How I Shipped My First Profitable SaaS Side Project as a Full-Stack Developer

Hi, I‘m Alex! I‘ve been working as a full-stack software engineer for the past 8 years. Currently, I lead the web development team at a Series C startup in San Francisco. We use a modern stack including React, Node, GraphQL and Kubernetes.

Like many developers, I‘ve always dreamed of using my skills to build my own SaaS product. The idea of having a profitable side income and owning a piece of software that helps people is really appealing.

But I never quite knew where to start. There are so many options and it‘s easy to get overwhelmed or discouraged.

Sound familiar? Well after years of false starts, I finally got focused and built a real SaaS product called MyAwesomeDashboard. In this post I‘ll share exactly how I took it from idea to first paying customers in just 3 months – all while working full time.

Hacking on Side Projects vs Building a Real Business

Like many developers, I love to build things. I‘ve created dozens of fun side projects over the years – everything from silly Chrome extensions to Twitter bots.

But none of these projects made any money. They were fun to hack on but didn‘t solve real problems. Projects would fizzle out after a few weeks as I lost motivation.

These experiences taught me that to build a real business, I needed to be much more strategic and disciplined in my approach. Some key differences in mindset:

Hacking on Side Projects	Building a SaaS Business
Build something cool and figure out use case later	Validate problem and market before writing any code
Use latest bleeding edge tech	Choose stable, proven tools to optimize development speed
Try to build every feature yourself	Ruthlessly cut scope and leverage existing services
Code in free time whenever you feel inspired	Schedule focused work sessions to make consistent progress
Get bored and abandon when project is 90% done	Push through the finish line to launch and get users

With this more professional mindset, I was determined to build a SaaS product that actual solved a real problem and generated some revenue.

Finding a Problem Worth Solving in a Massive Market

The developer tool market is massive and growing quickly. By 2024 it‘s projected to be worth over $3 billion per year.

Developer tools also tend have excellent economics. Developers are willing to spend on products that save them time or make their work easier. And many companies have budget allocated for developer tooling.

So I knew this was a good market to enter as a solo technical founder. But what specific problem should I try to solve?

Some criteria I used to evaluate ideas:

1. Is it a problem I‘ve personally experienced deeply? This will make it much easier to validate ideas and make product decisions.

2. Are there existing products in the space with paying customers? This proves there‘s a real market and willingness to pay.

3. Can it be solved with technology I‘m very familiar with? Using my existing full-stack development skillset will accelerate development.

4. Is there room for a simple, focused solution? I wanted to avoid products that required complex enterprise sales.

With this criteria in mind, I brainstormed problems I faced frequently as a full-stack developer. One that jumped out was managing cron jobs.

Nearly every company I‘ve worked at relied heavily on cron jobs for critical workflows like:

• Data syncs between systems
• Queueing up notifications and emails
• Running ETL processes
• Performing database backups

But monitoring and debugging these jobs was a huge pain. I can‘t tell you how many times I‘ve had a job fail silently or run way longer than expected. Digging through log files to track down issues is a miserable experience.

Some quick Google searches validated that many other developers struggle with this too:

I also found a few existing cron monitoring solutions like Cronitor and CronHub. The fact that they had paying customers gave me confidence this was a real pain point.

However, most of the existing tools were geared towards sysadmins and IT teams. I believed there was an opportunity for a simpler, more developer-focused solution.

Designing a Simple MVP to Get to Market Fast

Once I decided to build a cron monitoring tool for developers, it was tempting to start coding immediately. But I knew I needed to be strategic to ship quickly with my limited time.

I timeboxed myself to one week to outline a simple minimum viable product (MVP). The goal was to identify the smallest feature set to launch with to validate the idea.

Here‘s what I decided to include:

• A webhook endpoint that receives a JSON payload after each cron run
• A dashboard showing each job‘s last status and duration
• Email/SMS alerts when jobs fail or exceed a time threshold
• Slack integration to pipe alerts into team channel

And here are some things I explicitly cut:

• User authentication (I just used a shared login for the MVP)
• Fancy visualizations and graphs
• Advanced alerting logic and filtering
• Detailed logging and debugging tools

Cutting these features was painful but necessary. I knew I could always add them later if the core product got traction.

With this simple spec in hand, it was time to start building! I decided to use a classic MERN (Mongo, Express, React, Node) stack since I‘m very comfortable with JavaScript.

Building MyAwesomeDashboard in Focused Sprints

Finding time to code while working full-time is always a challenge. It‘s easy to get distracted or lose motivation when you don‘t have big blocks of uninterrupted time.

My secret weapon was blocking off focused 2 hour "power sessions" each morning before work. I‘m naturally a morning person, so I knew I could get a lot done in the early hours while my mind was fresh.

Each session had a specific goal like:

• Set up webhook endpoint to receive job data
• Create React component to display job status on dashboard
• Integrate SendGrid to send email alerts

I timebox each task to ensure I wasn‘t getting stuck in the weeds. If I didn‘t finish in the allotted time, I noted where I left off and picked it back up the next session.

