Building a DevOps SaaS Solo: Month 1 Retrospective

One month in. Here is everything that happened, the good and the bad.

## What I Shipped

• Multi-project dashboard (read-only, v1)
• AWS account connection via IAM role (not storing credentials)
• Basic infrastructure status view across all connected accounts
• Onboarding flow for first-time users

## What Took Longer Than Expected

AWS account connection. I underestimated how many different ways people have configured their AWS environments. Some use root accounts directly. Some use SSO. Some have complex cross-account role setups. Building a connector that handles all of these gracefully took 3x longer than I planned.

## What I Got Wrong

I built the UI before I had real user feedback. Classic mistake. I had to rebuild parts of the dashboard after the first 5 user interviews showed me I had prioritized the wrong information.

## What Surprised Me

How much DevOps engineers appreciate blunt, technical communication. No fluff. No marketing language. Just: here is what it does, here is what it does not do yet, here is the roadmap.

## Metrics (Being Transparent)

• Waitlist signups: 127
• User interviews completed: 31
• Features built: 4
• Features scrapped after user feedback: 2
• Lines of code written: I stopped counting

## Month 2 Plan

CI/CD pipeline builder. This is the feature request I have received most consistently. You will see it ship publicly.

If you are a DevOps engineer or startup CTO, I would love to get your feedback on what I have built so far. Drop a comment or find me at step2dev.com.