Ask HN: Best way to build a SaaS product for a non-tech founder

10 points by amitgupta6 3 years ago | 16 comments

I am a non-tech founder and have a compelling SAAS idea. I have validated the idea by surveying several potential customers. I am a potential customer myself. I have evaluated no-code solutions but I don't think that will solve problem for my customers.

I have a budget of about $50K to spend on building the product. I suppose, I have following options - Learn to code myself and build an MVP (Doesn't appear to be a practical choice) - Hire an outsourcing agency (or freelancer). Tell them my requirements and give them money. Looks practical one but have heard not so great feedback about this approach. - Hire a few technical people myself and build the product. - Find a CTO. Have tried doing it and failed.

Is there any 5th option which I am missing? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Contact info - omk55f7e@duck.com

codegeek 3 years ago |

If you are non technical, please do this first before seeking technical help or CTO:

- Document the idea on paper

- Do Mockups, storyboards, Wireframes etc. Doesn't have to be perfect and you may end up with something else in the future but you need to do this to actually formalize the idea. Otherwise, it is just in your head and no serious technical person would want to engage further. Suggestions: Use tools like Whimsical (big fan), Miro and many others. Old school Balsamiq will work as well.

- If you want to build a real SAAS business, your goal is to find a fully committed technical person/CTO ideally. Freelancers may take your money and even build something ok (a big if though) but if they don't have skin in the game, you will end up back at square one because code needs to be re-written/thrown at times especially from MVP stages.

Ultimately, you have to sell the idea, the vision with details on how you can achieve good growth for a good tech/CTO stranger to take you seriously. That is the unfortunate fact.

lienhoangduy 3 years ago |

In my opinion, here are some thoughts and I hope it's helpful:

Ideate and create your wireframes, mockups, prototypes, etc. You have to make your idea visible and ready to talk to others. Some tools that can help you with this are Whimsical (flowchart), Visily (wireframe and mockup), Justinmind (Prototype). This step can wrap up all your idea and you can use them for presenting to others. In the end, no one can succeed alone, find a Co-founder - a CTO to build up the product with you. You can have some freelancers to execute and build an MVP.

necatiozmen 3 years ago |

I can recommend to using helpful frameworks to save development time when building your SaaS production CRUD app.

There is an open source React based framework called "refine."

It eliminates the repetitive tasks demanded by CRUD operations and provides solutions for critical parts like authentication, access control, routing, networking, state management, and i18n.

So your developers can save a lot of time on the development process. Here is the repo: https://github.com/refinedev/refine

he11ow 3 years ago |

I'm going to give advice here on the assumption that you won't be taking on a CTO. I think it's a legit choice, finding the right partner is hard. Anyhow, it'll be easier to find the right person after there's something tangible to show.

The first thing to clarify to yourself is how close your SaaS is to a CRUD app. The less actual processing of data in the background there is, the easier it'll be for you to get this app built.

The second step is to wireframe your product properly, including behavior. For this you don't need a developer at all, but a designer. I would strongly recommend looking around on Upwork. Upwork gets a lot of flak on HN, and in my experience, wrongly so. At any rate, since it's your SaaS, not the designer's, you'll end up designing most of it yourself. The designer is there to execute, so that you end up with a decent mock up.

Working on getting to a mockup will force you to get very clear on the exact functionality of your future app. For this reason, don't try to design everything. Design for the absolute bare minimum product you could see yourself using.

Having a mock up is brilliant: not only can you show it to prospects, but you can start to get quotes for the work from different developers. Because they're all seeing the same functionality, you can compare quotes better than if they each come up with their own solutions, design, view on how the app should look and act.

Get at least five quotes, preferably more. Agencies will cost your more than freelancers, and will generally pad their hours or fees. The end result with agencies can literally be worse than freelancers. There can be a huge disparity between quotes (up to 10X difference, I found). Part of it is is trickle-down VC money: agencies that got used to catering VC-funded companies will charge more.

I know none of this seems to talk about the development part, but that's because ideally, by the time you find the right freelance developer, they should be able to just take your mockup and get it done, the way a WordPress designer can take a design and get it done.

