TL;DR
- Most developers jump straight to building a SaaS product before they have any distribution. The product fails not because it is bad, but because nobody knows it exists.
- Services are not a consolation prize. They are the fastest way to validate your product idea, earn your first revenue, and build the market knowledge your product needs before you write a line of code.
- The right sequencing is: service first, distribution second, product third. In that order.
Let me tell you something I have not said publicly before.
Before GinuxAI. Before BuySmart. Before any of the products I write about — I spent months building things nobody asked for.
Not because I was not skilled enough. I was.
Not because the ideas were bad. Some were genuinely good.
I built them before I had a single user. Before I had validated that anyone would pay. Before I had talked to enough people to understand whether the problem I was solving was painful enough to make someone open their wallet.
I went straight to the product.
And I paid for it in months, in opportunity cost, and in the quiet frustration of finishing something and realising I now had to start from zero on the harder problem: getting anyone to care.
This article is about what I learned. And what I wish someone had told me before I learned it the expensive way.
The SaaS dream and why it is a trap for most developers
There is a version of the SaaS story that gets told constantly in developer communities.
Build a product. Launch it. Get users. Generate monthly recurring revenue. Scale.
It sounds clean. It sounds like a system. It sounds like the logical extension of the engineering mindset we already have — define the problem, build the solution, deploy it.
But there is a step that version of the story leaves out entirely.
Distribution.
The developers you see online who have built successful SaaS products — the ones doing serious MRR, the ones with the Twitter threads about their revenue growth — almost all of them had something before the product.
An audience. A following. A network of people who already trusted them. A distribution channel they had been compounding for years before they had anything to sell.
When they launched, they were not launching into silence. They were pulling a lever that was already built.
Most developers do not have that lever. I did not have it.
And without distribution, even the best product shouts into a void.
Your product can be objectively better than the alternative. It can be faster, cheaper, and more thoughtfully designed. And it will still sit undiscovered because nobody knows you exist and you have no mechanism to change that.
The product was never the bottleneck.
Distribution was.
What I should have done first
The fastest path to a product that people actually want is through service.
Not consulting forever. Not replacing one job with another. But starting with service deliberately, as a strategy, before you write the first line of your product's code.
Every conversation you have with a paying service client is market research that no survey, no Reddit thread, and no validation framework can replicate.
You are inside their workflow. You are watching them use the broken tools they currently tolerate. You are hearing the exact words they use to describe their problem — which are almost never the words a developer would use to describe the same problem. You are seeing which part of the process makes them frustrated enough to pay someone to fix it.
That intelligence is worth more than months of building in isolation.
And here is the part that changes everything: they are paying you to gather it.
The client paying you for a service is, without knowing it, funding your research into the product you will eventually build. They are telling you the price point before you have to guess it. They are telling you the features that matter and the ones that do not. They are pre-validating your roadmap with every conversation.
When you eventually build the product, you are not guessing. You are building what you already know people will pay for because they have been paying for the manual version of it.
The identity shift nobody talks about
There is a deeper reason most developers never make the transition from employee to founder. And it is not the one they think it is.
It is not lack of skill. Developers are technically exceptional. That is not the gap.
It is not lack of ideas. Most developers have more ideas than they know what to do with.
The gap is identity.
For most of us, the mental model of what we are goes like this: I am a developer. I build things. I ship features. I solve technical problems. Someone else sells them.
That mental model is completely fine inside a job. It is lethal when you are trying to build something for yourself.
Because when you are building for yourself, you are not just the person who builds the thing. You are the person who identifies which thing to build, who decides what it costs, who explains why it is worth that, and who takes responsibility for whether it works.
Services force that shift.
The moment you sit across from a business owner, tell them their current process is costing them money, and propose a specific solution at a specific price — you are no longer an employee. You cannot be. Employees do not negotiate outcomes. Employees do not own the result.
That conversation changes you in a way that shipping another feature inside a product nobody uses never will.
The sequencing that actually works
Here is what this looks like in practice.
Start with people you already know. Not strangers. Not cold emails. The people in your phone, your family, your former colleagues. Think about which of them runs a business or works inside one.
Call them. Not to pitch. To ask one question: what is the most frustrating, time-consuming thing in your work right now?
Listen properly. Not to identify a technical solution immediately. To understand the shape of the pain.
When you hear something you know you can fix — offer to fix it. Charge for the outcome, not the hours. Deliver something that works. Document everything you learned.
Then find another client with a similar problem. And then another.
After three to five clients in the same space, you will start to see the pattern. The same friction. The same workflow. The same words to describe the same frustration. That pattern is your product.
Build for that pattern and you will know before you write the first line of code that someone will pay for what you are building. Because they already have.
Where I am now
GinuxAI is live. BuySmart is open source and growing.
Both are better products than they would have been if I had built them in isolation from the beginning. Because in the process of building publicly, writing about the market, and having conversations with real users, I have been doing exactly what services do — getting close to real people with real problems and letting that shape what I build.
But I would be lying if I said I got the sequencing perfectly right from the start.
The honest version is: I learned the sequencing by getting parts of it wrong. By building before validating. By discovering, after the fact, that some of the assumptions I built into early versions of the product were assumptions nobody had actually confirmed.
That is not a disaster. It is how almost everyone learns.
But you do not have to learn it the same way I did.
The sequencing is not complicated.
Solve a real problem for a real person. Get paid for it. Learn everything from that client. Repeat until you see the pattern. Then build the product that solves the pattern.
Services first. Distribution second. Product third.
In that order. Not because it is the comfortable path. Because it is the one that actually works.
Discussion
I am curious where you are in this journey.
Are you currently in build mode — working on a product before you have paying users? Or have you gone through the service-first path and built something from validated demand?
Drop your experience in the comments. Especially if you tried to skip straight to SaaS and paid for it the same way I did. I want to know what the pattern looks like for developers in different markets and contexts.
I write about building products in Africa, what the best builders on the continent are doing differently, and what I am learning as a founder. Follow me here on Dev.to or subscribe to my Substack at oluwajuwonomotayo.substack.com for the full archive.
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