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Need help with decision paralysis

I have a story to share, it might be more common than I think it is or I could be the only developer experiencing this kind of decision paralysis. Either way, it's blocking me from releasing a SaaS for almost 3-4 years. I know something needs to be done to move forward with my aspiration of releasing a SaaS product. Any advice is more than welcome!

The story

I am a full-stack developer, most of my experience is in the JS ecosystem where I would rank my JS skills a 9.5/10. I feel very comfortable working with monorepos, FE, BE, tooling in general, and even deploying JS-related stuff (that includes typescript).

My goal is to build a SaaS product that will allow me to make a living one day. To reach this goal I have a series of requirements for the tech stack:

  • The DevOps is simple, manageable, and predictable
  • Adding features or debugging is easy and scalable (1 person army)
  • It does not grow exponentially in complexity as the code-base grows
  • Pricing of deploying and scaling is predictable with little overhead
  • Allows for iterating over many different SaaS products in a fast and easy manner. It's very likely that my first attempts will not find a market fit.

The problem

As I mentioned, I am experienced with all things JS, so naturally, this was my first (and only choice) for some time. My stack of choice was Express, Mongo, and React (MERN).

I spent 4 months, developing a SaaS product. At some point, I built an API with a full auth-mechanism, and most of the business logic for the SaaS I was building. Now I only needed to connect a React FE and add payments. At that moment my motivation went from 100 to 0.
I had spent 4 months of summer developing only a part of the API, I could not see anything but some JSON responses in postman.

That's when I started reading about other success stories from bootstrap founders, I noticed something in common: most people used either a BaaS (firebase) or a full-stack MVC framework that is battle-tested, most likely django or rails.

I took a break and a few months later I was learning RoR. Took me a year to learn and build a SaaS (that I never launched) to lose my motivation again, I just wasn't as good at Ruby as I was with JS, plus building a modern FE was a bit of a pain (no reusable components), reactivity even with hotwire is more complicated than it needs to be IMO. So I pivoted again...

Now I am building another SaaS, A LOT of features are in place: subscription payments, teams, and business logic. But again I am starting to think about the future of this project, the stack that I chose is too trendy (burned too many tech cards), and how easy it was in Rails to add features - even though my approach was probably not the best according to the rails doctrine.

My ask

I can't keep on this track of pivoting between stacks, I really want to get something out there, register a company and be happy with the tech stack that I use, while maintaining my goals mentioned above. Has anyone experienced this? Am I too crazy or maybe afraid of releasing a product? What advice would you give me?

Note: my latest stack is SvelteKit/Supabase

Thanks for reading this long post.

on July 29, 2022
  1. 2

    Once upon a time I worked with a developer who was always in pursuit of the latest and greatest stack. We wasted a huge amount of time reading documentation, and asking questions. At the end of the day, we could have launched products much more quickly if we had stuck to technology we knew and had proven we could use.

    Stick with what you know and launch your product.

    Once your start making money, hire someone to develop the next iteration, while you focus on running the business.

  2. 2

    yes i have experienced this. I created one project in one tech stack than i wanted to share my learning so i thought of creating a course than i researched all the themes for hugo than i started creating my own theme in hugo than i tested it with netlify than i thought it is better to host on my own vps but i liked how netlify used to sync everything from github so i started another project with different tech stack and now that project is also completed....you see where i am going? all this while i didn't talked to single user did 0 marketing, didn't even created a single landing page! So my new resolution is to not touch development at all, i will only write this year.

    My suggestion is to go back to your mern stack and stick with it until you face real problems with users.

    what were the saas's that you created that didn't see light of the day?

    1. 1

      Testimonial collector, apartment listings for unversity students, simple HR managing tool and currently working on an AI copy content generator tool

  3. 2

    I feel you. Some tips:

    1. You are focussing way too much on the stack, not once did you talk about a) potential customers and b) the problem your SaaS is solving for them.
    2. You sound like a struggling solo founder that could really benefit from regularly talking with other people (peers, other founders, mentors, friends) about what you are trying to do and what you are struggling with.
    3. You are pursuing the holy grail of indiehacking (a product that makes you money while requiring pretty much no work from your side), and most people trying that fail.
    4. Failing at least a few times, and learning from it, is part of the journey.
    5. What is the smallest thing you could release? A landing page! So go build one, release it, then post on IH (and everyhwere else) and ask for feedback. You can continue working on the app in the background, but you need to start collecting feedback so that you know that what you are building is actually needed.
    1. 1

      Thanks for your tips. You are right, I didn't mention my product, but it was on purpose since I think it's not relevant to my struggle. It is a copy content / SEO / blog post generator using AI from the company that I work for.
      That's good advice starting with a landing page and going from there, I will look into that, thanks.