Why I'm Building 12 Micro-SaaS in 12 Months (as a Former Founder)

#watercooler #career #webdev #indiehackers

I founded my startup in 2017, and after an 8-year grind, I finally sold it for a few million dollars in 2025.

The journey was... intense. It was a chaotic mix of organizational struggles, fundraising hurdles, key employees leaving, and navigating endless customer demands. While I’m grateful for the exit, the process taught me a hard truth: This isn't the game I want to play.

At my core, I am a developer. I believe in the power of one person building something great. I realized I’d rather spend my energy crafting excellent products than exhausting myself with fundraising decks and middle management.

The "Golden Handcuffs" and The Void

Currently, I’m in a lock-up period. I have to commit to the acquirer's management team, which means I can't launch anything publicly under my real name yet. My focus is fragmented, sliced thin between corporate reporting lines and my responsibilities at home.

I have a backlog of product ideas I’m dying to build. But most of them are "Big Ideas"—complex platforms that require massive context and energy. With my current fragmented schedule, they are impossible to execute.

Meanwhile, the world is changing at breakneck speed with the rise of AI. Watching the tech landscape evolve while I sit on the sidelines, unable to ship my own ideas, is frustrating. It feels like FOMO on steroids.

The Shift: From "Big Bang" to "12 Experiments"

So, I decided to flip the script.

Instead of seeing this lock-up period as a prison, I’m treating it as a "Research & Development" sabbatical.

I won't try to build the "next big thing" right now. Instead, I want to build small. I want to experiment. My goal is to release one Micro-SaaS every month throughout 2026. That’s 12 products in 12 months.

The plan is simple: Turn small ideas into tangible tools, throw them out into the wild, and see if they stick. If I find a seed that grows, I can double down on it later.

The Enemy: Context Switching

We all know that shipping is harder than it looks. A prototype might take two days, but the polish—fixing bugs, handling edge cases, writing copy—takes weeks.

This is especially true when you have a "day job." Trying to remember where I left off in the code after a long day of meetings is mentally draining. Context switching kills momentum. By the time I reload the project into my brain, my passion has often evaporated.

To combat this, I’ve established strict constraints.

The Constraints: Web Only, Fixed Stack

Rule #1: No Mobile Apps, No Desktop Apps. Mobile apps are a nightmare of App Store approvals and review processes. Desktop apps (even with Electron or Tauri) add too much friction for the user to just "try it out." The Web is still king for MVPs. If the concept works on the web, I can build native versions later.

Rule #2: One Stack to Rule Them All. I love the TypeScript ecosystem. For this challenge, I need speed and low overhead. I’m skipping the "which framework should I use?" debate and locking in my stack for the entire year:

Frontend: Preact (React is great, but I prefer lightweight libraries. Preact gives me the React ecosystem without the bloat.)

Backend: Hono (Standard-compliant, fast, and runs anywhere.)

Infrastructure: Cloudflare (Workers, Pages, D1).

While Next.js is the industry standard, I find it can be heavy outside of Vercel. I want to keep things raw, cheap, and fast. Cloudflare’s edge network is perfect for this.

The Road Ahead

In 2026, I will be a machine that turns coffee into Preact and Hono code.

I once tried building a desktop app with Tauri and got bogged down in the complexity. I learned my lesson. In the web world, deployment takes seconds.

The infrastructure is solved. The constraints are set. All that’s left is to polish the concepts and distill them into simple, valuable solutions.

I’ll be documenting this journey—the code, the metrics, and the inevitable failures—right here.

Let’s build.