Software engineer becomes SaaS Founder. What I Learned so Far

1. Marketing is super important

It does not mean it is as hard as learning to code but it needs a lot of attention.

Most projects aren't going to have the same situation as Facebook or Google and get publicity organically.

So you will need to know the basics of marketing or hiring if you afford it.

What basics?

• SEO

• Email Marketing

• Social Media Marketing

• Conversion Tracking

• Landing page iterations

• Analytics

• Target users

For my SaaS, the main acquisition of new users was from online advertising on YouTube.

2. The tech stack should be as simple as possible

Don't drown in complexity and think that you will need a FANG or even a big company infrastructure.

The good thing with Cloud providers nowadays is that most things are scalable and that is taken care of until you get a lot of users.

If you reach many daily users(1k-10k) you will have the financial opportunity to invest more in scaling.

I don't think one needs testing in the early stages.

3. Keep the costs for running it low

I pay on Firebase based on user usage and that is very very low at the beginning.

I saw some posts here where people are paying $500+ per month for running their early-stage SaaS which is crazy for a technical infrastructure with less than 50 daily paying users.

Optimizing costs and allocating money in the right places is very important for all business sizes.

4. Advantages of a technical founder

Because you know how to program, you don’t need to pay one or more software engineers at the early stages. For a regular person, hiring a software engineer full-time is expensive and few can afford it.

In case you don’t know all the technical parts of launching a software business, like not knowing the backend and only knowing the frontend, you can learn as you go.

AI coding is good enough to give you a boost in productivity and in learning what you don’t know.

5. A is very helpful

Since using GitHub Copilot for coding, is saw a 50% decrease in the time I spent coding certain parts.

It is a great tool if you know at least one programming environment very well.

I see the trend with “vibe coding” where non-technical people use AI to develop software.

It is interesting because it gives non-programmers the ability to create basic things with software which is great.

But at the moment, developing a good software product without knowing how to program is not possible in my opinion.

I also used AI for SEO on another personal project and it did better than I would have done with my SEO knowledge.

And this is what I can recall that I learned so far.

Feel free to ask me things or comment with your thoughts.