How failure and rebuilding our SaaS helped us launch our first product ⚡

I’m happy to announce that we have finally launched our first SaaS product - Podtailor.com, a website builder for podcasts that automatically imports episodes (and creates episode pages) from the RSS feed every time a new episode is published.

The platform offers many other features, such as a podcast player that lets you listen to episodes directly on the site, support for show notes/transcripts, blogging, and much more.

However, the journey to launching our first SaaS wasn't without challenges. In this post, I will go through the process of building it, where we almost decided to quit, and how we overcame those challenges to finally launch.

Backstory

In 2021, I had dinner with a former colleague and friend, and we chatted about life and all its aspects. We had always discussed building a product together someday, as I am a designer and frontend developer, and my friend is a backend developer - a complementary skillset. While we had worked on solo side projects before, we had never built a SaaS on our own, so we thought it would be a fun new challenge!

However, both of us were quite busy, and nothing came of our discussions about building a product. Therefore, we decided that we needed to take action if we wanted to make something happen!

A first failure

After our dinner, we began researching and brainstorming product ideas, and a few months later, we started building a website that listed prefabricated tiny houses available for purchase and configuration online. This product was trending in our country at the time, as these houses did not require a building permit and were becoming increasingly popular. Our business model involved taking a percentage of each sale through affiliate links and ads.

We had almost built an MVP, but we began to lose interest in the project. We encountered the "chicken and egg" problem as we needed to market ourselves to both end consumers and the companies listing their products on the site. Working on SEO would take time, and we would need to use PPC to make the product take off.

As we lost interest, progress slowed down each week, and we eventually decided to quit and work on a simpler product that suited us better.

Next time, we’re gonna build a fun product and launch it no matter what!

Starting Podtailor

A few months after our first failure, when we had not yet started another project, I stumbled upon Indiehackers and started reading threads daily like a maniac. Now I'm motivated again!

At this point, we had compiled a list of ideas, and one was to create a website builder for podcasts. That sounds like a fun project! We didn’t want to build just another general website builder since that market was already saturated. Instead, we wanted to create something for a specific niche. We noticed how some of our friends who ran podcasts spent a lot of time uploading episodes manually every week, and we saw an opportunity to automate this process.

Every podcast has an RSS feed, which we could use to import the episodes. We saw other products doing similar things, which was not a problem as it validated the need for this kind of tool.

After researching and designing some mockups, we decided to give it a try!

Let’s build!

We chose to build the app with React/Next.js and Firebase as the backend. Although we hadn't used Firebase much before, we thought it would be fun to explore it further. My co-founder primarily works as a PHP backend developer but also writes JavaScript, so we decided to use a technical stack that we were both comfortable with.

We developed the MVP during our free time on nights and weekends. He focused on the functionality while I worked on the design and front end. Since we were building a website builder, we needed to have some pre-made themes. Therefore, I spent a lot of time researching podcasts and their websites to gain inspiration before beginning to design/code them.

A website built with one of our themes

We wanted to make the dashboard as easy and intuitive as possible, so we took some inspiration from Sanity (my favorite CMS) and decided to build a drag & drop block system for flexibility, which would allow users to build up pages as they want.

Dashboard

We were almost done with the MVP at one point, but we struggled with Firebase on some features as we didn't have much experience with it. Then the summer holidays came, and we slowed down development due to traveling and enjoying life for a while before getting back to coding and finalizing the product after the summer.

Should we rebuild the back end?

During the holidays, we had a lot of time to think, and my co-founder had a look at Inertia.js. This technology enables you to write the backend with PHP/Laravel and write the frontend in React. We had a chat about it, and he convinced me how fast we could work if we did it this way, as he had a lot of experience with Laravel before.

I must confess that I got a little bit stressed about the thought of rebuilding the backend and having to migrate the frontend when we were so close to having a working MVP. But I also remembered the challenges we'd faced with Firebase.

On the other hand, we had built the frontend with React, so we could reuse all the frontend components. It felt like a crazy decision to rebuild it, but I didn't want to repeat our first failure and lose interest in the product because of a (for us) bad technical decision.

So, we’re rebuilding the backend…

My co-founder worked hard on setting up the new backend and dashboard, and in no time, we had all the functionality that we had previously built with Firebase. He then showed me the new, unstyled dashboard that just printed out data from the API, and I got a little overwhelmed at first sight, realizing how much work it could take to integrate it into the front end again. But when we started to integrate it, it went pretty quickly!

When we came to the point where we were back to square one, we built the last features that the MVP needed and realized how fast we were working now, with a tech stack that we were comfortable with. We were pretty happy with how smoothly it went, so we felt that we had made a good decision rebuilding it after all.

Time to launch!

After the challenges we've had building our first product, we are now happy to finally launch! It was a fun process and we learned a lot. We're totally going to build something else in the future and reuse all the knowledge that we've learned during this project.

Next time, we will learn from our mistakes and choose a technical stack that we're comfortable with instead of taking the risk that comes with learning some new, cool tech. Learning is always a good thing, but I'd rather launch a product fast when it comes to building a bootstrapped product! :)

We're planning to launch a bunch of new features and themes in the coming months, so stay tuned!

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I also created a quick demo website for the Indiehackers Podcast that you can see here:
https://testpodcast.podtailor.site

We’re also launching on Product Hunt next week. If you want to support us, please follow it here:
https://www.producthunt.com/products/podtailor

Also, feel free to check out the product. And please let us know if you have any feedback or questions! 😃