SaaS Building Episode 01 Concept & Idea

You want to build a SaaS,
or optimize your workflow,
then you’re the right place my friend

Todays’ episode we’ll go through the conceptualization and ideation of my mini SaaS
It isn’t actually a SaaS as I wont try to sell it
but all the steps are illustrative of how to build a SaaS
So you’ll see how to improve your own work flow
or guide through the your own creation of a SaaS

Simple Tools
I like simple tools
Simple tools get things done
However, most tools are overengineered
so this is where we are going to start

Just a simple txt (short)
The problem we’re going to solve is my own
My todo list is a txt document
yes, it is not fancy
but it is fast, easy and understandable
The problem is I can’t share it easily between devices
And I don’t want to complicate it as I use it everyday.
I don’t want to have slow, bulky click click todo lists.
I just want to keep it simple

So let’s make that

Maybe ways
I want to be able to share a todo list between my devices
There are many ways to do this,
Maybe an app,
Maybe common login
But we want to get it out of the door fast and efficiently.
then we can iterate on our expansion ideas to make a
global todo list that will take over the world
while making the world a better place
So let’s keep it simple

My approach
We want to do to reduce the spec:

Well, we can

not have a login system - no reset password it etc..
do not use big fancy js libraries - HTMX and old fashioned SSR
And we can just use SQLite, or even an txt file
So that’s what we’re going to do

Downsides
The downsides of not having a login system for your app
is that you cannot collect emails to try to upsell people
but we will gain so much speed in developing our software
that it is worth this risk
Also, remember if people can signup,
then we’ll need to ensure that spammers do not signup
Of course we could use FireBase etc..
but now we have even more distractions
and we’re using a company that deleted their motto of
“Don’t be evil”
Yes, they acutally did that

Initial Design
This is how I make sketches for webapps

I tried all the tools
but if you want to get stuff done
then simple is the key
less is more, usually

and thus I ended up with using either ExcaliDraw
or just simple drawings

Let me show you here