How to SaaS your SaaS?
We all need services to kick start some parts of our project. Marketing, CMS, Auth, managing social media, analytics etc. etc. etc.
How do you wade through the vast number of options and pick the one that's best for you?
Bonus points: How do you do that without spending all your time on it?
Do you just wing it? Do you go into details with spreadsheets/other tools?
Do you just build your own and avoid integrations?
Trending on Indie Hackers
We do these steps:
We pick up and generate different ideas about channels and pile them up together. We do it constantly.
Prioritise them using the RICE framework. We do it regularly, usually every two or three weeks.
After choosing a particular idea, we test it (we use HADI approach).
In the end we focus just more effective channels and improve them, simultaneously continuing to test others.
If I understand you correctly you're talking about building these kinds of features yourself. I'm coming from the point of view of selecting services to integrate so these features are done and ready to use.
Or were you talking about using the RICE framework to prioritise the needs for external services?
Yep. I am sorry. I misunderstood you a bit. The idea was to build these kinds of features yourself.
It is a problem. I have thought of building a service which (slowly, over time) covers most of this ground. Something along the lines of OutSeta: https://www.outseta.com. I would love to have that with the ability to be self-hosted so users had complete control over their data.
If I'm bootstrapping I usually limit external services as much as I can and choose the cheaper Good Enough options.
In terms of building it myself, the bonus there is you potentially have another service you can extract. As an example, I built a SaaS using Kotlin and couldn't find a decent background job manager (distributed across multiple worker instances) so I built my own. It's now quite a mature solution in its own right and I could extract it into an opensource lib or paid service.
I'd also love a self hosted 'quick start' that covers this kind of stuff.
Something about letting someone else store such critical information really puts me off.
Have you ever found yourself limited by the 'good enough' options or feeling like you're spending too much time building these things yourself?
And, if I may, what 'good enough' options have you found that you'd recommend?
If they're good enough for you they might be great for me! :D
I think it's a tricky balance, and it depends on your in-house skills. You see a lot of social media content schedulers. That's something a developer could knock up in a weekend. That would be good enough for me to not even look at a service.
If the time to develop was higher, say weeks or months, then I would absolutely try to offload it onto a service. Again, though, it depends on your strategy. I only work on long-term ideas and am committed for at least 6-12 months so I don't mind spending the time building things out.
I also prefer bespoke software over general solutions because I feel it's a potential competitive advantage. An example here might be community management software. I would far prefer to build custom community/forum software which was deeply integrated with my product than use an off-the-shelf solution.
I try to use Notion for almost everything so that's my good enough in terms of content, tasks, project management, knowledge management, wiki, CRM, etc, etc. I would get by with that until I could afford the more comprehensive/specialised options.
Another good enough in terms of tracking is Plausible analytics. Simple and cheap, and there is a self-hosted option.