Building a SaaS Solo: What I Learned Shipping 3 Products

The solo founder trap

When you're building alone, you wear every hat. Designer, developer, marketer, support. It sounds exciting at first, but it quickly becomes overwhelming if you don't set boundaries.

Here's what I learned shipping three products in the past year.

Lesson 1: Ship ugly, ship fast

My first instinct was always to polish the UI before showing it to anyone. Bad idea. With StagePilot, I spent weeks perfecting the dashboard before a single user had signed up.

The fix? I started building landing pages first, collecting emails, and only then building the product. With Feels, I had 50 signups before writing a single line of backend code.

Lesson 2: Pick a stack and stick with it

I wasted time switching between frameworks. Now my go-to stack is:

Next.js for the frontend and API routes
PostgreSQL for the database
Convex when I need realtime
Vercel for deployment

// My typical project structure
src/
  app/           // Next.js App Router
  components/    // Reusable UI
  lib/           // Business logic
  server/        // Server actions & API

This stack lets me go from idea to deployed MVP in under a week.

Lesson 3: Marketing is not optional

The best product in the world means nothing if nobody knows about it. I now spend at least 30% of my time on distribution:

Writing threads on X
Posting on Product Hunt and Indie Hackers
Building in public to attract an audience

Lesson 4: Automate everything you can

With OpenFlux, I set up GitHub Actions to auto-update the RSS feed daily. No manual work needed. Apply this mindset everywhere:

CI/CD — push to main, auto-deploy
Monitoring — alerts for errors, not manual checking
Content — schedule posts in advance

What's next

I'm doubling down on AI-powered tools. The intersection of LLMs and SaaS is where I think the biggest opportunities are right now. More on that in a future post.