HaloAuras

I built a multi-tenant SaaS in nine months. I am a vet tech.

I am a veterinary technician. I have no formal computer science background. I started building this in the notes app on my phone.

Nine months later it is a live multi-tenant SaaS with a custom CI invariant system, and I built it alone. Public signup opened a month ago. I have no paying customers yet.

The thing I was building toward is narrow. Paid advertising solved attribution years ago. Every dollar traces back to the ad that earned it. Organic content never got the same treatment, so it gets judged on impressions and cut first when budgets tighten. If you run content for someone else's business, the question you eventually get asked is whether it is working, and until now the honest answer was that nobody could tell you.

So the product runs the content operation end to end and then attaches each sale to the specific post that earned it. Not the channel. The post.

Here is what I actually want to write about, because it is the part nobody warned me about.

The code was not the bottleneck. I can build. What I could not do was tell whether something was done.

I spent five days this year convinced a screen needed restyling. Tokens, palette, button treatment. Every fix landed, every test passed, and every time I opened the page it was still wrong. It turned out the flow was not a styled version of the design at all. It was a different flow. Nobody had ever compared them as screens, only as values, and a full green test suite had been agreeing with itself for a week.

That is the failure I kept hitting in different costumes. A check that verifies something adjacent to the thing it claims to verify. A guard that passes for a reason unrelated to what it is guarding. A document that says a rule exists while nothing enforces it. I now assume every green tick is worth exactly what its last deliberate failure proved, and nothing more.

The other thing: every defect that mattered was found by me opening the product and looking at it. Not by a test. I would build for a week, walk the flow, and find the real problem in four minutes. That gap between what the suite knew and what I could see by looking is the whole reason this took nine months instead of six.

I am not through it. No customers, no traffic, and I have spent more days demoralised than I expected to. But it runs, and someone other than me has used it, and that is further than the version of me that opened a notes app got anywhere near expecting.

Happy to answer anything about building solo without a CS background, or about the attribution problem specifically if you run content for clients.