These are the tools 100+ successful SaaS founders use and why.

Do not fall for the delusion to think that tools make a successful business.
It does not matter. You succeed if you make something people want. That's it.

I collected the tools which give me a lot of value in their free plan.
https://freeplan.app

Building something valuable is mostly totally independent from the tools you use.

I had an idea along these lines, but it wasn't a newsletter (and I haven't done anything about it yet). My idea was to create a website, techstackenvy.com. The idea was like yours, where people share the tech stacks they used to build something. My idea wasn't to sell the information to the developers who are interested in it, but to make money from tech tool providers wanting to showcase/promote their tech (or companies wanting to promote their use of tech). I don't personally like the newsletter approach. When I'm researching a tech stack I don't want a weekly dribble of information. I want to see all my options laid out.

Here are a couple specific ideas I had about it.

• I think people are often interested in specific worries that a tech stack can possibly help them solve. There are some things you can do yourself (and a tool might make slightly easier), and other things that are just plain hard, and you really need a tool. For instance, handling user authentication correctly (allowing federated login, as well as traditional user-name and password creation) with password security etc. is a hard thing to do yourself. It was a revelation for me to learn that firebase offered all of that for free. (In comparison, Amazon cognito looked more difficult to use and potentially expensive.) So what I'd like to see is an index into technology by the particular problem you're trying to solve -- like a big table of problem x technology where you can click on cells to see how a given solution to a given problem is working for people.

• I had an idea that there could be a kind of "common demo application" that could be implemented with various tech stacks so you can really get an apples-to-apples comparison. Like, maybe it's some app where people share pictures of their pets or whatever. It would have all of these required features -- user accounts with authentication, session management, user uploadable content of text/images/video, private messaging, search/paging, mobile-friendly design, and so on and so on. So there would be this official "requirements spec" for the app, and then people could implement the app with various tech stacks -- all the way from different back end hosting options to different front-end animation tools. As I say, this would allow an apples-to-apples comparison, and it would allow a tech provider to show off how much better their tool is (simpler to use? less code? faster? more secure, etc.) as compared to other tools for the exact same application. The other thing I like about the demo app is that it would provide a complete end-to-end open source example that people could start with in building their actual apps.

That was my dream, and it was overwhelming to imagine making it and trying to grow interest in it, so I haven't.

Check out stackshare.io, which is similar to what I was imagining, but not quite what I want.

I disagree with some of the comments tbh. I think this could work well if each person you essentially interviewed about their tools provides enough content for a fairly lengthy, in depth and insightful blog post for example. One of these a week I'd read for sure.

I'm by no means a successful founder, I'm still building my first micro-SaaS. I've gone through a bunch of JavaScript front end frameworks and backend options (Flask, Django, Express, Laravel) you name it.

I finally found a tech stack that has sky rocketed my productivity, one that I stayed away from for a long time (VueJs + Nest Jst + PostGres + AWS ). If you asked me why I ended up with this particular stack we could be here for a long time, and for someone thinking about getting into coding or struggling with options for which tools to use for their side project: I'd be shocked if there weren't nuggets of information they would pick up and see value in your content.

In short I think you could provide tones of value with this but I also don't think a newsletter makes sense, podcast or blog I think would work. You could target newcomers and monetize with courses for each tool (just and off the top idea)

Hope this helps and good luck!

Hi Jop, the main issue I see with your hypothesis is that the audience you are targeting is not the most easy to monetize.

I find, that at that point it is a bigger concern to find users for your product/service than learning to use more. So maybe the opportunity to exchange services might be better.

As the business from your users grow, as well as your user base. You might start cashing from advertisement, but personally I would be surprised if it happens in less than six months.

I like your idea, about sharing tools. So maybe that could be your headline, so focus on one tool, promote other Indie Tools (to attract readers), and in that case yes, offer the HOW and WHY of these tools, but focus on money making tools, just as GumRoad.

Start by selling individual newsletters, just as Dru from trends.vc and spend honest 40 hour research into them and you might be into something. To me, the best way to validate an idea is using Twitter.

This is my service I'm always happy to help fellow Indie Hackers, so just schedule a meeting if interested.

Honestly you could probably sell this although I really don't see any value in it. Who cares what tool someone used? That has nothing to do with their success.

While interesting, it don't think you could keep content fresh for long enough time. It would become repetitive.

In my case, I think I would have been more interested if you showed me how you can build X with Y. E.g. a ecommerce store with bubble. However, there might be some similar projects in the market... But a learning base like that would be nice, yes!

Cheers!