SaaS Manual

Learn to build "Software as a Service" products from scratch

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SaaS Manual is the one stop shop to learn how to build SaaS products. I have built many services, the last being Cloud9 IDE which was acquired by AWS. And I will share the lessons I learned with you.

January 3, 2021 Launched auto-generated Changelog

Today, I launched an autogenerated Changelog page for SaaS Manual: https://saasmanual.com/changelog/

The generator reads the git history and looks for certain merge commits in the format (type: module) Title. It then collects all of those and renders a nice list of recent changes.

I will cover the how-to in a later SaaS Manual post.

Happy new year!!

December 27, 2020 Launched "Code Embedding"

Over the past days, I wondered how I can best reference source-code in SaaS Manual posts.

Usually, code examples would go stale as the underlying code changes. I was looking for ways to help prevent this.

Here is what I did and here is how it looks like in an article:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EqPisLAW8AApc3N?format=jpg&name=large

You can mark code snippets in source, like this:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EqPjFTvW4AUFJHl?format=jpg&name=medium

You can then reference the snippet in your Markdown file like this. Optionally you can also specify a git repo if the source is not part of the main repo.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EqPjcUzW8AAJoZI?format=png&name=900x900

And as you previously saw, the output is rendered like this. When you click on "View Code", it takes you to the source file location of this snipped.

Example: https://saasmanual.com/articles/moving-to-aws/

Markdown plugin source: https://github.com/saasmanual/website/blob/main/src/lib/embed-source/index.js

Enjoy 馃帀

December 26, 2020 Built small SEO helper

I started diving into SEO for SaaS Manual. After signing up for a Moz trial account, I thought to review the current issues and start automating the checks as part of the Markdown build step.

I built a very simple plugin, for now only checking the description and keywords. It generates the following output:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/770537236676345869/792382520175493130/Screenshot_2020-12-26_at_14.24.55.png

You can find the plugin here https://github.com/saasmanual/website/blob/main/src/lib/seo/index.js

December 24, 2020 Added Wikipedia summaries to tools pages

Now when I add a new tool that I use for SaaS Manual, I can easily embed Wikipedia summaries. For this, I wrote a simple Markdown plugin that fetches the summary from the Wikipedia API.

You can see this in action here:

https://saasmanual.com/tools/aws/

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/770537236676345869/791650974325800980/Screenshot_2020-12-24_at_13.58.06.png?width=1480&height=1347

Enjoy and have a wonderful Christmas today!

December 15, 2020 Sent "Moving to AWS" Email 馃帀

I finally managed to send out the next email. It took a little bit longer as I was working on other projects as well, but here it is!

In this email, I am describing how I moved SaaS Manual away from Notion to AWS. I am diving into the infrastructure setup, how I use the AWS CDK and many other topics.

SaaS Manual is now running on AWS. Here is how: https://lnkd.in/gsdQRpS

Enjoy!!

December 6, 2020 Moved away from Notion

Whoop whoop, I moved the SaaS Manual page away from Notion to AWS.

Notion was the perfect starting ground for launching the idea. Moving on, it didn't provide enough ways for me to build the new site and explain what I did in the process.

Everything can be found on GitHub as well https://github.com/saasmanual

November 10, 2020 Sent "Launching on Product hunt" Email

Today's email covered how I launched SaaS Manual on Product Hunt. I am also covering my thoughts around launching products in general and the pitfalls you might want to watch out for.

The email went out to 766 subscribers and you can access the content here if you are not subscribed to the list:

https://saasmanual.com/2020-11-10-Launching-on-Product-Hunt-4fdb7ef738be4e7f8928731002350177

Enjoy!

November 3, 2020 Sent "How to build a landing page on Notion" Email

Another SaaS Manual email went out. This time I am explaining what I did to launch the SaaS Manual landing page using Notion.so.

Because I used Notion, I was able to launch the landing page without having to build any infrastructure and just focus on the content.

Have fun!

https://saasmanual.com/2020-11-03-Building-a-website-on-Notion-bf98c2cb108e4370b291b375b377eb18

October 28, 2020 Set up Discord server to build a community

I've set up a Discord server after I asked whether this was something that people would enjoy.

You can join the community here: https://discord.gg/gGTD6eX

I will post regular updates there and you can ask away about anything related to building SaaS products. Have fun!

About

SaaS Manual is the one stop shop to learn how to build SaaS products. I have built many services, the last being Cloud9 IDE which was acquired by AWS. And I will share the lessons I learned with you.