on your page the number of hours it would take someone to develop what you provide versus your price. It's a great selling point and will show the value of your product.
It takes so many hours writing all these code which are not directly related to your application logic!! I should quantify this per feature.
Congrats on starting this. You really need to focus on landing page. I assume this landing page highly increase your bounce rate. You might find some inspiration on https://landub.com/
Based on the section you have on it right now, I suggest to design something like http://thetheme.io/thesaas/demo/bootstrap.html
Thanks @hosshams. Yes, I should. I underestimated how difficult it is to create landing pages by hand.
How is this different from other starter projects on github?
I plan to differentiate in a few ways.
Build an ecosystem around SAAS + Node and provide other components like email templates, legal documents, llc related information, etc.
Make UI loosely coupled and make it highly customizable. Developers can use their favorite framework and styleguides.
Make this beginner friendly with full course style screencasts.
Do you have any other advice or tips?
Maybe you can partner with other indiehackers here and build a directory of SAAS related products.
That’s a good idea. I definitely want to partner with others instead of building out everything by myself
100% agree. Looks promising