Baseline

I launched the Baseline homepage and an invite based launch program today. Why invite based? I think it is important to build relationships with the Baseline users first. So opening up the product slowly and improving it for existing customers is my plan to build a sustainable product which users will hopefully love. Once I have largely positive feedback from users I will open up Baseline to the general public. Go have a look here and sign up for an invite https://baseline.dev

I was able to get everything up and running in a few days. Here is what I did: I setup the API / Website using a simple Node / Koa setup. Each is their own service which you can access at https://baseline.dev and https://api.baseline.dev. I built the UI using TailwindCSS/UI, this really helped me to move fast 🙏. I built the Baseline CLI using Node as well and use pkg to bundle it into a binary which you can download. It seems impossible to sign this binary so I might move to something else in the future. I am running on AWS and use the AWS CDK to define the infrastructure as code. You can find an abstracted version of this here for your own project https://github.com/nonken/hurricane. You can find the source for the CLI here https://github.com/baseline-dev/cli.

I thought a lot about how to launch Baseline without building an entire system, handling users, payments, managing infrastructure, databases, etc. I also didn't want to store any customer credentials for their SaaS services unless I have a clear security threat model. My conclusion was to initially ask users to install Baseline on their computer. This means that users can store the credentials on their computer and then talk to a stateless API. This also allowed me to launch without a database.

During my time at different startups and large companies I have seen time and again that there is a general lack of overview on who has access to the different SaaS services teams are using. A new member would be onboarded to the team, added to services. After some years, the member would change teams or leave. And now it would be a wild guess game what access that person had.

The goal of Baseline is to take that pain away. You simply connect to all the SaaS services you are using and Baseline will provide you with a powerful overview of who has access to which services.

With this you can now enforce stricter security policies such as MFA for everybody and reviewing and auditing access regularly.