I am building my best SaaS ever. How you can do it too.
I am building my best SaaS ever. How you can do it too.
When I sold my SaaS Userdesk in March, I needed a new SaaS product.
It is unusual for me not to have one, at least since 2022.
Shipped.club, my Next.js SaaS Boilerplate, is an amazing product, but it’s not like serving your customers daily and generating recurrent revenues.
As you may know, I am active on Twitter / X daily. I love to talk to people and there’s an amazing community of indie hackers, very supportive and friendly.
When you start publishing content, every social platform begins to show its limitations.
You need to plan your content and schedule it.
You need productivity tools to engage more efficiently.
You need to repurpose your content and check the performance with advanced analytics.
After the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, it is not more an open platform like it was before.
The access to the Twitter / X API now costs an exaggerated amount of money (from $5k/month to $42k/month), which makes it impossible for indie makers to build products for the platform. It’s a shame, I loved those old days (I built two SaaS for Twitter in the past).
But there’s a new platform, launched in July 2023 called Threads.
I started using Threads a couple of months ago, and I like the vibe. More and more people are using and enjoying it. It looks like the old Twitter—I like it.
You might hate Meta for various reasons (I don’t to be honest) but it’s undeniable that it’s a good opportunity for me.
Why? Because I know the domain, I know the features the customers need (because I am a user of social content schedulers myself), and I know how to market it (because I’ve observed many similar products growing on Twitter).
I don’t know what are your impressions, but it looks like the perfect situation to start working on a new SaaS.
And, for this occasion, I have a co-founder. I met Mattia Righetti on Twitter, he’s a former marketer (while I’m a tech guy), and he knows social platforms as well.
I already started building the SaaS product, and it’s coming so nicely—I’m pumped.
The product is called BlackTwist, and it will be publicly available at the end of June.
If you want to grow on a new promising social platform, I recommend you to join our waitlist, because we have some special news for the early adopters.
But how can you be in a similar situation?
These are the main ingredients that can improve the chance of success.
You know the problem to solve—you’ve used similar tools in the past and you know which problems to solve.
The problem is already validated by the market—when a founder starts a product with an idea not present in the market yet, there are two possibilities:
the founder is a genius visionary
or the product doesn’t have a market because it doesn’t solve a painful problem
Which one of the two options is more probable in your opinion? (spoiler alert, the second).
If your product idea has these characteristics, you can start building on auto-pilot, and make a great SaaS product.
If not, it doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed, but you’re taking more risks.
Now, let’s talk about product design skills.
There are three things that helped me improve my skills:
I worked with a strong product designer for 1.5 years
I read the book Refactoring UI
I observe and use great products, and take inspiration from them
Shipped.club updates
Talking about my other product, Shipped.club, I’m celebrating the $25k total revenues in May.
The revenues, month over month, are dropping, and that was expected since I started a full-time job in April, and I can’t focus on marketing like before (remember, marketing is everything).
So far I’m excited about this product, and I’ll keep supporting it in the long term.
Since I have a new stable income, the revenues of Shipped.club represent a nice side income, that I’m going to reinvest in different ways— ads for the product, and personal long-term investments, like ETFs.
Whenever you are ready, I can help you with your indie hacking journey in a couple of ways.
Learn how to Build and Launch your Micro SaaS with my free email course.
7 lessons in 7 days in your inbox, 650+ developers already joined, start learning today.
Shipped.club is the Next.js SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
210 indie makers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!
That’s all for today.
As always, let me know which topics you’d like me to talk about in the next issue.
See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca
