SaaS App Retrospective - 12 Lessons I Learned

An assessment of the journey creating my SaaS app - highs/lows and things I learned through the process.

In October 2020 I decided to build a SaaS app using NoCode, with the aim of getting multiple monthly paying customers.

I did it.

thank you for attending my TED talk.

If you want some more details, read on :)

Why NoCode

For a year leading up to choosing a Nocode approach, I had built a shopping list app with code. I used the Ember.js front end framework, and it was going great. I had a working app, with multi user OAuth login, talking through AWS API Gateway, being handled by Lambda using Node, persisting data in a DynamoDB database. Great.

The trouble was I was only really 60% done, and it had taken 12 months, part time, squeezed into the gaps around my day job. I hadn’t built the invitations logic, nor made the UI look nice. I had come to a choice in the road.

Keep yak shaving with code, or pivot?

I knew that even though I liked code, and problem solving, that the actual fighting with syntax and dealing with all of this and this and this wasn’t actually getting me to the endpoint very fast.