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Cover image for How I built my first Saas Startup

How I built my first Saas Startup

Thrinkxs on January 18, 2025

Appointment booking software isn’t a new concept. In fact, it’s widely adopted in many industries. But when it comes to salons and spas in South Af...
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fyodorio profile image
Fyodor

Cool story, good luck with your business 👍🏼

As it’s a dev platform and the main audience is the developer community, it’d be interesting to know the technical part — what have you built it with, what tools and infrastructure did you use? I guess you heavily employ embeddable widgets?

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Thrinkxs

You know I keep hearing about emdeddable widgets but I didn’t quite use it.
I used NextJ, Typescript for the Frontend, Express JS and Node + Typescript for the backend .
Also went for mongodb for database.

Will write a post on the comprehensive stack

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Ben Halpern

Good luck!

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Lance Munyao

Amazing stuff right here. I love how you've built a user centered product.

The interface for search can have more status indicators (loaders etc) though....When searching for spas near me I really didn't know what was going on until the google maps search integration just popped up seconds later

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Lance Munyao

You could potentially look at the market here in Kenya as well

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Thrinkxs

It’s actually our plan to launch in Kenya and Ghana as well.
That’s why we chose paystack to allow global payment

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Thrinkxs

Thanks for the feedback
I’ll definitely fix that

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Thomas Nixon

Great success story 👏 would love to know what you built the tech side on, like did you use a framework like Baseline github.com/Baseline-JS/core to accelerate your time to market?

Interested in how well your solution is scaling now, any hurdles?

Why didn't you just use Stripe in the first place or at all?

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Thrinkxs

Thanks Thomas
We couldn’t use Stripe because it’s not available in Africa, so we had to incorporate in the UK first before being able to use stripe.

I used NextJs and Typescript for Frontend and Express, Node and Typescript for the backend as well.

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Daniele Minatto

This is such an inspiring journey! I love how you identified a real pain point during a personal experience and turned it into an opportunity to create value for others. It’s especially impressive how quickly you pivoted when the payment feature caused issues—that kind of responsiveness is crucial for early-stage startups.

Congrats on SwiftBooked!

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Thrinkxs

Thanks Daniele.
Really appreciate it.

Yeah it was quite tough early on, cause we didn’t have cashflow so we couldn’t sustain the pay per booking model, had to switch to subscription.

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Steve Chester

Congrats on the launch and good luck! I've built something similar for the US market over at neverwaitapp.com

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Thrinkxs

Is it profitable?

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Jackfiallos

I had a few questions that came to mind while reading:

  • When you first had the idea, how did you confirm there was a real demand for it? Did you already have connections in the industry, or was there another way you validated it?
  • Early users can be tough to get. What worked best for you in attracting those first customers?
  • Now that you're past the beta phase, what’s been the biggest surprise—good or bad—about running a live product?
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achilela profile image
Ataliba Miguel

Nice and motivating story. I myself have also tried in a similar fashion attempt to built something hovering around in Angola but with CompVis in place. The framework would entail the saloon video cameras would provide streaming videos and an AI trained network would evaluate the crowd inside of the saloon and all of the clients registered with the app or simply with WhatsApp would receive push off notifications on the crowd inside the saloon when is it at high/low peak or when a chair is empty ready to receive a client.