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Launched a solid SaaS in 8 hours 🔥

The idea came last night from Guillermo Rauch tweeting that he wished there was a service to search your personal Twitter history (tweets, likes, retweets, filters, etc) using an Algolia-type search UI (super fast search as you type). A whole bunch of people echoed that they'd pay for this type of product.

So I decided to build it overnight.

You can check it out live at twitter-search.io and the full source code is available here.

This entire product was built and launched in around 8 hours.

The only reason it was possible to build a production-quality SaaS MVP this quickly was because Saasify handled all of the tedious parts, including:

  • User accounts
  • Stripe billing
  • Auto-generated marketing site
  • API authentication
  • Twitter OAuth
  • Rate limiting
  • Caching
  • Legal docs
  • Monitoring
  • Lots of glue and book-keeping

All of this functionality and most of the UI was auto-generated from this simple saasify.json config file.

The key to Saasify's power is that it handles all of this SaaS boilerplate for you, allowing you to focus solely on your product's unique value proposition.

Implementation

Twitter Search's unique value prop comes in the form of two pieces: a REST API that handles the core functionality (src/) and a webapp for the UI (web/).

The REST API is written in TypeScript using Koa and tsoa. Each API endpoint receives some custom headers from Saasify's API proxy that let it know everything about the authenticated user making the request.

These headers include:

  • x-saasify-user - String ID of the authenticated user making the API call.
  • x-saasify-plan - String slug of the pricing plan this user is subscribed to.
  • Additional headers specific to Twitter OAuth

The embedded webapp can be viewed from the dashboard and is a standard Create React App written in JavaScript. It's embedded in an iframe within Saasify's auto-generated host SPA which informs the webapp of the details for the authenticated user via a small JS script called saasify-sdk.

The React webapp also uses Chakra UI as a beautiful and lightweight component library.

Of course, this product's core feature set wouldn't be possible without Algolia powering the search and ZEIT hosting the serverless API and embedded static webapp.

Looking to the future

The way this product was built may sound a bit complicated and it's definitely not as simple as we'd like at the moment. Even so, we hope it provides a good example of Saasify's potential to help developers quickly get their ideas off the ground.

Our team is working very hard to improve the developer experience that Saasify provides, and we hope to make this type of integration much simpler in the coming months. Feel free to follow our progress via our open source repo.

Some of the related roadmap items that I'm particularly excited about include:

  • A visual template editor that mirrors the Saasify CLI's functionality.
  • The ability to eject from our hosted SaaS boilerplate and fully customize your product.
  • Breaking out the current monolithic React frontend into embeddable blocks that you can use with any website or framework.
  • Continuing to build a strong community of successful Indie SaaS makers who have used Saasify to get their ideas to market.

If you want to learn more about how Saasify works and experiment with rapidly launching your own SaaS products, check out our docs and feel free to get in touch.

Lastly, I'd love to hear what the IH community thinks of both the product itself and the ability to launch SaaS MVPs with Saasify orders of magnitude faster than with any other approach.

  1. 19

    Rauch: “Hey I’ve got a need. Anybody filling it?”

    Person 1: “I love this idea. I would pay for this”

    Person 2: “I would pay for this”

    Person 3: “I’ve been working on this for months”

    Travis: I built this overnight

    That’s some serious flex. 💪

  2. 6

    NGL Saasify may be the best startup idea i've ever heard. The fact that it's free to start while you're basically taking equity in every SaaS business built on this platform is next level genius. Bravo 👏

    1. 2

      Thanks, Nikola -- this really warmed my heart to read.

      Right now, Saasify is still just a one-man shop but I'm actively looking for collaborators. 😄

  3. 4

    Was following the tweets, you folks killed it!

  4. 2

    @saasify love the transparency on this platform and the ability to "eject".

    I'm trying to wrap my head around monetization however. It seems many of the examples are really helpful and cool to use, but as a user of your platform I would want to monetize.

    Just like Chrome extensions which get tons of downloads but no one really wants to pay for them.

    I think showing examples of your service where money is being earned would be very convincing similar to how IH allows you to connect your Stripe to verify your revenue.

    That could then entice others to list their SaaS on your site (for example as a leaderboard/marketplace) to excite others to want to build apps that also make bank.

    Just some thoughts but I think you guys know most of this and are clearly on to something amazing.

  5. 2

    This is amazing - congrats!

    1. 2

      Thanks, Kunal -- love what you're doing with Founder Phone btw 🙏

      Giving the GH repo a star would mean a lot to me https://github.com/saasify-sh/twitter-search

  6. 2

    This is awesome...I think you're on the right track with creating end to end examples that not only give an api endpoint but a full on saas product. This is going to be tricky to standardize because a service can consume an API in so ways but maybe you can come up with some standard minimal templates based on research which give users a good place to start to customize the final user experience?
    So for example for images it could be an upload image widget followed by a download page where the 'processed' image is sent.

  7. 1

    "The key to Saasify's power is that it handles all of this SaaS boilerplate for you, allowing you to focus solely on your product's unique value proposition."

    I really like this concept (and the name!). It allows me to validate my value prop at minimal cost and with maximum speed. Very interesting!

    • Sae
      Co-founder of CRUU
      CRUU, the best darned React development tool ever invented by humanity this week.
  8. 1

    Huge flex but very admirable!

  9. 1

    That’s awesome! Do share more on the updates as you get them 👍

  10. 1

    Those are some beautiful commit messages in github repo and congrats man!

    1. 2

      Hahaha thanks, man 😄🙏

      I use https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/commit-emoji to generate random emojis for commits a lot of the time btw

      1. 1

        Ah, I’m gonna use this one a lot. Thanks for this!

  11. 1

    You're amazing! wow!

  12. 1

    This is really cool, thanks for sharing your experience!
    May I ask you, what is the business model for Saasify? Thanks!

  13. 3

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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