DEV Community: Yerkebulan Rakhimov

The 7-day SaaS MVP loop: ship fast, then validate with people who actually show up

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:33:27 +0000

I just shipped TubeMine in about a week. Cost so far: an 8 dollar domain on top of Vercel I was already paying for. This is part of a deliberate pivot I am making, away from "validate before building" and into "build first, validate through organic distribution".

Here is why I stopped trying to validate first, and the exact 7-day recipe I am running now.

Why "validate before MVP" did not work for me

The textbook playbook (Mom Test, Lean Startup, etc.) assumes you already have a warm network or personal brand. Without those, you ask random strangers to think carefully about a hypothetical and they will be polite. Polite stranger answers are noise, not signal.

To do validation properly you need to find people in the niche, run a few days of interviews, transcribe, synthesise. Best case: a full week of work. And you still do not have a hundred percent guarantee at the end.

So my inversion: spend that same week on the smallest usable MVP instead. AI tooling makes this realistic now.

The 7-day recipe (literal day-by-day)

Days 1-3: Core flow, no auth, no design.
Pick one problem. Build one solution. Anonymous, free, single page. The goal is to prove the thing works technically and that you would actually use it. If you find it boring at this stage, the idea is dead. Drop it without sunk cost.

Days 4-5: Design.
Wire it through Claude Design (or any AI design tool) plus a primitive library like shadcn. Not three weeks of redesign. Quick and good enough. Plan mobile responsive from start, because retrofitting is always more expensive.

Days 6-7: Auth + payments + deploy.
Google OAuth for auth (skip email magic links, deliverability hurts and friction kills signup). Polar for payments (less compliance overhead than Stripe for one-person teams). Supabase for the database. Deploy to Vercel.

Stack: Next.js 16, Tailwind v4, shadcn, Supabase, Polar, Upstash Redis, Vercel. AI assists at every step, Claude Code or Cursor for the code, Claude Design for the UI, Whisper-based tools for dictating prompts when you do not want to type long instructions.

Total cost

Vercel: 20 dollars per month (was already paying)
Domain: 8 dollars per year via local registrar
Free tiers for Supabase, Upstash, Polar at this scale

Do not buy a domain more expensive than 20 to 30 dollars a year, even for a beautiful TLD. The psychological cost of killing the project goes up with sunk money. A cheap domain makes the kill-decision rational.

The 1-month organic test

Ship to production. Tell your network. Post on Threads, X, LinkedIn, Reddit about what you built and what you are learning. Watch signups, daily active users, and paying conversion.

If zero paying customers by day thirty, kill it and start the next project. If there is signal, think about paid promotion.

You are not idle during the validation month

You fix bugs based on what real users hit (this is the customer feedback you could not extract from cold strangers). You talk to the people who came organically, they self-selected as interested. You start scaffolding the next project in parallel.

Why short cycles matter more than perfect cycles

Long build cycles kill motivation. Without motivation, no project gets finished. One week of build plus one month of validation caps your downside at five weeks, not six months. The compound interest on running 10 short cycles in a year beats one carefully-planned six-month project in a year.

My current run

TubeMine. Tool for YouTube channel owners to analyse comments on their videos. Live at https://tubemine.tech, code at https://github.com/RakhimovY/tubemine.

First project under the new strategy. End of day 7 with a working product and paid tier. Now in the 1-month test window. Will write a follow-up at day 30 with actual numbers.

What would you do differently?

If you have shipped under tight time constraints, what did your 1-week stack look like? What tools made the biggest difference?

5-year cost of my .tech domain: $488 vs $204. The renewal trap I missed.

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:54:54 +0000

Last week I shipped TubeMine, a free YouTube comments to CSV extractor, in about 2.5 hours of focused work. Phase 0 prototype, validating whether anyone wants the tool before investing more time.

Part of the launch checklist was buying a domain. I bought tubemine.tech through the local Kazakh registrar ps.kz at $8 for year 1. Vercel had $7.99. One cent. Not so much.

This post is about why that cent will cost me $284 over 5 years, and the decision framework I'm taking from it.

The renewal trap

Three days after launch, a reader commented under my build-in-public thread:

Did you check the renewal price? Local registrars usually have it around 20x higher than the promo registration.

I hadn't. Most checkouts only show year-one pricing, with renewal hidden somewhere in the management UI you can't see until after purchase.

The renewal price for ps.kz is buried in a sub-tab called "Финансы" inside the already-purchased domain card. Year 2 onward: 55 800 ₸ (about $120 USD).

For comparison, here is how .tech pricing breaks down across registrars I checked:

Registrar	Year 1 (promo)	Year 2+ renewal
ps.kz	$8	$120
Vercel Domains	$7.99	$49
Cloudflare Registrar	~$48 (no promo)	~$48

5-year total cost: ps.kz $488 vs Vercel $204 vs Cloudflare $240.

The $284 delta between ps.kz and Vercel is pure markup on the wholesale renewal price. Identity Digital, which operates the .tech registry, charges $48-49 per year wholesale to anyone. Local registrars stack about $72 per year on top, forever.

Beyond price: friction my $0.01 saving did not cover

The cent isn't where it ended. With ps.kz I also got:

DNS activation took 3 days. Their support works business hours only, no weekends, no 24/7. Filed a ticket Saturday, got a response Monday afternoon.
Manual DNS setup after activation. No auto-propagation to the Vercel hosting that needed it.
Renewal price invisible until after purchase, as mentioned above.

Vercel Domains pushes DNS within 60 seconds because it's the same dashboard as the hosting. Cloudflare does instant propagation across their anycast network.

The decision framework I'm taking forward

This isn't "local registrars bad, Western registrars good." It's a risk-stage tradeoff:

phase: validation (likely to die in 30 days)
  cheap y1-promo registrar OK
  if product dies in month 1, you lose $8 and walk away

phase: validated (signals fired, project surviving)
  transfer to Vercel or Cloudflare at month 11 of year 1
  transfer fee ~$8, adds +1 year to term, skips the markup forever

phase: brand-critical (paying customers, public launch tied to domain)
  Cloudflare or Vercel from day 0
  ~$40 y1 premium buys 24/7 support and no DNS surprises

tubemine.tech is currently in the validation phase. The product got its first paying $19/mo customer earlier today, which puts TubeMine on the validated track. I'll transfer the domain to Vercel at month 11.

What I'm changing operationally

Auto-renewal off on the ps.kz domain. Don't want a $120 surprise next year.
Calendar reminder at month 11 to evaluate: if TubeMine is still alive, transfer to Vercel; if not, let the domain expire.
For future projects: I read the renewal column before the registration column. Always.

The takeaway

The visible price during checkout is rarely the price you pay. Especially for vanity TLDs like .tech, .io, .ai, the wholesale renewal price set by the registry is the floor, and registrars stack their markup on top.

If you're shipping a side project this week, the cheap registrar is fine. If you're shipping anything you expect to live past year 1, check the renewal price BEFORE checkout, not after.

Where do you register domains for new SaaS or side projects? Cloudflare or Vercel straight away, or do you also catch the local promos and plan to transfer later? Curious if anyone has actually done a y1 to y2 transfer in practice (Porkbun, Namecheap, GoDaddy to anywhere), what the experience was.

Next post: the technical architecture write-up for TubeMine. Server-side broker pattern, monthly per-IP budget on Upstash, and the four things I deliberately left out to ship in 2.5 hours.

tubemine.vercel.app | code (MIT)