Things I wish I knew when creating SaaS as non-developer
Germanas Latvaitis
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I am an experienced product manager which learned to code and built my own SaaS without knowing a lot of code. Read my short story and tips on building one yourself and avoid the mistakes I did.
For more than 10 years I have been building tech products. Started from simple websites and ended building products that are used by the top 100 companies in the world.
I was more of an idea guy rather than the developer who could build it myself. I was always trying to use any no-code tools or hiring other developers that could build stuff for me.
But I believed that if I wanted to become a great product creator, I needed to build one myself. Not just thinking the idea and outsourcing the rest, but actually, code every single part of it except some third-party libraries.
I started with simple stuff by learning python and some data analysis when AI and ML were on the rise. Played around with sci-kit and tensor flow was fun but in the end, it just became a novelty.
After playing with other python projects like a flight aggregator (which I almost got sued for), I came up with the idea to build a slack app to track employee engagement. It had a lot of components but was not too complex that I couldn't figure out myself.
What I wish I knew before:
1. Don't code everything yourself, use no-code tools as much as possible. Only a small percentage of products go from the development phase to real businesses. Prepare to fail a lot. No-code tools will shorten that failure loop.
2. Validate, validate and validate your ideas. Don't just choose to take the world from the start. First, validate your ideas by building simple MVPs and test them out.
3. Analysis paralysis. Don't just listen to every podcast or read every book. Just start building right away and you will learn by doing.
4. Create personal OKR's. (Objectives and key results).
5. Don't overwork, life-work balance.
6. For growth ideas, visit indie hackers, product hunt, or dev.to communities. There are plenty of people sharing their lists on how to validate and market products. No need to reinvent the wheel.
7. Do a product hunt launch correctly. I failed once, it's not that simple. Need some time to prepare.
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