How I'm Building a SaaS to Launch in 7 days (in public)

Hey everyone, Peter here!

I’m doing a fun, quick challenge to build a SaaS (coding the entire thing myself) in 7 days and documenting the entire journey.

I got a lot of support to do this so I'm finally doing it..

I have 10 years of experience coding (python, node, vue) and have done a lot of projects up my sleeve so this isn’t my first rodeo.

The Idea of the App

The idea for my SaaS product is to create a collection of well-designed SaaS pages AKA a swipe-file. Whenever I design pages for my SaaS products, I always go to Dribble or other websites with nice designs. It would be really useful to have all the designs I like in one spot, and that's what I want to create. Essentially, it will be a database of really well designed SaaS pages, user flows, emails, pretty much everything you need for a SaaS.

To develop my SaaS product, I won't be hiring any additional developers. I'll be spending 2-3 hours per day working on the project and making sure it's shippable in seven days.

Tools

For building the web app, I'm using SaaS Pegasus, Appliku, and Tailwind.

SaaS Pegasus is a code-based template that has many of the essential features already built in, such as sign-on, login, and payments.

Appliku is great for handling code deployments and domain management.

Tailwind makes it super easy to create well-designed sites.

The Tech Setup

I'm using Airtable as the backend storage for my SaaS product. I chose Airtable because it has an easy-to-use API and allows me to add and edit images easily without having to write any API code. For payments, I'm planning to use GumRoad. I read that GumRoad performs better than Stripe on Twitter, so I want to test it and see if it really does perform better.

What I’ve done so far

So far, I have set up the code base and solved some initial roadblocks. I've installed all the required packages and have all the code set up. The site is running on my local machine and in production. The next goal is to work on the dashboard and data import.

Roadblocks so Far

One of the roadblocks I faced was a random CSRF issue, which is a security issue for cross-site prevention. I spent around 30 minutes trying to fix it using ChatGPT, but the answer was actually on the first page of Stack Overflow. Thankfully, I managed to fix it after thirty-minutes.

I have a video here if you want to watch this instead.