Day 1: Building a SaaS Product in 100 Days

Today is Day 1 of 100 days in #100DaysOfTechStartup challenge. I just wanted to share some of the decisions I made yesterday on Day 0

Here is what I decided:

Product

I will be developing a SaaS product which deals with Property Management.

Why did I choose this?

I own some rental properties and I would love to use my own product. Having a product of my own out in the world is one of my greatest motivations to do this challenge.

Tech Stack

Backend: Spring Boot (Java) Frontend: Angular and BootStrap Database: Postgresql

Why did I choose these?

My goal is to complete a product and learn the inner details of developing a product and launching it but not to learn new technologies. So I am just going with what I know and it will be a good practice too.

Hosting Provider

My first thought when I pick a project is the website name, URL, and the hosting provider. I do have a couple of domains I bought but never started that project. I have learned from my mistakes and choose to select the hosting provider when it is required. Until then, I will be hosting it on my laptop. Haha. Mistakes do teach us some lessons.

Source Code

I will go with GitHub. I will share the details in later blog posts and also add it here once I have it ready

CI/CD

I am familiar with DevOps in the Atlassian ecosystem but I know it is good to know how it works in GitHub. I am sure they have great support because I have used websites like vercel.com and my experience was very seamless.

Research

I have made a list of websites that are in the Property management sector from around the world. I realized every country has terminology and rules different. But overall, once you have an MVP, it should be easy to extend it further to support multiple countries. I felt doing this research gave me ample information on what's out there and how I can make mine slightly better if not similar to them.

Next steps

  • I had the experience of jumping into the code too soon and almost redoing the whole thing once I realized my models and DB structure is very inefficient. So, I am going to spend some time on UML modeling and have the tables and models planned ahead at least to some extent.

  • I recently did a crash course on Figma for UI designing. I am so glad I did that as someone who has always been far away from anything to do with UI, the course definitely instilled a sense of likingness towards UI. It gave me confidence that I could design something too. Check out the Figma Crash Course if you are interested.

  • I want to practice building in public too. So you may soon see me developing the product in realtime. Please follow my YouTube channel for upcoming videos

  • I will be reaching out to the Indie Hacker community for more tips and any help I may need along the way. I love the IH community and if you are new, you can check it out here

I am excited for the journey ahead. Follow me on Twitter at Tech Hustler for regular updates or to reach out to me.

If you want to keep yourself motivated, I would recommend you to check out Ten Ways To Make Money As A Developer book which is very well written and quite motivating in fact.

Cheers,

Tech Hustler