TL;DR
I'm Vicky, a solo developer from Malaysia π²πΎ building 5 SaaS products simultaneously. This is the story of how I manage my time, w...
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5 products in parallel is wild. I'm doing 2 (Japanese e-commerce + a side SaaS for Japan sourcing) and even that feels stretching.
What's your context-switching system across the 5?
Hey Mamoru! π Thanks for reading β "wild" is honestly the right
word, some weeks it feels exactly like that π
Honestly, my context-switching system is pretty simple:
1. Weekly focus blocks β I dedicate ONE week per project at
a time. This week is SmartLangAI, next week is Animal Rescue.
Switching daily would kill me.
2. Shared infrastructure β My commerce SaaS and education
SaaS share 80% of the codebase (auth, billing, multi-tenancy,
admin panel). So "switching" between them is actually pretty light.
3. Aggressive ruthless prioritization β One project is always
my "main." Right now SmartLangAI gets 60% of my time, the rest
split the remaining 40%. Without this, I scatter.
4. Documentation > memory β Every project has a
/docs/notes.mdfile where I dump where I left off. When I come back to it after
2 weeks, I don't have to "reload" my brain.
Japanese e-commerce sounds awesome btw β that's a tough market
to crack. Are you doing localization for international sellers?
Btw if your Japan sourcing SaaS ever needs multilingual support
(JP β EN β CN etc.), I'd love to give you free credits to try
SmartLangAI β would love to get your feedback as a fellow builder π
What's your biggest bottleneck right now between the 2 projects?
Hey Vicky! Thanks for the detailed breakdown β the Weekly focus blocks idea hits hard. I've been daily-switching and it's wrecking me.
Japan e-commerce IS brutal. We sell on Amazon JP, Rakuten, Yahoo β and we don't currently localize for international sellers, that's actually exactly the gap I want to fill with Japan Brand Finder (japanbrandfinder.lovable.app/): making Japanese suppliers discoverable in English.
SmartLangAI free credits would be amazing β JPβEN product description generation is on my roadmap. Where do I sign up?
Biggest bottleneck right now: distribution. The product is built, the audience isn't.
How did you get traction on your first SaaS?
So glad the weekly focus idea resonated! π Daily switching is
a productivity killer β try it for a week, you'll feel the
difference.
Japan Brand Finder is brilliant β just checked it out. There's
a massive gap there. International buyers struggle SO much to
discover Japanese suppliers because of the language barrier.
Smart positioning! π―π΅
For SmartLangAI signup:
π Just head to smartlangai.com and register as a User
π You'll get 35K free characters on signup to try it out
I'd LOVE to hear your feedback specifically on:
On distribution β honest answer: my first traction came from
THIS kind of content. Writing in public on DEV, sharing what
I'm learning, being honest about struggles. No paid ads, no
cold DMs.
A few things that actually worked:
Japan Brand Finder's audience is probably hanging out in
r/FulfillmentByAmazon, r/dropship, ecommerce Twitter, and
Japan-import Facebook groups. That's where I'd start.
Excited to see where you take this β let's stay in touch! π€
Vicky, this is gold β thank you. Going to register for SmartLangAI tonight and try JPβEN translations on real product descriptions. Will share specific feedback once I've run a batch.
Your 4-point distribution playbook just became my next 30-day plan:
r/FulfillmentByAmazon as a starting point is brilliant β never thought of cross-posting there.
Let's definitely stay in touch! π€
What's the one mistake you wish you'd avoided in your first 6 months?
Vicky, first β thank you. The signup β API key β first translation flow took me literally 5 minutes. Dashboard clean, JSON API intuitive, response fast. Beautiful execution. This is one of the smoothest SaaS onboarding experiences I've had recently.
Ran my first batch on a traditional Akita cedar bento box description (~280 chars JPβEN). Since you asked for honest feedback:
β Works beautifully:
β οΈ Where it struggled (might be useful data for your roadmap):
For e-commerce dealing with traditional Japanese products, culturally-specific proper nouns are the tricky part. Possible roadmap features that would unlock this for sourcing use cases:
Happy to share full input/output JSON if useful for your test set. Will keep testing β Japanese snacks and character goods next.
Truly appreciate the generosity, Vicky. This is the most "fellow builder" gesture I've experienced on DEV.
@vickylee β found this via @tokidigital's fog post (he name-checked your translation API in the section about the anesthesia/Akita-shrubs problem). The cross-link between your work and his is the most "build-in-public actually paying off" thing I've seen in this cohort all week.
One question on the "ship every week" principle, asked as someone running a stricter "ship every day" cadence for 16 days now: at what point did weekly start working for you rather than feeling like an arbitrary cap? I keep finding that daily makes the work coarser (no time to sit on a decision), and I wonder if weekly is where the quality curve crosses back.
The Akita-shrubs case in @tokidigital's post is the use case I'd most want SmartLangAI to handle natively β culturally-specific proper nouns are the failure mode where every generic API quietly mangles things. Is that on your roadmap, or would proper-noun preservation need to be a separate layer the developer wires in around the API call?
(I'm at Day 16 of a similar cold-start: solo dev, MIT Apify Actor for Gmail inbox triage, 245 readers / 0 sales so far. Your number β 5 products in parallel β does land as wild from where I'm sitting.)
Thanks for the connect, foxck β and yeah, the proper-noun case is the one I'd put at the top. The eval set I sent Vicky was basically a pile of exactly that failure: γ’γγγ΅β"Anesthesia", 逑β"Masahiro", ηε «γ€ζ©β"eight bridges". Culturally-specific nouns are where generic translation quietly fails the e-commerce use case β a mistranslated brand name doesn't read as broken, it reads as confident and wrong, which is worse.
On weekly-vs-daily (since you asked it in the open): I'm only a week in, so take it lightly β but my read is daily forces shipping volume while weekly forces shipping judgment, and a cold-start probably needs the first before it can afford the second. Curious where @vickylee lands though β she's got the longer track record here.