Again, all of this assumes no fancy algorithmic or data processing in the background, and also that this isn't a data-intense application.

amitgupta6 3 years ago | |

Wow. Sincere thanks for taking time to write this elaborate answer. This is truly useful.

The one about price (and quality) disparity is very insightful. Didn't know it could vary that much.

The app I am trying to build is not a CRUD app. To give you some hint, it's about collecting data from various sources and putting them in a nice dashboard. The data in question is decently large and it comes from several dozens of sources. Most tech guys would talk it down like a trivial technical problem which can be solved in a hackathon but it does solve a non-trival and a very important problem for my potential customers.

You are right about the mockup since it would give me a great clarity myself as in what the end result would look like.

Again, many thanks for your detailed answer.

he11ow 3 years ago | | |

Sure thing. "Collecting data from various sources" can become a very difficult problem (depending on the data, depending on the sources...)

It doesn't necessarily change any of my earlier suggestions (especially on the mockup). But, if this is the nature of your problem and you haven't got a CTO and you're actually serious about building this thing, then you have to level up your coding skills at least to the point you can collect SOME data from SOME sources.

senttoschool 3 years ago |

Find a CTO as a co-founder. Do not do anything else.

If your idea is actually good, it shouldn't be that hard to find a CTO in today's environment because a lot of engineers have been laid off with nice severance packages.

amitgupta6 3 years ago | |

Yes, but my concern is that the problem I am trying to solve won't make a unicorn but surely make a few million dollar business. I wonder if this would be exciting enough for a tech co-founder. What do you think?

_448 3 years ago | | |

Share your idea here and provide your contact information, and technical people here will respond.

senttoschool 3 years ago | | |

If you can't sell your idea to a co-founder, you can't sell your product to customers.

xcubic 3 years ago |

Depending on what it is, I might be interested. Email in profile.

ushercakes 3 years ago |

I would just post here asking for a technical co founder if you’re willing to split equity.

If you want to keep the equity, you could try hiring an agency or a freelancer.

readonthegoapp 3 years ago |

i like the idea of using a low-code tool like Anvil:

https://anvil.works/

that said, i've never used that particular tool or really any of them, but Anvil changed their pricing recently to make things more startup-friendly, imo.

You'd still face all the same questions tho.

There are anvil-type partner agencies that presumably build saas apps pretty regularly. maybe search out some of the 'no/low-code businesses that made it'-type sites that seem to pop up every once in a while. a lot of it is hype, imo, but... possibly still legit.

I don't know if HN has a "What do you think about this type of app?" post type, but maybe you could put it in 'Ask HN' without getting downvoted to hell?

That can bring good and bad, too, so not sure it's all that useful. Some people love to hate.

But you might be able to find someone who is particularly interested in your idea and wants to help.

I have a couple of folks I use for relatively inexpensive development of saas apps using Laravel (a PHP-based framework), sometimes with various plugins - they're small operations so that's good, but it's not multiple people with a project manager, etc., so there's just going to be more work you have to do in that situation - which can be tough if you're trying to take care of your day job, too. Feel free to ping me.

Anvil can seemingly do a lot, but might not be able to do everything -- like, it might not be able to easily do team-based or multi-tenant saas (like Trello), whereas it prob can do a regular/simple saas like your personal gmail account easily enough. and building an app - like a native iphone/android app - is a diff ball of wax. $50k alone type of thing.

i use balsamiq for mockups and it's great. i use the 2-project plan, and retire/unretire projects as needed - the higher-level plans are too expensive for my blood. there is nothing else that comes close to balsamiq, imo. everything else is too complicated, or too garbage, or too pricey, or too whatever.

i usually start with pen (or pencil) and paper, a notebook, and start making notes, drawing screens, etc. then i take it to my dev and say, "here, please do this, and please give me an estimate of cost and timeline."

my latest project built this way is this:

https://navbarlinks.com/

i'm pleased with that outcome, and i may do further dev on it, not sure yet.