5 months, +600 commits and +350hh coding, Building a SaaS starter kit

Feels good to ship, and more if you spent a lot of effort and time.

We are building a SaaS Starter Kit and a community around this too, so everyone can feel more supported when building.

Idea came up after trying to start a quite big challenge (Online courses + bootcamp) which had a lot of nice things, but after weeks of building things, users management, payments, and more, I realized that I was about to spend months, like 6 or more, and 3 of them were going to be building repetitive stuff.

Just wanted to focus on my cool ideas and avoid the boring part, users, payments, landing, etc. and what if the project fails (which is quite probable, since +90% of them usually fail) don't want to throw all away and start all over again, so I started the template system.

So instead of wasting 6 months of work, I could waste just 2 or 3 months, because the other part were part of my template system, I wanted it just for me at first, but after thinking, it made more sense to sell it, collect feedback, improve it, and generate a bit of income along the way, since I spent a lot of time.

One big challenge was keeping myself focused on the idea, sometimes wanted to stop building and start another SaaS, but after sharing with other people and creating a team, I could build this until having a nice product, we still need to build a lot, but we have sth already usable.

Some products are made and shipped within days or hours, so if you have that kind of project is fine, but wasnt the case for this one, so is quite hard to keep building and coding for 1 project for months without getting any sell or feedback.

What I can tell you is if you have those moments where you want to throw in the towel, don't do it, take a rest and continue the day after, the project will be always look better the next day, if the feeling continue after days, you can start thinking about quitting imo.

What is nice about my project is that even if I don't reach ramen profit, it's fine, I will be still building on top of this, since will be a nice base for my future projects, win-win situation for me (and it feels good when you have a project that you know that all code you are writing is going to be useful no matter what)

I recommend communicating with customers is discord or similar platforms, we are using it transparently, even our board is open to public, discussions, problems, new ideas, marketing, seo, etc. all devs can learn from each other.

This is my startup btw: https://blue-panda.dev/ any feedback welcome.

So far my focus is 3 bases: landing, users (firebase), payments (stripe) and each of them with 4 designs available (currently building 6 more designs and other bases like nocode, cms, supabase+lemon)

A concern that I found with other SaaS starter kits is that you have a huge project in your hands, so even if you don't need payments, you will have all payments code mixed up, so I'm building as separate as possible, so you can choose things that fits your needs.

Shout out also to my friends and brother that joined me some months ago too, we have quite a nice team.

Thanks guys,`

#buildinpublic