DEV Community: Tanvir Bhachu

The "AI SaaS Dream" is a Lie

Tanvir Bhachu — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 11:34:31 +0000

You ever see some post like "How I made 10K per month with new AI SaaS" and think, "wow, I should make one". Well, I don't blame you, I'd say this is the ultimate developer dream. To build something that solely yours and it generates enough money to let you quit your job. To be on some beach, eating lobster while your AI SaaS makes you passive income.

But, you've been lied to. This dream, isn't as easy as people make it out to be.

If you've been on X (formerly Twitter) in the recent years, you'll notice that a lot of developers have moved to creating their own SaaS project. For some, they've succeeded but I'd say for the large majority of devs, most project never even reach 100 users.

Lately, we've seen solutions like V0, Lovable, Bolt, Cursor etc that let's you vibe code whole projects. You type "Build me an app that handles real-time voice transcription" and magically, it appears in your browser. And your mind explodes with a billion ideas all of which could make you a trillionaire.

Sure, these new AI platforms automate the coding, but not the architecture, security, marketing etc. So anyway, let's actually talk about the lie. We're going to use my personal project for this.

My Own SaaS

Recently, I thought I should create my own SaaS. I noticed that I really enjoyed journaling — it's my form of therapy, a place for all my thoughts and ideas, a place for me to think through everything.

Now I used Daybook as my main journal, but as dev, I found the UI super frustrating, I hated the lack of features, I hated how much was behind a paywall. Their mobile app has a rich-text bar that pops up while typing, out of 12 actions, 10 of them require you to pay for the pro tier. That's an unreasonable limitation.

Check out https://jadebook.app/ for the chance to receive a chocolate chip cookie sometime in the next 20 years (not legally binding btw)

Okay, so I have an idea: let's build a journal platform. I thought it was going to be easy, I mean look all these people on X who apparently started earning 10k per month after building a SaaS in 2 weeks.

But here comes the first problem: You only see the ones that succeeded.

If making 10K per month was as easy as 2 weeks of work, no one would want to work anymore. So, it took me a literally month just to make sure the underlying infrastructure would work correctly and scale. For example, testing the limitations of all the rich-text editors and how they work. That's not even minimally viable.

Actually Building

Here's the next problem, when you build something for yourself, you understand all the limitations, and everything is tailored to your use case. But when you build for the public, now you have a lot to deal with:

A huge focus on fixing bugs and handling edge cases
Having correct security measures like not accessing the db on the client
Making sure you have protection from attacks and malicious actions through rate-limiting, permission checks, etc.
Making sure all content is encrypted
Making sure the app is responsive, and the UI can be used by anyone (not just you)

If you can't tell, this is actually a lot. For Jadebook, I had to spend 3 weeks just learning everything about encryption like "how on earth does one add searching to encrypted content?" (The answer was semantic search btw).

That's something that isn't part of the vibe-coding experience which means that often, these newer SaaS end up with a lot of cracks in their armour.

The Marketing Blindspot

If there is literally nothing unique about your business, you'll fail. Now, this competitive advantage can be anything, maybe your marketing is way better than your competitors, maybe you're using an infrastructure that scales better and cheaper, maybe your UI is simply far superior.

But there are 2 main components: the product and the marketing.

Product

The product is your SaaS, it's your website, your service etc. Now developers are insanely good for creating products. We can produce MVPs like it's nothing — The very first version of Jadebook was made in a single month with basic auth, and most of the core functionality.

But engineers aren't normal people. Because of the way we work, we subconsciously fear risk and creativity.

Let's say you're in charge of building a bridge; A single mistake could cost millions of damage. Or you're working at a start up, a single mess up could make or break your idea. For Jadebook, I built the beta and gave it to all my friends. Can you guess what their questions were? What does this do?, How do I create a tag?, Where are the AI features?

While building the product, I forgot to add any sort of onboarding, I had basically nothing descriptive, and they had no clue as to how things worked. Even without the marketing being the problem, my product failed to be usable for actual normal people.

