How to build and ship a tiny SaaS in 1 Day

Happy Saturday hackers 👋

I built and shipped a tiny SaaS on Thanksgiving day. I broke down the hours and the thought process 👇

Starting off with Do's and Dont's

Do's

✨Set simple goals
✨Compromise on UI/UX
✨Start Building Small

Dont's

⛔Spend an hour on your branding
⛔Build/optimize for 1000 customers

✨Set simple goals

I have a bad habit of starting too big🙈So this time I broke it down to the simplest version my ego would allow.

I settled on:
👉Extract followers from a competitor
👉Filter Followers by keyword
👉Follow/DM users

✨Compromise on UI/UX

Honestly, I'm not good at UI building... but I am good at using templates 💡

I also think I'm getting lazy...

Anyways, settled on using TailwindUI templates. No dashboards... just a landing page with a form.

✨Start Building 1/2

I had a ton of energy and motivation, so I started with the most difficult part for me... UI/UX

✅Stripped down the template to Hero, footer and header.
✅Added a Form.
✅Generic 'Search' icon as my logo

Total: 2 hours🥵
In my defense, it was my first time with NextJS

✨Start Building 2/2

Backend is my happy place 😇

✅Firebase Functions for Twitter API
✅Netlify for hosting the app

To be upfront, I'm familiar with TwitterAPI and Firebase. So I was basically reusing old code.

Yes, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V is 50% of 'Coding'

Total: 3 Hours🤩

⛔Don't spend an hour on your branding

I used to spend hours on the logos and a name, it was a guilty pleasure 😅

but in reality, it doesn't matter.

The biggest brand in the world is named after a fruit...🍎

pretty sure Steve was high... but you get my point. I settled on a generic search icon and 'CRM-ish' as my SaaS name. Found a $4 domain name to go with it.

⛔Don't Build/optimize for 1000 customers

Don't spend time optimizing your code to handle 1000 users.

99% of the time, it will take years for you to get 1000 active users.

If you are lucky enough to be that 1%, then optimizing code will be the least of your worries😆

⏰9 Hours Later (Building + Testing)

Total Cost: $4
Total Time: 9 hours

I ended up with https://crmish.pro Let me know what you think!

This was a long thread.. If you are still here, either you had a gun to your head or you like my content.

Follow me for more and feel free to DM. https://twitter.com/NuzairNuwais