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I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

blog.stetsonblake.com

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Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#231

Post by stets »

pembrook wrote: post #200
stets wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck vue.js. Launch your thing. EarlyBrd only used jinja2 templates with Flask. Now I'm migrating to laravel and only use Blade templates. Prove your thing out first because most users don't really care unless you're making some kind of real-time data analytics bs (in which case inqtel or other prob wants to send you some money)

What did you find were the downsides of developing a product in Flask vs. Laravel? Curious as I've been debating about which direction to steer a friend who is a designer trying their build their own product. He's played around with python, and liked it, so I was going to suggest flask (since most of online tutorials start there). But I've also heard good things about PHP/Laravel for beginners.

I would recommend Laravel or even Rails for a beginner over Flask. Again, with Flask I was re-writing and implementing things I didn't need to. Like hashing passwords. Or building user scaffolding. Flask fans will argue that you can do all of these. Yes...but you probably are grabbing some module and reading the docs and then messing around with it for a while. My forgotten email system in flask was a celery task running in a sidecar container and using an additional redis container for queueing and grabbing that job. In laravel that looks more like one command. `php artisan ui vue --auth`. Maybe there is a better way but I found myself struggling for a lot. Yes I didn't need to use psycopg2 and make nasty raw SQL calls because SQLAlchemy exists. SQLAlchemy isn't built in though. Django has a lot of these features and much of flask's attractiveness is in being light-weight so I guess it makes sense. Today, I'd say for solo-founders, try out Laravel > Rails > Django > Flask > everything else

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#232

Post by XCSme »

shp0ngle wrote: post #149
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #145

I have not had any success on Upwork. 100% of the “leads” I got there were scams. Not 75%, not even 99%. 100%. Not one single honest job. Some were requests for me to participate in scams, but I don’t roll that way. I’m sure that my experience was unique, and that my profile must have had some “scam flag,” so I won’t write off the platform in its entirety. I heard good things about the site from friends, but every si…

PHP is still big in the publishing business. WordPress alone is bigger than HN would lead you to believe. Lots of business runs on PHP. And not just running Drupal from inertia; Laravel is a new shiny thing.

And there's a reason for that, it's so simple but it works. Get a shared hosting for $3/mo, add WordPress to it by uploading a zip with cPanel and you're done. It's cheap, you never touch a line of code, there are premade resources for most niches (themes/fully fledged apps and platforms) and tutorials on how to do even the most basic things.

This works great for small business owners, web agencies and professionals (which is the majority of the people who actually need a website). When self-hosting you also have a sense of ownership and power (and you actually have them) compared to using dedicated platforms such as Shopify, Medium or Wix.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#233

Post by stets »

tkainrad wrote: post #113

Nice article, fun to read! I think solo-founders should try hard to find a simple and efficient tech stack - including hosting. Why use containers and EC2 when you could just use a PaaS like Pythonanywhere and be done with it?

It's mostly familiarity. I was working on AWS as an infra guy and doing a lot of docker stuff. Python anywhere looks cool but I still wanna manage my servers. I'd prob go digitalocean or similar if launching today. (with my containers ofc)

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#236

Post by novaleaf »

Is there any "SaaS as a Service" that can be used to put up a MVP of your SaaS idea?

Basically a whitebox SaaS open source that you can use? I only know of KongHQ but that's a SaaS marketplace, I don't think that's a good idea because with that you are treated as a vendor (no control of your users/ecosystem).

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#237

Post by stets »

novaleaf wrote: post #236

Is there any "SaaS as a Service" that can be used to put up a MVP of your SaaS idea? Basically a whitebox SaaS open source that you can use? I only know of KongHQ but that's a SaaS marketplace, I don't think that's a good idea because with that you are treated as a vendor (no control of your users/ecosystem).

There are a few templates and things if you google 'saas boilerplate'. Most I've found are specific to languages and require a lot of setup. It's an ok idea, just needs to be executed correctly. Laravel really handles a lot of this well and they even developed a paid boilerplate that claims to do billing and other things easily https://spark.laravel.com/

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#238

Post by eternauta3k »

zeroc8 wrote: post #155

The problem we have is market saturation of basically everything. The winners take it all. If I had a chance to do it all over again, I'd probably just learn a trade, like electrician, bricklayer or plumber. They don't seem to run out of work.

I'm not sure I understand. If you're a programmer, that's a trade and there's work out there.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#239

Post by unnouinceput »

stetsonator wrote: post #220
unnouinceput wrote: post #117

Qoute: "In the Fall of 2017 I'd done a ton of freelancing on the (garbage) website Upwork. Upwork is a bit of a grind. User's can search for a skill they'd like to freelance in ( Cisco Networking, Python programming, Painting Dogs, whatever) and apply for job's via proposals. The crappy thing about Upwork is that once a job is posted, the heat is on to apply. The longer you let the job sit, the more likely that other…

1 - maybe you’re right, I don’t know. Freelancers can find success on Upwork but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a garbage website 2 - I don’t think I ever said RSS was hard to make work. My app is essentially a feed reader. I am also a shit developer, covered that one already Thank you for reading and your feedback, though!

That garbage site is providing opportunities for millions of developers and clients, and personally feeding my family for over a decade. I tried freelancer.com, rentacoder.com, elance.com (before merging with odesk and the 2 of them becoming what is today's upwork), fiverr, peopleperhour and toptal. Of them all upwork is the best. Maybe you can make a better one, huh?

where is dang when you need him, eh?

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#240

Post by metadata »

andygcook wrote: post #185
metadata wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is a very successful marketer on upwork. However, she's been on the platform for maybe even 10 years now, way back when it was odesk and elance. She has flawless work history and over a hundred clients - and she told me that recently the number of job invitations she gets are way down and that the 90%+ of the invitations are very fishy. My guess is that platform is now so popular that the quality of its audie…

What kind of marketing does your wife do and can you send me her Upwork profile? I’m looking for some extra help for my company. Email in profile.

She does SEM in 6 languages (Google/Bing Ads, FB PPC), helps with SEO, regularly finds broken things on clients' sites, deals with developers etc. I'll send you her profile link privately.
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