Before our launch video I made a "do not claim" list. It ended up longer than the script.
Been building a backend SDK for React and Next.js SaaS apps for about a half year now. It's me only, that's the whole game. This week I finally sat down to cut our first launch teaser. 60 seconds, nothing fancy.
But before I wrote the script I ended up making a different doc first. A list of every claim I'm not allowed to make about our own product. I didn't set out to.
I just kept catching myself reaching for phrases that sounded good and weren't true, so I started writing them down instead of using them.
Here's what came out of it:
- no "enterprise-grade" or "battle-tested." and its v0.0.x. that phrase is just confidence with nothing behind it.
- no sso or saml. not built yet.
- no github or microsoft login. we've got google, linkedin and magic link. that's what we have so that's what we say.
- no soc2/gdpr/ccpa "compliant." It's haven't been audited. the word "ready" was quietly carrying that whole sentence and i didn't trust it.
- no "source-available" or "open source." this is the one i almost got wrong. i had it written in before i caught it. our source isn't public. the docker images and examples are. self hosting means running our images on your own box, not reading our code. so i'm not allowed to say it, even though it sounds better.
That last one stung a bit, because i'd already said it out loud a few times before i stopped myself. Building in the open partly means correcting yourself in the open too.
The thing i didn't see coming was that taking all of it out didn't leave me with an empty page. It forced the teaser to lead with the stuff that's actually true and, weirdly, more interesting. Bring your own Stripe so we take 0% of your revenue. Priced per app instead of per seat or per user. Self host the whole thing on your own infra with your own database. And the only proof that means anything this early, we run five of our own live products on it (PlugNode, AgentCenter, Imejis, RemoteWait, LinkTracer).
It's still early and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. No big revenue story yet, plenty still sitting on the roadmap. But the honest version of the pitch turned out to be the stronger one. I just had to write down all the lies first before I could see it.
Video's here if you want to see how it turned out: https://youtu.be/G2wYZTzhn14?si=1kInOeO923pUR8Dc
And the thing itself: buildbase.app
Want to know whether anyone else keeps a list like this, or if I'm overthinking the honesty thing. Does radical honesty actually pull people in, or does it just make me feel better while the founders who over-claim quietly out-market me? Still undecided.
