SaaS founders, how long do you take to build the first versions of your SaaS?

[bugz444]

@bmag777 Okay well then I think it’s probably disingenuous to say you build an MVP in 2-4 days.

You’re building landing pages to collect interest before building the real product. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and 2-4 days to build that seems reasonable too.

But that’s not the same thing as building a functioning product.

 

[truescience4ever]

@bugz444 You can do it if you are good. I built an ERP system in a couple weeks years ago. And went live with it ever since.

I am lazy though lately, prefer to stretch the few days in a couple weeks. Why the rush. The key is not in the MVP but rather in issues like market fit, solving a real problem etc.

 

[nokwe]

@truescience4ever Is your ERP still active? I've been debating going down the rabbit hole of building one internally, but maybe not full ERP.

 

[truescience4ever]

@nokwe It has been in service since 2014 and it is a full blown ERP. Multi- inventory, multi branch, multi currency, multilang, multi everything. FIFO / LIFO stack implemented, double entry accounting, split and merge stock (There are lots of different tools for stock management), CRM ... super fast. You can hold an entire franchise on a single server implementation with lots of branches and millions of entries. Provides also financial information and cashflow prediction etc. It's our business core (we are a multi field firm).

I've even had it checked by professional consultants in the field. They saw it as currently at around 70% of what SAP does (the stock core launched in 2014 was one thing, but it was enhanced a lot during 2015).

However it is not commercial yet, despite being built for commercial from the ground up.

Reason is, live product of this kind requires significant investment and sales sweat, and probably over 1000 clients to get profitable (long story) - despite software being already here. Plus heavy security, compliance of different types, 24/7 support and engineering monitoring... etc. So it has never been fully launched though we tested some SMB MVP flavor for a bit.

Thought of a partnership but never found the right partner for it. We're working on other projects and rolling biz meantime.

Edit: If you're not 100% sure, my suggestion is not to jump into this. It's far bigger headache then it appears.

 

[bmag777]

@bugz444 No, I’m not build landing pages, I’ve been building real products that works as it should. I share some YouTube videos of the product in another comment on this post.

Check it out and let me know your thoughts. Thanks

 

[613jono]

@bmag777 I took a look at the stuff you made. I think its a valid strategy to throw shit at a wall and see what sticks, but I don’t think it’s effective because you are severely limiting yourself on what you can build. Any worthwhile idea will take a lot of time and work to both build the software and get the customers.