I Launched 41 SaaS companies in 48 days

This all started because I had to send a fax.

Mom had died and we were trying to settle her estate and for some reason they required us to send paperwork by fax in the year of our lord 2026. I dont own a fax machine, I havent had one in over a decade. I found a bunch online but they were irritating as most wanted subscriptions.

I did have a free Saturday and I do have some limited ability to code. So I wrote a quick API based Svelte program and threw it together in a few hours just for something to do. The fax was sent, twice in fact, as I forgot to sign one of the pages. Confirmation was received I moved on with my life. That got me to thinking. That was useful. I bet I could throw a simple Stripe process on that and maybe make a whole $17 a month from now on if Im lucky. Well, I finished it and deployed it on a Cloudflare Page mainly to get more familiar with using the Cloudflare network more than anything. And then SimpleFaxService existed where before it did not.

That led to three more that did similar things with pdf manipulation, images, and very basic single use tools. Simple one-page apps that did i single thing for about $4.

What was neat was I was able to reuse almost all of my code. Only a little bit where the core app functionality changed. The rest was just repeatable boring boilerplate. I copied the programs because boilerplate is boring and I was being lazy.

I wanted to keep launching these because it gave me something to build. My irl manufacturing company is in a slump due to losing a major supplier and it will take me a year to build the facilities we need to manufacture in house. I have nothing but time and I kind of feel useless with nothing to do all day.

As so much of the web app is boiler plate I made a CLI tool that automated the new app launch process. I choose Svelte as it was my preferred framework of choice. Im more of a backend developer but it seems to make more sense to me despite my not particularly liking Javascript in any flavor.

Then I got three transactions on my Simplefaxservice web app. Two from Latvia which i dont really understand. I have no idea how they found me but here we are.

At this point I had about 8 apps in the wild. All launched on Cloudflare but I had moved over to Workers as it just seemed easier. Buy a $11 domain. Setup the Amazon SES support email address. launch a program using a CLI tool. Connect the domain to the launched worker. Add domain to the R2 bucket for storage. Boom, you have a production(ish) ready empty web app in about 5 minutes. You just need to spend a few hours making it do something useful.

So for the last month I have been building apps, developing more involved templates, and launching new web apps fairly obsessively.

The working theory I am going with now is I kind of consider anything I build like this to be in the MVP stage. I am going to keep aggressively building and launching until I can determine which ones have market appeal. I wont know that on any of them until the get out of domain name obscurity for being new. I am guessing around 90-120 days before I start seeing some signals of life from launch to "something possibly happening."

If this project follows any known mathematical standard then my Pareto distribution should be something like 80% failure or near failure, another 10-15% meh performance, and maybe 3-5 out of every 100 apps finding market traction and product market fit once I determine they are getting traffic and double down on the development. The real issue is the 90-120 days of wait time before you know market reaction. This is like app farming.

So +/- 900 hours of build time, $1100 dollars in domain names, $5.00 a month in Cloudflare Pro Account for every 100 apps to hopefully have 3-5 decent software businesses within a year of so... maybe. As I have no idea if this is going to work.

Things I have learned. You naturally get better the more you build. Things just get more smooth and your apps get more streamlined although my pace leaves me wishing I could just tweak them a bit more. Also, analytics is more difficult the more you build. Its hard to keep track of the moving parts which is essential for finding the ones that work and the ones that dont. I had to write a program that queries the Google Search console results to hopefully get an idea of what is happening when compared and contrasting my tracking. Revenue is super easy to track. Traffic is more problematic.

When you standardize your builds bug fixes are easier but not easy. every app is different and the subtle changes you make while customizing make it hard to go back and fix known systemic issues you find that are common to the templates.

I am very firmly in the not much traffic and low revenue stage despite spending a bunch of time feeding apps to the process and it really sucks. Like real bad. Its like screaming into the desert. So, for now I will just keep trucking along building and shipping until this blind squirrel finds a nut.

:-)

dave ...