I've launched 4 SaaS startups this year - my template

#startup #ai #development #ui

I've been on a SaaS startup building and launching spree this year since I lost half my web development contracts to AI. I think many developers have been in the same boat.

Instead of looking for more development work (which is in real flux at the moment) I decided to instead launch my own SaaSes.. SaaSs?

The first thing I noticed as many have, is AI can scaffold a UI very quickly - in 30 minutes I had a SaaS website - yay! It was quite bland but well designed - ok - nothing fancy. Then came iterating on that website, which took days - then weeks to get it right. AI seems to fix something and break something else at the same time - this went on forever.

Now the bigger development effort for a SaaS is the backend - the dashboard and the multi-tenancy, the stripe plans/payments integrations, the email sending, authentication, team management, ACL, privacy, security... the list get's long pretty quick - but it is finite if you want it to be.

So if you spent one week on the website, prepare to spend a month on the dashboard and 6 months on the backend.

Quickly I learnt the important rule. Make a few choices upfront that minimizes your development. Like the 80/20 rule - but also the discipline to follow through.

Choose the most important features of your SaaS. Figure out your value proposition and the pain point you fix. Focus only on that and build just that and launch. Don't build anything else - truly - do not.

If you are building an email sending platform, just build a backend that sends emails. Hook into into your necessary SaaS features, which are authentication, payments.

The good part is that you realize quickly that you are building a few things over and over, payment, auth, dashboard UI, users profile, teams. (At first, don't even build teams - it's not needed for your main goal - just the fix to the pain point).

Now - this story is sequential - from when I started to what I learned along the way. However, it's not how you should build a SaaS - it's just the story. To build a SaaS now focus first on the most important thing - your AI development environment. Spend 2-3 days on that. Seriously, your SaaS will take at least a month to build, 2-3 days on the environment your AI will work in will pay off 100 fold.

I use Claude most the time so it pays to read up on the best practices - https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/use-case-guides/overview

I also use a number of other Agents for differnet purposes. GLM2.5 at this time is as good as latest Claude Opus but faster. I use it for smaller fixes that are isolated. For very quick generation - an idea I want to scaffold I will use three differnet agents at once - Claude, GLM, DeepSeek (I now US doesn't like DeepSeek but it's the fastest model almost on par with Claude just for one shot research), combine their ideas into one and then have Claude optimize and choose the best mix.

The reason I do 3 models is that they open up the possibility space of the response. Claude is optimized for US users and tied to US laws and government controls - it will reply with that as the scoping context that limits the openess of it's reponse. This is critical to understand for marketing research.

GLM and DeepSeek are open models, general and non US focused, they give broader replies and consider non-US views. Their reponse is not as limited. Especially if you're researching non-US markets their response is valuable.

Now back to how to actually build your SaaS.

The 20/20 vision of hindsight. To actually build your SaaS - research first. Start with where your visitors will be coming from. Are you going to focus on Google searches? SEO? Paid Ads? If it's paid Ads, what is your search phrases, how much are the CPC on those - how dense is that market and how rooted are the current leaders? When you answer these questions your choice of SaaS becomes a lot more likely to succeed.

List the ways you will get customers

Use my existing network (X, LinkedIn, Dev.to)
Paid Google Ads
Paid Posts on Instagram
SEO
Posting on Reddit, Hacker News
Making blog posts
Creating freebies (Templates, Open Source libraries)
Listings on directories

How will your target your specific customers

My linkedin is mostly software engineers - my SaaS is AI image generator - not the right fit - I'll just spam 10K linkedin contacts...

These answers start allowing you to see which paths will actually bring customers to your SaaS, which changes the choices you make for your SaaS.

Paid Google Ads - How much is CPC on AI Image generator. What's the CPA if I can make at least 2% sign up and then 2% of those buy the paid plan which is $20. Anwser that and you'll realize AI Image Generator is too costly for google ads unless you've got a huge ad budget.

Now this goes on.. you'll notice something. What you thought was a good idea for a SaaS usually isn't from a marketing first point of view. When you envision how your customers find your SaaS and how many will sign up and purhcase a subscription.

You'll notice the good SaaS is one that you research well and find need that is not filled well and marketing for it is reasonable. What was hard was figuring out what that need was.

Now I can't tell you what those needs are - I'm still researching and building. This is just where I've landed after launching 4 startups (one very 2-3 months) this year.

To help you on your journey of building your SaaS I've created a boilerplate - https://saas-startup.mailkite.dev/

It is purposefully basic, what's important is the framework is Agent research first. Take a look at the github - https://github.com/mailkite/saas-startup

and importantly the AGENTS.md (CLAUDE.md equivalent) - https://github.com/mailkite/saas-startup/blob/main/AGENTS.md

If forces the agent to research the market and build UI, UX, features based on it's research. Documents the research, catelogs and refines. Over time the development will stay linear - not become a big pile of spaghetti AI code.

Please share your thoughts and experience in building SaaS - the new best thing this year.