Short introduction, but by step-by-step process
Hello and welcome to the new Blog
SAAS founders are increasing day by day. I absolutely love the concept of creating something valuable as a developer to finally bring some money from it.
And after Levels.io and Mar Lou sharing some interesting SAAS earning stories, I was thinking of bringing a blog on a similar process, how to find a SAAS idea and build it and then market it to gain some customers.
How to find SAAS Idea?
Well, some people prefer finding problems they themselves encounter
Some people prefer finding repetitive problems they have found with others or multiple people
Some people go behind Reddit, Twitter, Idea browser, Micro SAAS ideas, talk to customers/people, Boring Cash and other similar websites.
Some people find an already working idea earning a lot, then try to remake it with more features and a cheaper alternative, just like Youform as a Typeform alternative
How to validate an Idea?
These steps or processes are simple
Use ValidatorAI or FounderPal to validate your SAAS idea using AI
Use Reddit, Twitter and other social media platforms to know if an alternative is already present and people need that kind of tool
Quickly launch a landing page and share the link with people on social media or any platform like Discord, Medium, or Peerlist to get your first customer
Build MVP and launch it ASAP within a week (the best approach in my opinion)
How to bring an Idea into Reality?
This is quite the hardest part, actually, but I'll divide it again into processes
- Write down the Idea features
- Finalise the design (Simple design with all required pages, admins, apps, features, pricing, blogs, FAQ, legal papers, landing page, contact page and more)
- Quickly build an MVP using your favourite tech stack, Nextjs, React, Tailwind, Tanstack, Shadcn, Resend, Stripe, Polar, Vercel Analytics, Posthog, Firebase, Supabase, Clerk or BetterAuth
- Launch MVP and launch on ProductHunt, TopSAASDirectories, Micro SAAS Launch, Peerlist, Twitter
- Keep marketing one post on social media every day, write emails about updates to users and subscribers, and add pricing to get the revenue from your hard work
Last part is again a tricky one because this takes time and marketing, and a sense of understanding what people actually need and why they will pay and how they will pay
How to Earn from SAAS?
The process of getting money from a user for your work is similar to the situation of why and how you pay someone for their work.
We become rational when we want to pay someone for a small feature or price for a SAAS app, and that is why sales is the hardest one, and you really need to understand the user mindset of how and why they will pay.
But marketing with a better product will eventually bring more sales and help you to keep growing
Do not forget to stay connected to your first-time users, collect and act on feedback, and be active with your products in the customers' eyes; it will build trust and get you more sales and reputation.
Add reviews and testimonials with your customers and clients to showcase them to others helps to bring more customers and build trust among others.
Will my small project/product get a customer?
Some of the hardest questions or doubts we have are about trusting ourselves.
Will someone use my product?
Is someone ready to pay for it?
All these doubts actually kill action, and in the era of AI 2025 vibe coding, we can stop thinking and quickly bring our idea into reality.
Just take baby steps, one step at a time, so use your idea and write it down, then create a landing page or a simple app and put it behind an authentication layer and push it to github or a new URL, demo URL
Share it with others to try and use it for your for FREE and collect feedback. This entire process should take one week, and within a week, you will have one customer to use your product. Be very sure to share the product not with friends but actual people and if you are in college then share it with seniors or on social media platform, bring one Youtube video explaining your product and add this video link on landing page so that anyone visiting your website can watch and understand your product, add your contact email so that people can reach if they have slight interest in your product.
Hard work does pay off, so even if nothing works after doing all you can, TRY again. The more experience you have better the product you can make.
Nextjs SAAS boilerplates?
Well, if you Google or visit this website, you can find a good option for Nextjs boilerplates for building SAAS.
