Cleaning SAAS Progress Thread

[Bounce Back]

Hey folks,

You may recall from my intro post that I've been on the forum since around 2016. I've forgotten my previous account in a break I took while building and selling my commercial cleaning business. After the sale I took some time to slowlane up some cash to pay off some debts and what not but over the last couple of months have been ramping up to start a SAAS venture.

After some flakiness from a seller on a SAAS I was going to purchase from them, I have pulled out of the deal. I felt I had to trust my gut.

So back at the drawing board this week I had one thought on my mind: "How can I just get started? Even buying a SAAS is taking too long..." and the echo in mind of reading posts about doing something with which I have "domain authority".

Finally something I had sidelined some years back for a variety of reasons seemed so much more appealing now. I had got decently far into developing a management tool of sorts for the janitorial industry but had a lot of growing pains in my primary business (the cleaning one) at the time (long story for another time) that it just fell out of my scope of concern. Since being back slowlane it became more and more distant and out of mind as well.

In the meantime the industry has gotten a little more competitive but the main one I planned to compete toe to toe with looks to have taken on a bunch of debt, feature creep, blown up in employee count (expenses), and now no longer advertises their prices openly so I am going to guess got even more expensive (I already thought I could compete on price easily if need be).

This may change but my two current goals are:
1. Switch over to doing this full time at 200k ARR (I am blessed to make more than this at my day job but will take the cut to focus on it full time when this happens).
2. Exit at 1M ARR (unless I am doing like +20% month over month or something).

I've decided, screw it, despite all the issues I have with it - it is what I am going with and I will handle them. So here is the start of I think my first ever progress thread on this forum ladies and gents. Cheers!

 

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[Bounce Back]

First official progress post:

Alright so as part of my return to slowlane I also decided to wrap up a masters degree I had started before launching my business which I've been doing while working (which has also gotten pretty crazy but slowlane is going to slowlane). I am in my last semester of that with my graduate project and what not and most intense course so this will add yet another thing but I don't care I am hungry for it. I will do what I can and figure it out from there.

As of now here is what I will start chipping away at:

Mid-term goal (will guide the next few months of progress):

1. Goal of being beta-able by end of this semester (let's say May 15th)
   1. At that time I will call up companies and get 3-5 of 'em to test it for free and do a case study on them.
2. Figure out initial pricing

Short-term goals (things to work on in between updates/over next few updates):

1. I need to shake the cobwebs off the code and my dev setup. My hard-drive has died since I last had this running locally so I don't even remember my full setup/flow. Need to pull the code back down from the server and just get it to run. (Don't even get me started on remembering the convoluted flow I had to be able to deploy the mobile apps).
2. I need to take inventory of what I have and determine what the MVP (minimum viable product) is truly to get this launched. I will move to start tracking in JIRA or something like I do at my day job - previously I was just doing this in a text doc even though I know better.
3. I know I am going to rip out the custom made auth solution I did - I did it out of desperation of keeping costs low and now am not worried about that as much as I am using some half-baked BS I came up with - will replace it with most likely Auth0. This will create some rework to parts of the code but is very much for the better.
4. I want to reconsider some other core solution I had built out myself again. There is an industry standard way to handle this part (has to do with calendars/scheduling things) but I recall that standard fell short of a lot of things I had planned in the future. I want to see if for keeping things simple if there is anyway at all I could just adopt that standard and scratch all my custom stuff (that honestly gives me headaches dealing with and slows down development a lot).
5. Decouple the landing/marketing site from my react app or see how to integrate it into something like wordpress. I'd like to be able to change that quicker/on the fly and have some of the SEO plugins wordpress provides - thinking the sooner the better as I could start paying to have some content/blog posts generated as I code up to the beta.

 

[CONAN]

Fellow developer here...
It is my great wish to build a (micro) SaaS business and there were tries in the past. Many hours of development spent before learning that I should (somehow) validate the idea and present it to the marketplace in cheapest possible way (which is definitely not months of development) ...
So I hope you're sure you're at the stage in which grinding code is the next step...

As for your goals:

3. Definitely! Custom auth is not worth it you need true and tried solutions both for easy of development and for security
5. You mentioned React app. I would recommend using existing components like Material UI and not do custom ones as much.

And just an advice for remembering setup/flow. There's no need to remember those I recommend you build CI/CD pipelines early on which will enable you to deploy way faster and detect errors easier

Good luck!