I've been working on XLPLAN for a year now and the hardest part for me was NOT TO make the functionality of the app, but to make it SaaS [organisations can have many members; organisation is billed 🏘️].
🤔Now I'm thinking that creating a product from the SaaS-part can save a lot of developers significant time ➡️➡️
Do you think there can be a market need in a Ruby on Rails SaaS boilerplate like this? Any ideas on how I can validate it?
Thank you!
I run a Rails SaaS starter kit since December 2018. Started as something really small, but has gained quite some traction (enough to bring someone in part- time recently while I focus on my other products). I don't (and won't) consider it a business on it's own, but it could help you kickstart a suite of other tools (that can be a business as a whole).
So yes, there's a market need. If you should go down that road depends on your longer term plans.
Cool! Can you share a link to your starter kit?
I run a Javascript boilerplate (https://usegravity.app) and have 235 customers, so there's definitely a market for it.
However, I had first-mover advantage with Javascript, you have some heavy competition from Bullettrain & Railskits which are both built in Rails. The big challenge will be in figuring out how to position yourself against these two kits.
You an also check out https://bullettrain.co/ as another example of this being done. This is similar to Jumpstart Rails that someone mentioned already.
In this case it's simple. Just look at the success of new entrants like Jumpstart Rails.
You can also hear about Chris's experience building it on his Business Time podcast.
It would be interesting to see. Check out Laravel Spark
Laravel Spark is really feature-packed! Looks awesome
Can you elaborate on what it would include that currently available open source tools do not provide? I build everything in Rails so I could be interested in this but I also am pretty satisfied with the plethora of gems available for me to assemble my perfect stack.
there are 3 OK-ish gems for multitenancy:
I've tried using all of them and at a point had a very hard migration from from milia to acts_as_tenant because of increased flexibility.
And turning a set of gems into a working SaaS app takes a lot of time and consideration.
Anyway, a the SaaS boilerplate would looks something like:
Basics:
User can create many Tenants.
Tenant can have many Members.
Members can or can't have a User account.
Members with User accounts have role-based access to a Tenant.
SaaS revenue block:
Tenant has a Pricing Plan
Tenant can be billed based on one or many Pricing parameters (Modular pricing)
Invoicing
Stripe
Subscription management
Additional:
Language support, Time zone support
Ok, so I've created my own boilerplate (alternative to Jumpstart and Bullettrain) and a 175-video course