SaaS Journey - Update #1
I’m on a journey to bootstrap a profitable SaaS application. I want to document it here for others and to hold myself accountable. I’ve been talking about doing this for years and feel like it’s time that I have to make it happen. I’ve made a change in my career to free up time so I can focus on building my own business.
I have had the hardest time with focusing on a single idea. I think of an idea, find a competitor and just quit.
I’ve done that a countless number of times, but this time needs to be different.
I just watched a video where the guy did a 100 day challenge to build a SaaS app. It ultimately took longer than that, but they learned a ton and went on to build a successful software company afterwards.
Even if this first product idea sucks and fails, I’m going to keep working, listening to feedback and adjusting as needed.
I need to get used to shipping a product and seeing it through even if there are stumbling blocks in the process.
My first SaaS idea
A questionnaire/survey builder for small-to-medium size businesses for operators to easily create reusable templates for their employees. There are a million spreadsheets, paper templates, word documents, etc where people do this today. There are massive competitors in this space but I don’t see a lot targeted at this area of the market.
One of the first products I worked on as a developer had a feature like this. It was focused on the Aircraft Maintenance niche. You could use premade reports or build your own inspection types.
I’m planning to build this in a generic way for any business type to easily build and manage questionnaires for their business. They’ll be able to invite employees to the app to complete them. This will mainly be for internal use. I need to simplify the features and map out an MVP for this so I don’t spend 6 months trying to build something that nobody wants to use.
MVP Plan
I’m trying to balance the idea of building something too simple and actually providing value. I want to build the smallest example product that is useful. I don’t necessarily even want to launch something that somebody would buy. I just want to get something useful launched.
If I can build a very simple product that is useful, I can later add all the advanced features like authentication, reports, user roles, image uploads, mobile application, etc.
My current plan is to build a simple landing page that instantly allows you to start building a survey. You’ll be able to save your surveys using your email address. I’ll store them in your local storage too. (Very simple)
I could build the survey as a JSON format, base64 encode it and use that as the share link.
- No authentication
- No complex user roles
- No database
The problem though…is this even useful? Will it be so damn simple that it’s useless? Probably. Should I still do it? I don’t know.
Here’s an overly simplified example sketch of what I’m thinking.