Dev Work

Even the way we devs work becomes a barrier, all of our projects need structure, everything needs to be labelled, we work in an extremely controlled environment. Everything we do has documentation and everything flows together.

The problem with this is over time, you start lacking the ability to be creative or do anything that lacks structure. There's a reason why we have UI Designers and Developers as separate roles. Creativity requires you to get out of structure, to take risks, be bold, do things that make no functional sense simply to improve the design.

Marketing

But like I mentioned, business requires 2 things: product and marketing. Most devs can make the product but if no one knows about it then you'll never get any users. And what does marketing require? Making content, posting on social media, branding, understanding a bit of psychology, constant iterations and the best of all, absolutely no clue what will work and what won't.

It takes ages to get good at marketing, and you'll post a bunch of stuff that won't work or it'll get no view, maybe it'll even look horrible. It's going to be so painful to having to sit down and create something with no boundaries or structure.

This is a tough spot to be in. On one hand, you're a genius but your inability to convert that genius into actually money is frustrating as hell.

The Future of SaaS

Recently, due to the advancements of AI, a lot of devs are just creating personal SaaS projects. What's the point of paying 8 bucks a month for a todo list? Just have AI make you one with all the features you want, throw it on Vercel and that's it. You just saved 8 bucks per month and 96 bucks a year.

But if you're planning on making money using SaaS, you need to understand that there's a reason so many fail. A lot of people romanticise the idea of having a business, as if you can go from nothing to 10K a month and somehow that's realistic.

It's taken 8 months to build Jadebook into a platform that's finally somewhat ready for users. Now, I did a lot of it without any AI tools but even if I did, I realised that AI wasn't even that useful. The main pain points were architecting the whole thing, dealing with edge cases, understanding marketing etc.

Don't lose hope

AI can't do everything for you. Don't lie to yourself and believe that you'll spend 2 weeks on some website and then instantly get rich over night. It takes a lot of effort and the thing is, almost anyone can win with enough consistency. If I had given up with the first iteration, Jadebook would have no value. But over time, it kept improving and eventually it became something genuinely useful.

If my journey resonates with you, or you're curious to see the fruit of these lessons, I invite you to explore https://jadebook.app/

But these were just some of my experiences. Thanks, for reading and hopefully you gained something from this :)

Making a Social Media App

Tanvir Bhachu — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 16:13:24 +0000

Hey, I'm Tanvir Bhachu. I was really bored one day so I decided to make a social media platform. So here's an article on how I did it.

Before we start, here's a link to the completed project: Veritas

Part 1: The Foundation

First I needed to figure out how I wanted to approach the project. I obviously opted for React and NextJS since that's my main stack. I didn't want to build the whole social media infrastructure so I chose Sanity CMS to handle all the post content. For chat, I was thinking of making an actual clone from Instagram but services for integrating chat are extremely expensive. So I instead made the whole chat myself using MongoDB. Since I was using MongoDB anyway, I used it for user authentication.

Part 2: Setting Up the Backend

I tackled Sanity first. I created the schemas, essentially planning out how all the data is going to be structured. This wasn't very difficult at all but it was the first step.

Part 3: The Authentication

There are 3 main parts to the login page. The register part takes in a user's email, username and password and creates a user in MongoDB. Before a user is created, it'll check whether or not a user with the same email or username exists. The login part takes in a person's username and password. Then it'll check if that user exists in Sanity because that's where the main details are and the user in Sanity is used as a reference when creating a post. If it doesn't, it'll create a user with some predefined values otherwise it'll set the user data to the local storage.

The forgot password mechanic works by entering a person's email and password correctly. If so, it'll send an email to them with their password. I used an email I don't normally use so it might go to spam but it works.

Part 4: How the actual app works

The entire application is on one page. It uses router queries to see what component should be displayed. I built a 'capsule' that holds all the components. The navigation and data fetching is done at the top level so the state can persist even if the page changes. If you're on posts and you click on the user profile, the data will be available immediately because of this.