This approach allowed me to make consistent progress even with a busy work schedule and family responsibilities. In about 6 weeks of morning hacking sessions, I had an MVP ready to show users.

Here‘s what the initial prototype looked like:

No, it wasn‘t pretty! But it worked and did the job it was supposed to do. I was ready to get some real user feedback.

Launching to Beta Users and Iterating Based on Feedback

After quietly building in isolation, it was scary to finally show my creation to other humans! But I knew I needed real feedback ASAP to guide the product forward.

I started by making a list of 10 developer friends who I knew ran cron jobs often. I personally emailed each one asking if they‘d be willing to try MyAwesomeDashboard and give honest feedback.

About half of them agreed and I sent over setup instructions to get them onboarded as beta users. I made it clear that I was looking for candid reactions – the good, the bad and the ugly!

The responses were super insightful:

• "Wow, the simplicity is refreshing compared to other cron monitoring tools I‘ve used. It does one thing and does it well."

• "It‘s a little tricky to get the payload format right when setting up the webhook. Could you provide clearer examples in the docs?"

• "I love being able to see my jobs at a glance. Could you add some color coding to make it easier to spot failures?"

• "We have some cron jobs that run every 5 minutes. It would be cool if we could group those together to reduce noise."

I collated this feedback into a Trello board and used it to plan my next development sprints. Over the following few weeks I knocked out the most critical improvements like better docs, dashboard enhancements and smarter grouping logic.

The result was an much more polished MVP that was ready for a wider audience. I started inviting more users off my email list and sharing updates on Twitter and Indie Hackers.

With each new batch of users, I gathered more feedback and iterated. The product was improving with every cycle.

Launching Paid Plans and Getting First Customers

After a couple months of beta testing and refinement, I was seeing strong user engagement and getting great feedback. Multiple people told me MyAwesomeDashboard had become a critical part of their workflow.

I knew it was time to test the most important hypothesis – would people actually pay for this? I created some simple SaaS subscription plans based on the number of cron jobs monitored:

• Hobby Plan: $9/month for up to 5 jobs
• Startup Plan: $29/month for up to 25 jobs
• Business Plan: $99/month for up to 100 jobs

I purposely kept the plans very simple and affordable to start. I figured I could always add more tiers and price points as I learned what customers valued.

To support payments, I integrated Stripe Checkout which allowed me to start billing with minimal code. Stripe also has great documentation for enabling trial periods, cancellations, failed payment retries etc.

With paid plans available, it was time to announce them to my beta users. I sent an email highlighting all the improvements made based on their feedback and noting that there would now be a cost for higher usage limits.

To my absolute delight, I got my first paying customer the same day! A few more trickled in over the following weeks. They were mostly small startups and agencies whose businesses depended heavily on cron jobs.

I made a point to reach out to each paying customer to thank them and open a line of communication. Getting to know them and understanding their use cases gave me tons of ideas to improve the product.

MRR (monthly recurring revenue) started to tick up as more customers converted:

We‘re not talking life-changing money here, but I was thrilled! Knowing that I had built something that was creating enough value for people to take out their credit card was an incredible feeling.

Lessons Learned as a First-Time SaaS Founder

Building and launching MyAwesomeDashboard taught me so much. Some of my biggest takeaways:

• Solve a problem you‘ve experienced firsthand. This makes it so much easier to understand the market and make good product decisions.

• Do your research before coding. Validating the idea through competitive analysis and user interviews saves a ton of time later.

• Constraining your time forces you to ruthlessly prioritize. I never would have shipped so quickly if it wasn‘t for my limited schedule.

• Simple solutions win. Solving one problem well is so much better than trying to do everything poorly.

• Focus on the 1% of users who are your biggest fans. Listen to them and build for them and magic will happen.

• Charge from day one. Finding out if people will actually pay is the ultimate form of validation.

Of course, the journey of being a SaaS founder is far from over! Now the real work begins to grow MyAwesomeDashboard into a more mature business.

Some key areas I‘m focusing on:

• Marketing and distribution – I‘m experimenting with content marketing, social media engagement and some paid advertising to attract new customers. Building in public has been huge.

• Customer development – I‘m doubling down on communication with my most engaged customers to understand their pain points and desires. Lots of Zoom calls and feedback surveys.

• Docs and onboarding – I‘m improving setup guides and creating an email sequence to help new users get immediate value from the product. First impressions are everything.

• Enterprise functionality – I‘m starting to get interest from larger companies who need features like SSO, audit logs and granular permissions. Lots to learn here.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope this honest account of building my first paid SaaS product as a full-time developer was insightful.

If you‘re working on something similar I‘d love to connect. Feel free to shoot me a message on Twitter or check out MyAwesomeDashboard. Use the code FREECODECAMP for 20% off your first year.

Keep shipping and thanks for all the support!