That Probably Doesn't Need to be SaaS
Developers are building too many micro-SaaS products.
I have written a weekly newsletter for 4 years. I track tech trends and creator content. Lately, I see a shift. Thoughtful technical writing is disappearing. Instead, I see endless solo-SaaS launches.
Developers spend time building niche web apps instead of writing about what they learn. They build marketing pages with colorful gradients where blog posts used to live.
AI caused this.
Coding agents removed the barriers to launching products. You can now type a command and walk away from your laptop. This makes building easy. It also makes it dangerous.
Many developers build things they do not understand. They move on before they learn the lesson.
Building like a SaaS is good for your career. It teaches you data isolation, auth, and data modeling. These skills help your day job. But taking a project to production is different.
A SaaS requires:
- Business strategy
- Marketing
- Pricing
- Customer support
When you move from a hobby to a service, your life changes. A user might email you at 2 AM on a Sunday because they are locked out. A bug in someone else's code might hammer your API. Your fun project becomes a job you did not apply for.
Stop trying to launch your tenth micro-SaaS. Build for yourself instead.
Make something for an audience of one. Build it with high engineering standards. Then, do these two things:
Open source the code. This shows your work without forcing you to provide lifetime support. It acts as a receipt of your learning.
Write about it. Writing a post forces you to understand the problem. A blog post costs nothing to maintain. It does not page you on a Sunday morning.
Do not feel pressured to monetize every passion. Not everything you build needs users.
The engineering you do for yourself still matters. A hobby that produces a great blog post helps the community more than a micro-SaaS with twelve strangers as customers.
Next time you finish a project, write the post before you write the pricing page. You might find that the writing was the goal all along.
Source: https://dev.to/aws-heroes/psa-that-probably-doesnt-need-to-be-saas-d0j
Optional learning community: https://t.me/GyaanSetuAi