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I built a SaaS company over a weekend because I didn't like the price of the tool I needed
by
Annabel
https://medium.com/@justincloud/i-didnt-like-the-price-so-i-built-a-competitor-over-a-weekend-here-is-what-happened-6309a2a3a761
Great idea, however, this post is spam. Why link to a Medium paywall? It's disrespectful to this platform and does not provide any value to Indie Hackers. I would at the very least inform users that this directs to a paywall. The Indie Hacker community should be a place of authenticity.
Original poster here. I didn't post this to Indie hacker, somebody else did, didn't mean to come off as spammy.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
Nice 👍 I like your writing style. It is very motivational. What I do not like is that you published it on medium :( Not only do I have no account there, and I hate opening it in an incognito window just to bypass the paywall. I think that way you help medium build the content and not yourself and your brand. You should go with your own blog, on your own domain/your company domain. Just my 2 cents.
The same goes for your reliance on Linkedin...
Original poster of the medium post here. Thank you for the compliment! I've emailed you the link for free access. I respect your opinions and normally agree with them, especially for a professional author. I'm not, however, a professional author. Instead I am an economist by background, engineer by night and boring business person by day. I am experimenting with the paywall feature to learn a little more about the economics of writing. I turned it on two days ago and so far have earned enough money to pay for all of the startup costs for the SaaS company the article is about. I'm honestly shocked at how well Medium pays out. Perhaps I should write about that 🤷♂️. Feel free to also become a member here: https://medium.com/@justincloud/membership :)
I am still looking for a problem that I can fix and help others.
Ultimately if the product/tool is not helping others or not adding any value, no one gonna use it.
Always the hard part @nathn_code! This eBook/Notion could be useful to help you out with the early stuff (and beyond). 💪 Let me know if you take a look, I'd be happy to help any way if I can
Amazing work ... So, can we summarize it to something like an org-specific URL shortening service?
Further, had a few doubts .... is the input taken up from the user in the extension which company does he belong to ... and then how are you verifying the employee?
Yup, org-specific url shortening service is as good as any description.
We don't do any authentication in the extension. It is literally one line of code: rewrite go/(.*) -> goto.tools/(\1).
We validate the authed user server side leveraging firebase authentication.
For o-auth (Google workspace, o365, etc) or SSO'd (Okta, ping, etc.) orgs , the owning org is listed as an attribute by firebase authentication. For e-mail based, it uses the @domain.com. We then look this up on the server side and return the record that matches the org/link_text. So goto.tools/mail will resolve to different URLs based on the logged in user's organization. For public links, we simply look up the domain (i.e. company.goto.tools) and then lookup the company's record to see if the URL is public. If yes redirect. For custom domains (i.e. go.company.com) we simply lookup the domain.
Hope this helps. I'll probably document how we externalized auth in 3 minutes in a future post. Honestly it was a check box config on GCP, leveraging identity aware proxy, using firebase authentication as the identity source. This lets us easily setup oAuth login + add any company's SSO config (like Okta). Right now future SSO configs are a GUI config, but we can easily make it API driven for fully automated SSO setup.
Seems cool. Thanks for the detailed answer.
Thank you for this valuable information. Many people make an excuse for why they never started their business. The fact that you were able to create your business while watching your children is impressive. You did not let anything stop you from getting what you wanted.
This is a great motivation to build and create!
I feel the same so many times, but not actually put the effort to build haha
Great article. The best thing I liked was the cost details of running this SaaS company.
Impressive story as well as the list of tools shared which are very helpful to know. Thanks
Very impressive!
Like the idea of combining a Browser extension with such a service! Do you plan on providing a Firefox & Safari extension in the future as well?
That's kind of the maker energy I've seen in many tech conferences.
I've just started coding and your story is really inspirational. I hope I can do the same one day. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Very impressive! Wish I could do this. And the fact you've automated everything so there is little to no future input needed👏
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
This comment was deleted 4 years ago