SaaS MVP nearly ready but already have competitors...
Hi everyone,
I've spent the last 4 months hacking on my SaaS side project.
Image Automation as a Service - users design a template and then can automate the image creation process based on some data (website pages, quotes , tweets etc). This can be applied to loads of platforms! I first thought of the idea back in 2017 and since then I've seen a couple of other "competitor" sites launched doing the same thing. I think that the founders of these are on here too... Due to reasons unbeknownst to myself I've left it til now to finally get my A** in gear and build this thing! From your experience, is this OK that I've got newly founded competitors?
I do have some really amazing benefits/features over the competitors:
placid app
https://www.bannerbear.com
I'm launching in API/Zapier access in a couple of days. I keep seeing the progress updates from Bannerbear and it keeps driving me to get mine to market since the essential idea of the product has already been validated..
Best,
Competition is a good indicator that your product idea has demand. Usually the market is big enough to accommodate a bunch of competition.
This is good for the users too because now they can choose a service that caters to their specific requirement.
Also competition keeps you on your toes to innovate and work hard.
Check how the launch of BannerBear "helped" you complete and launch your product 😃
Thank your for your reply! My thoughts exactly :D And it’s true, that even though a product has been built to some extent before, it can always be done better way and solve different problems :D
Are you considering SPA sites too (with no server side rendering)?
bannerbear doesn't work with SPA
This is something that's close to my heart too! Could we sync up and chat about this and how you would see it best working for your sites? Are you using react-helmet? What would be your use case with no SSR since the pages wouldn't be indexed by Search Engines without it right?
All the best,
Kyle
Google is capable to index SPA pages.. And it's doing for some time too.
They are using Chrome (headless?) to crawl. It doesn't index that fast like a normal page though.
No i am not using react-helmet, i'm using a custom component for dynamic title and meta description (so i guess it's similar to react-helmet).
I cannot use SSR since I'm using PHP for backend and no node.js there.
I don't know the trend of SPA pages and how much % they are going SSR too
I did hear about that actually! Your dynamic meta tags component could hook into the socialimage.app API to generate custom images based on your title / images :) With the Social Image App there is no queuing for images so as soon as you request for a new image to be generated it gets to work. The only response you will get is the image url - no pending status and requirement of timeouts and webhooks like other solutions...
I'd happily set you up with this and see what you think?
We can test and see how it goes :). I will contact you via twitter for details.
Sure :) no problem!