SaaS Forge

Finally! It was not easy. After some splash several months ago, we had just occasional stars, but it was growing steadily. The stats can be found here:
https://star-history.t9t.io/#saasforge/open-source-saas-boilerpate

The story begins in far 2001 when one of our close relative was diagnosed with lymphoma. Doctors treated him but it was not enough and we tried to gather money for the bone marrow transplantation. Unfortunately, we failed.

But since then I was helping the charity fun that helped him whenever I could. And now, when I started making money on my own project, I committed to giving 10% of my profit. I also want to tell people about the fund - in the hope maybe it can encourage other indiehackers and entrepreneurs to support charity.

Here is the page I added describing who we are helping and why: https://www.saasforge.dev/charity

Well, I wouldn't call it a "milestone" or "achievements". But, anyway, I downed pricing and now you can have the full SaaS boilerplate "just" for $239. It may be a huge sum for somebody, I know but it really saves you a lot of time + 1-year updates really worth it (In My Non-Humble Opinion :))))

Today I found we have the first sponsor of this project ever! The sponsorship is done by the Github sponsors page (they recently launched this feature). This is our Github sponsorship page. And here is where we list our sponsors.

How we got him

Sergio asked several questions on the boilerplate and I found there are some lacks in the documentation, also the process of installation of Mac is slightly different from that on Windows. So, I went through all the steps and found problems that could occur.

So, thanks to Sergio we not only got sponsorship but also improved our user experience :)

I created this article https://www.saasforge.dev/blog/how-much-is-to-build-saas-application not only to tell more about my SaaS boilerplate but also to explain why it's not a free solution.

I found many people, used to free open-source solutions, don't realize there are still many other, paid solutions that can solve their problems.

I created the SaaS boilerplate because I saw how time and money consuming may be the process of creating SaaS and give all the calculations in this article.

It took several weeks to finish the commercial version of the SaaS boilerplate (I also had a couple of private project in parallel).

The main feature is interface for payment (integrated with Stripe). Using just several environment variables you are able now to specify many different scenarios. For example:

• the payment method should be entered by user during the registration
• user may enter the payment information later if the selected plan has a trial period
• use must select a plan
• if user doesn't select a plan the default plan is assigned automatically etc.

Another feature is the admin dashboard. You can see all your users on one page and see specific details for any user. You also can disable/enable users.

https://www.saasforge.dev/pricing
https://www.saasforge.dev/features

We released the first version of it on December, 17th. The post on HN suddenly moved us to the front-page and it's when we collected most of the stars on GitHub (stats here http://hnrankings.info/21818323/).

I didn't do anything special because I was crazy busy with a couple of new custom projects that are built on top of the boilerplate. I even forgot to tweet :)

Another surge happened when I posted the project on BetaList and suddenly it was a "trending" startup :)
https://betalist.com/startups/saas-forge

So, hopefully more stars are coming :)

Wow, that's interesting - because today I found SaaS Forge among other "trending startups" on www.betalist.com . I wonder, what led to it. Overall, I see much more interest for this version of my SaaS boilerplate. The previous one, called "SaaS Idea" first and then "CaravelKit" - a similar concept, but frontend was Vue-based (not ReactJS) - never get close to this.

But anyway, I thank everyone who supports my project, and Happy New Year and great new achievements next year!

Wow, I just had an email from them with the link https://betalist.com/startups/saas-forge

It took less than 2 weeks! So, I wonder how they determine the period of waiting and why it's so different for different startups (I had a project that got featured too but much later).

Anyway, if you like the project's idea, please like it. THANKS!!

... on GitHub in just one day.

This short article is just a trial to analyse what happened and why, without giving any piece of advice.

Yesterday I wanted to create a post on HN and I did it but then it seemed to me I did something wrong and I deleted the post. When I recreated it again, I saw the message "Sorry, that story was previously submitted.". I wrote to moderators and they replied "The repost restriction lasts for 8 hours". Well, okay, not a problem.
Let's do it tomorrow.

Right before (or after?) I posted the link to my GitHub repo I saw this epic post https://www.indiehackers.com/product/reader-mode/-LwHtDRxHXMA9GpiSXWO and tried to figure out which title would be the best one. I noticed that the encouraging to some action would probably work better and name my post "Create your next SaaS with Python and ReactJS".

Suddenly, boom! - I had comments, point, stars on GitHub - I could hardly believe it happened!

I did my best result ever - #9 on HN - and then it started dropping at some point (right now the post has 93 points).
Now, I would like to understand, what was going on and why.

I'm asking this question because I already created open-source products (the same SaaS boilerplates) and posted info on HN but never gained such results. The maximal amount of point on HN I earned before was just... yes, 3! Against 64 today (Upd: 95 now). And it never led to so many stars on GitHub.

Okay, I think the reasons are:

1. The title of the post was pretty "sexy" and intriguing (thanks Ryzal, again!) (until the moderators (?) changed it to boring "SaaS application boilerplate" what I think led to the dropping the post down.

2. This product looks much better than all previous versions. I worked really hard on UI and design (I'm not designer at all) and should admit I'm proud of the result :)) (even there is still a lot of things to do :)

3. I used ReactJS in this project for the front-end (previous version used Vue.js). Even although I still like Vue.js I should admit it's much less popular than ReactJS, may it makes the whole project to look a little bit more appealing.

HN stats is here: http://hnrankings.info/21818323/

That's it, for now, thanks for reading!