You can build your own with my step-by-step process, as mentioned below
- Use this NextJS Tailwind starter repository
- First, install the required packages: Tanstack, Stripe or Polar, Firebase, Supabase, Vercel Analytics and Nextjs or Clerk and Resend, React markdown or Tiptap Editor
- Build quick pages, App, landing page, Dashboard page, pricing page, contact page, blogs page
- Handle states and integrate API for each page, either with Supabase, Prisma, Neon or Firebase database
- Add an authentication layer to the login page using Supabase, NextAuth, Firebase or Clerk
- Create an admin page to manage users, subscribers, payments, paid users, send emails, create emails, and so more. Integrating the API, the admin will reduce the time we usually waste in switching tabs and updating the application and help to engage users with one click
- Payment API with webhooks and backend API integration, this includes adding third party payments SDK for creating checkout and using webhook and backend API to update the each user payment information and transation details in the frontend and backend side both, usually one webhook works very well no need to add too many states because your want perfect product, keeping in mind that we have to build MVP within a week so later on we can update with more features
- Use Tanstart with Typescript, Shadcn if needed, Resend as base package
- Use server-side API for strict backend API and webhooks in Nextjs
Once that is done, our basic SAAS repository is ready, and we can launch it on vercel for FREE.
I'll bring this new SAAS boilerplate as our next template launch on gettemplate.website, similar to what we have brought to create the Nextjs Documentation website and one for creating CRM dashboards.
Collecting Feedback
This is again a tricky and important part; most developers who are founders usually find this boring and skip this part.
But it's important, force your users to give feedback, provide some free things to them if they add feedback, but collect the feedback, ask tough questions why they won't use your product?, which alternative they would prefer, if they pay, then how much and why they pay?
These questions are tough, but as they say in Japanese, if you get on the wrong train, get out immediately; otherwise, the longer you wait, the more expensive it becomes to go back to the original station.
A few quick tips for collecting feedback to understand how users are using your application: use session replays from Amplitude, Vercel or Google Analytics to see which pages users are visiting more and which pages they drop the most
Another detailed way of collecting feedback is to create a form and let the users fill it, provide some free giveaways like a FREE one-month subscription, a FREE template in our case, a FREE API access or FREE credits. Use Typeform or Youform to create a quick form and embed it in your website. Do not waste time creating a stupid, boring form.
Launching the app on platforms
Marketing is important, and in the crowd of so many websites, you need to grab some attention, and one way is to keep coming into the users' feed and eyes.
So for that, you need to be active on platforms, consistent on social media, and if your SAAS app is for businesses, then you need to talk to salespeople either or email or DMs or over the phone.
A few platforms I use are as follows
Here is the FREE 100+ website to submit your SAAS
Asset management for launching and marketing
I face this issue while marketing my website. We need screenshots, good banners and thumbnails, Twitter tweets and IG posts or YouTube shorts, all different kinds of creatives and tools I use
Notion to manage assets
Uploadthing, Firebase Storage or Supabase as cloud storage
You will understand why scheduling software and asset management software are in-demand SAAS apps in the market because of the above boring repetitive manual work we have to do every time for our product, create banners, same posters, screenshots and more.
Quick Tips
I created this kixi.app helps to avoid going to canva and figma, which are heavy apps take time for most of my website banners
I use the Scrapify screenshot API to get a screenshot for a URL, which we are using in Kixi.app as well.
Create something which will automate your work, it will bring more opportunities and ideas to you, so many things which I use personally or created myself, I can open-source them or bring them as SAAS app.
One more app idea I need is to automate social media marketing using scheduling. One good way is to use a third-party messaging API to send social media campaigns. One can use Mailchimp or SendGrid as well, but for me, Resend works well.
How to Design SAAS app?
In 2025, I will always choose v0.dev or Google Stitch to generate AI-based web apps and web designs. This helps me to bring imagination into reality
Once that is done, I usually prefer Cursor agents explaining all the features, pages and packages, and the user experience flow the current SAAS app needed to finally generate the app. Then I add my own design, theme, styling and apply my own colour theory.
This is the whole step-by-step plan to create your next SAAS app. Hope you like it
See you at the next one
Shrey
Few Citations
How we build website templates
How to Build AI chat App with Nextjs, Vercel AI SDK and Firebase
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