I started building a SaaS in public for the next 4 months

For the next few months, I'm making a new SaaS app from scratch and I'll cover all parts of it, including design, coding, marketing, sales and everything else you need to succeed.

If you want to follow along, I'll be tweeting updates every day at www.twitter.com/satvikpendem

1. What's the idea?

It's a group scheduling app. You've probably used Calendly or Doodle before but in my experience, they absolutely suck when coordinating disparate groups of people together.

I wanted to pick something where I knew I had a real problem, not something where I thought other people had problems and I simply had to build them a solution, without knowing anything about their domain of experience. I did that before and it did not go well, unsurprisingly.

2. What's the use case?

Imagine you're wrangling together a sale with a client. That client might need to ask its vendors or board members to join. Now you have 3 or 4 parties who all need to be in the same call. It should be easy to do but it just isn't.

I run a sales agency (https://closerlabs.org) and it's been a similar situation. I've had to send a lot of back and forth emails to everyone so that they can indicate when they'd want to meet, and I have to find the subset of times that work for everyone manually. It was starting to waste a lot of time for me. I just wanted to send out a link that everyone could use to put in their availability.

3. What's the business model?

A few dollars a month per user, comparable to other tools in the space. The main innovation will be the UX, making the tool much easier to use than the competition.

I had been working on a todo list + calendar app that I was going to monetize but when I asked people what they'd be willing to pay, they said "maybe 5 dollars a month, but even that sounds a little expensive so maybe 3 dollars a month." It was then that I realized B2C is a terrible market to be in (unless you're Facebook) and that B2B, or at least prosumer, was much better.

4. What's the timeline?

I'll be building the MVP over September to at least have a barebones product I can use personally, then it might take another month to get something other can use smoothly as well.

Once the core MVP is built, I'll be using @yongfook's method of 2 week sprints, one week coding and one week marketing, as he has said this pattern is really what catapulted him into 5 figure MRR.

Targeting December to get to 1k MRR for me though.

5. How will you get customers?

A combination of organic outreach, personal networks, blogging, guest posts, etc. No ads or paid methods for now.

6. A bonus gif/video on what I worked on today: https://imgur.com/fSNafVk

As mentioned at the beginning, if you want to follow along, I'll be tweeting updates every day at www.twitter.com/satvikpendem