Using Tailwind, dark mode is handled simply by adding the classname 'dark' if the local storage has dark mode = 'true'. I also used some npm packages such as "react-toastify" for the notifications and "react-loader-spinner" for the loading screens.

Part 5: User Profile

Once you pass the login, you get to the actual app. I started with the user details because it's displaying data I already have. So the page takes the Sanity data from local storage from when the user logged in. Next, I add the ability to edit your profile picture, cover image and bio. This takes in some inputs and edits the user data in Sanity using the user's id.

Part 6: Showing Posts

All the data is fetched using a couple of useEffect hooks. It uses some predefined queries to fetch certain data from Sanity which is especially helpful with getting posts only from the current user. I used a package called "react-responsive-masonry" to create a masonry layout. Then I mapped the array of posts from Sanity and added those posts to the layout.

Part 7: Creating Posts

When you add an image to upload, it creates an asset in Sanity but it doesn't belong to any document yet. After adding the title and description for your post, it'll create a document for your post. Once you go back to the home page or the user profile, it'll rerun the fetch function to update the list of posts to include your post.

The deletion of posts simply runs a function to find a post using its id and to delete using a client library from Sanity.

Part 8: Creating a chat system

So I created a separate collection in MongoDB just for chat messages. I could create chat rooms by creating maybe a group id and then only showing messages with the correct group id. However, I just wanted to show a prototype of what a chat system would look like. I might choose to create that functionality but it may push the capabilities of MongoDB, at least the free tier which is what I used. I also didn't want a massive number of messages. It's very painful having to go delete every message individually. So I added something called a TTL index. This allows me to automatically delete any message sent after 3 days. On the client side, a function is run every 5 seconds to check for new messages.

Also, MongoDB is not built for chat systems. In a real-world scenario, you would probably want to use WebSockets to get real-time chats and Supabase for the database.

Part 9: The Shopping Tab

I wanted to recreate the feel of Instagram so I added a shopping tab. This is pretty basic and honestly, a little too basic for me so I might change it a bit. I created a JSON file that has all the data for each product. This is simply because I didn't want a huge file so mapping over a JSON file makes management a lot easier. I create an Amazon Affiliates account and put links to products that were either really popular or that I personally bought. And that's about it.

Part 10: The Future

This is a stable version of the platform, good enough to show as a portfolio project. But I want to add the ability to like and comment, create group filtered chat groups, make the shopping tab much better and also add the ability to view other people's accounts.

Overall, it was a very good project to work on. It feels nice and fast and it has functionality. Feel free to check it out, all you need to do is create an account.

Web Portfolio Projects Ideas

Tanvir Bhachu — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 10:45:40 +0000

Introduction

As a web developer, personal projects are extremely important. They showcase your skills and prove your understanding of programming. If you're a beginner then this post should guide you through projects focused on increasing your skills and understanding. If you're an advanced programmer then this should give you some inspiration on what to build for your next project.

If you're a beginner, I recommend you go through a course first. It helps to have some existing knowledge before attempting to create your projects. I personally used courses from Scrimba and SoloLearn to build my initial understanding.

Beginner

These are some pretty basic projects meant to be easy but still require some problem-solving. One of the major things to focus on is connecting your websites to external data sources. APIs are a good introduction to creating dynamic websites using data.

Project One: Weather Web App

This one is a simple introduction to connecting websites to APIs. You can use any weather API but the most common two are OpenWeatherMap and WeatherAPI. The goal here is to fetch data from an API and display it to the user. You can use the fetch method and convert the data into JSON to interpret it and then update the HTML to display the information. It shouldn't be too complicated and it'll help create even more applications by using a variety of APIs.

I built this project myself, AstroWeather, so you can take this as an example. Note, this is using more complex methods, animations and technologies. Your one would likely be simpler.

Project Two: Google Search Clone

This doesn't include making a whole search engine yourself, but rather just recreating the main search page. It also doesn't have to be an exact clone, feel free to add your own touch. You can make the search into an input element and when the user submits the form either by clicking a button or pressing enter, you route the page to www.google.com/?q=query.

The main goal is to work on creating layouts, working with multiple elements and taking inputs from the user.

