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My SaaS tool development journey thus far

Hello fellow SaaSpreneurs,

I thought this may be a good time to share the progress of my SaaS tool . My intention is to help those who may be here looking for answers on how to get started with SaaSing :-)

Quick Intro:

KeeyBoo is a B2B SaaS tool that helps businesses keep track of their network infrastructure documentation. Think of it as confluence for network engineers
If you ask me for a business model right, i would laugh at you. I am a one man shop trying to be as lean as possible.

Background:

I have zero coding experience with no time to learn coding. I already have a lot of networking stuff to learn so it was an easy decision to start looking for a freelance developer.

I started off documenting what problem i am trying to solve. As a network engineer, i have used a lot of network documentation tools but most of them are super bulky with features i don't really need. Most of these tools sell network automation stuff that works really well BUT miss out the most important component, good ol manual documentation. This is where KeeyBoo comes in.

Planning:

Before doing anything, i started off reading a tone of SaaS documentation and articles to get myself up to speed. I had to learn different architectures and bootstrapping articles.

Idea Validation:

I wanted to see if my idea was viable in the market. I talked to a few network engineers and got impressive feedback. They wanted to know more about my tool. I setup a landing page to capture some emails and tell people more about the tool. So far i have 9 people in my audience list, a few followers on my LinkedIn and Facebook pages. This is with me putting in almost zero effort. I like it already

UX/UI designs:

Knowing how important UX is, i had to get someone to help out with the UX stuff. I paid a recent bootcamp graduate $100 and took me through what i may need to get started. I got her off Linkedin with a post and #UXdesign #UIdesign hashtags. She recommended hiring a designer to do wireframes and mockups. I got someone on fiverr to do the wireframes and one to do the mockups from upwork

Development:

The tool is still in development. I got a fullstack web developer from upwork after knowing all my requirements below.

  • Architecture -      Multi-Tenant
  • DB Architecture: Single DB multi-tenant design
  • Database -           Postgress or MongoDB
  • Front-End -          Vue.js or React
  • Backend -            Node.js (express) or Django open to suggestions but no PHP
  • Cloud: -               AWS, Linode but preferably DigitalOcean
  • Subscription:     Stripe
  • Authentication: Auth0 with single sign on support and MFA
  • CMS: Laravel or Magento. Prefers Laravel

He is doing a great job so far.

Budget

I have spent so far $2600 and I see more money getting spent on cloud deployment.

I will keep you posted with how things are progressing.

Yours trully,

A happy SaaSer

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    A lesson learned for me with my most recent product, don’t trust email lists. If you aren’t talking to the people who signed up and getting pre-orders, don’t treat them as future buyers.

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