Starting work on Firestarter!

Hi IndieHackers!

Firestarter is (will be!) a kit for building a SaaS applications quickly.

This project was born mainly for me, to consolidate how I like to create a web application in a way this is professional, fast to build, runs fast, cheap to run at a low scale, low maintenance (no server admin etc.) and easy to extend using code from the community.

Code at: https://github.com/mcapodici/firestarter
Latest code always gets deployed to: https://firestarter-three.vercel.app/

Why?

There are a few of these around already, and with options like DivJoy with all the insane number of choices, why do we need more?

Well this is the odd thing - I am not doing a bunch of competitor analysis and trying to find a gap. Doing that stuff kind of turns me off and I quickly lose motivation! Instead I am building this for myself, sharing the code as open source, and hoping a few people along the way find it useful.

The reason for this is I want a project I am mildly addicted to, that gives me joy to work on. That is the only way to keep at it in the long term.

Since nothing really succeeds in the short term, this is my strategy. Also part of the strategy is I can't lose: if I make no money or even get not one Github star, I can still use the learning and code to build other stuff, so I would have gained. Plus it is a fun project, well for me, so there is that.

How to make money?

Future money could come from donations, hiring myself out at a good rate to help startups use the stack, done-for-you versions, premium features. Although my goal is the free version will always be awesome and you won't need the premium, but it might save you time.

Tech stack?

In terms of tech, I plan to use:

• NextJS - for static site generation and React bundling
• Vercel - for site hosting and some of the continuous deployment
• Firebase
• Tailwind
• Various Tailwind plugins
• Various unit test frameworks
• Github actions - for ensuring tests pass before deployment
• Github codespaces - for personal development, although end users can use their own computer and tooling if they want.

I have learned some of the pain points of using Firebase so this project will avoid those giving examples of doing things without falling into those traps. For example testing locally using the emulator sounds great ... but don't do that! It is frustrating, slow to start up and can crash alot. I am going to find better methods of unit testing in this project and I have a few ideas to try out.

Future ideas:

• Expand the project to be a basic SaaS with signup, login, some personal features, like a todo list, some social features, like discovery of other people, chat etc.
• Then add more examples of how to do different things, so that using the template is more like taking away what you don't need than adding what you do need!
• Maybe offer to help people who want to use this in their startup, initally for free.

Thanks for reading!

It is early days, the repo looks bare, the README is very bare.

I don't expect you to remember this project based on this, but hopefully as it evolves, and you see the progress you might want to say, clone it and try it out (or get your tech cofounder to try it).

If there is a feature you would like to see, feel free to add an issue, would love to hear from you!