Technologies I use to build my SaaS
Hello fellow creators 👋
Quick Intro about me:
I am Prasanna working as a Freelance Developer/DevOps engineer, also Creator of these products,
and many others that didn't see the daylight.
Speed is the key in Indie hacking world. Time it takes from Ideation to MVP should be fast enough for the product to sustain.
I feel using/knowing about tools will help a lot to build products quickly and iterating on them.
These are my goto technologies / SaaS products:
Product Building:
- Hosting platform - Vercel (preferred), AWS
- Technology - NextJS with server components (preferred), Python with Flask
- Database - Postgresql (preferred), Supabase, PlanetscaleDB
- Error Notification - Honeybadger
- UI Template - LandingFolio
- Styling - Tailwind CSS
- Authentication - Custom Code, Auth0
Marketing:
- Logo & Design creations - Canva, Picyard
- Design tool - Figma
- Places to promote my product - Twitter, Reddit
- Testimonials - Famewall
- Video casts - Screen Studio
- Email Integration - SendGrid
Analytics & Others:
- Analytics - Vercel Analytics
- Payment Integration - Stripe
Mine is not ideal and I see there are some frictions while creating new products. But trying to get comfortable with the toolsets to use.
What are your go-to tools for Building, Marketing & Analytics?
Trending on Indie Hackers
My stack is -
NextJS on Vercel
Radix with tailwind for - react components
Supabase - Auth
Supabase - DB
Resend for email in app
Cloudflare Workers for server less stuff, though supabase function are also good.
ChatGPT4 for so many tasks.
In-App & On site Doc's & How to's - Dog fooding my product.
Notion for everything else :)
Nice. These are the tools I have on the list to experiment.
Radix UI, Resend for email.
I use Notion here and there. But not a pro user. I think I am missing out on something !!
Here is some personal suggest
https://tradly.app - no code builder to build marketplaces and custom user generated applications
Interesting one. I haven't used any no code tool before. But this has the option to start with no code & have custom code as well.
Will spend sometime this weekend 👍
+1 for NextJS. It's not for everyone, but it's nice when a framework goes ahead and makes a bunch of those decisions you'd spend a few days each agonizing over, like even just where to put page views vs components vs api routes, etc.
Yes, Twodave and it's getting adapted at a much faster pace.
These are the reasons why I moved to NextJS
I'm seeing Tailwind CSS everywhere, but never tried it. Any advantage of using tailwind instead of other styling frameworks?
Because it's very simple to get started, there are a lot of free components & designs available for Tailwind. Also learning curve is very small, if you know css, you can learn tailwind in a day.
Great suggestions Prasanna! LandingFolio was an interesting find. Don't you find AWS expensive btw?
Yes definitely AWS is expensive. I got into Startup Activator program and got some credits.
Planning to move to https://www.hetzner.com/ soon
I use Wholesale Internet and Cloudsouth for cheap servers
Oh! That makes sense then
we could also add the php language
Sure. I think all the languages are good enough to build our polished CRUD application 😂
What ORM do you use?
In Python, I am using Alembic for migration & SQLAlchemy for the ORM layer
I appreciate the assistance provided by numerous tools.
These are awesome. Thanks for posting your tech stack.
For findcool.tools (current project), I decided to keep it light and went with:
But for most other projects I typically use the following stack:
For marketing and content creation:
This toolset is great. I want to have my own newsletter too. Will check out Beehiiv 👍
By the way, I looked at findcool tools. Awesome work John !!!
Thank you!!
I'm curious, why didn't you mention GCP? Have you mainly been using AWS?
Yes, Edwin. It's mostly because of the AWS Credits I have.
I am planning to move to Hetzner soon. Its more cost effective.
This is the most useful post I have ever come across, as I am learning Next.js and Flask (using ChatGPT). I am eagerly looking forward to any YouTube tutorial that includes topics like database, development, etc. and the complete process. Also, don't forget to promote your product on Victrays.com/submit-tool for marketing purposes.😅
Sure will checkout Victrays.
Also this Udemy course was very helpful to learn about NextJS & OpenAI - https://www.udemy.com/course/next-js-ai
So nice! There are some tools and technologies that I've never heard of before, so it seems like there's a lot of room for improvement in my skills.
Yes. From the comments, I am learning about more tools to use. I think the idea is to get familiar with one tool in each category & focus more on building 👍
All of dem
Nice. Its a popular stack now
Fascinating!Would love to hear more about your marketing and promoting efforts. How did you go about getting your users?
Here's my current stack- I use similar tech.
Hosting: Vercel + AWS
Stack: Next.js + Python
Database: AWS RDS + DynamoDB
Authentication - Custom Code, Auth0
Design: Figma + Midjourney
Promotion: still figuring that out
AI: Pytorch
Email: AWS SES or Resend
Analytics: Google Analytics
Thanks, Pablo. I am very new to Marketing, but realized that it is the key to a successful product.
This is what I am doing,
As this is a B2C product, trying to do these. What are your marketing efforts, Pablo?
@worldofprasanna So far, I've done a few launches on Hacker news, relevant communities, and Product Hunt. Most of my income comes from word-of-mouth/networking since my consulting is what pays the bills, but I'm doing my best to figure out how to get users for consumer/developer products from digital channels.
Certainly! However, I'll need more information about the specific technologies you use to build your SaaS (software as a service) in order to tailor the reply. Could you please provide some details about the programming languages, frameworks, databases, and other tools you utilize?