I have also built this project myself. My one is not an exact clone and it's more of a new tab page but it showcases the goals for this project really well.

Intermediate

So you understand the foundation of coding. You've written some code yourself, made some projects, researched technologies and are ready to take your programming to the next level. So there are two goals now, learning how to output data and playing around with animations. Understanding how to output data is extremely important because many of the websites you will come across take input from the user and add it to a database. Animations are also important especially nowadays when there is more competition and you'd want your websites to stand out.

Also, you should just be looking into JavaScript frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Svelte. They make web development far easier, are more scalable and

Project Three: Journal Web Application

This is a project where you take multiple inputs from the user and add them to a database of some sort. Daybook is a good example of what you're going to build. Now you can build this in many different ways. I'm going to outline the path I would personally take. As for the database, there are many options, personally, I'd go with Supabase but feel free to use whatever you are comfortable with.

You'd want 3 different pages: a login page, a home/dashboard page and the editor page. For logging in, Supabase offers authentication which is pretty easy to implement but if you find dealing with authentication difficult then you could just go with saving the data to local storage. Next, you'd build the home page which would display all the user's journals. You'd want to map over the data and create the elements rather than having predefined elements and changing their HTML. React is very good for creating repeatable components. For the editing page, you could go for a simple input element or you could go for a rich text editor. Then the user can save those inputs in either the database or local storage depending on your choice.

I have created this project but it hasn't been updated to use Supabase yet. It should still give you a good example of what this project is meant to achieve.

Project Four: Portfolio Website

Now that you've created some projects, you can create your own portfolio. You can showcase who you are, what you do, your experience, your skills and how people can reach you. Your portfolio website is a portrayal of who you are and it is likely the first thing people see so you should really go all out here. This is also where animations come in. Animations can help you stand out and also make your portfolio website look and feel amazing. If you are using vanilla JavaScript then you could look into GSAP, Animate-On-Scroll, AnimateCSS and AnimeJS. For React, I would highly recommend Framer-Motion but AnimateCSS works in React pretty good as well.

For some inspiration here are some amazing portfolios: Tanvir Bhachu, Richard Mattka, Alex Coven, Robb Owen and Brittany Chiang. These are just some examples of portfolios I really love.

Advanced

Now you can pretty much go above and beyond. Anything is possible and you're simply limited by your time and creativity. At this stage, you probably want to create websites that are either providing a service or showcase high technical skills. Now you have a lot of choices here but if you're reading this then you probably want some ideas. So here are some advanced projects you could work on.

Project Five: Social Media App

Why not make your own Instagram? It's a cool project where you can work with authentication, handling user profile updates, posts, messaging etc. You can integrate a lot of technologies and I built my own social media app in about 1-2 weeks. I used my own login system, forgot password system, SanityCMS for posts and MongoDB for any database-related tasks.

Check out my social media app project, Veritas.

Project Six: Management System

You might make a CMS (Content Management System), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), or a management system for students to track assignments, tasks, grades etc. You have a lot of options with this one but it's something that could be useful for you and others. It's also a project that could showcase your skills.

Project Seven: A Game

Building games on websites is a bit difficult. For 3D, you need a lot of math and a high level of understanding of physics and animations etc. However, 2D games are much easier to build and might be a pretty fun project. You might create your own clicker game, maybe a platformer or a story-driven game. You could go insane with the animations and art to create something beautiful. This project is very different to the other projects since those are more professional whereas this would be more fun.

Project Eight: Clones

You could create your own clone of pretty much anything on the web. Maybe you don't like discord, so you could create your own discord just for you and your friends. Maybe you think Amazon could look a lot nicer with a minimalistic theme instead. This is a project which keeps on giving. You clone as many websites as you want and add your own twists to them.

Conclusion

Your personal projects should focus on either improving your skills or showcasing your skills. At the beginner to intermediate level, the main focus is guiding you through learning different technologies and solving a variety of problems. At the advanced level, you should be at the point where you can create pretty much anything you want. Well, that's all for today.

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