What are common repetitive tasks encountered when developing a SaaS?

[sniffaroo]

I'm thinking of building an automation tool for the following:

1. Domain registration
2. DNS record updates
3. Connecting DNS records to Cloudflare
4. Setting up email provider (and updating the DNS records: mx, dkim, etc)
5. Setting up email delivery (sendgrid, mailgun, resend, zeptomail)
6. Billing (stripe webhooks)
7. Setting up Authentication (Supabase, Auth0)
8. Setting up Database (Supabase, firebase, mongodb)
9. Affiliate program (Rewardful)
10. Minimal backend starter template + hosting (vercel, render, netlify, fly.io)
11. Minimal frontend starter template + hosting (tailwind)
12. Customer support (intercom, crisp)
13. Privacy policy and T&C placeholder

What am I missing ?

 

[kates]

@sniffaroo I would buy the DNS tool, no doubt about it.

 

[godislove333]

@sniffaroo A number of the services you mention don’t provide APIs. E.g sendgrid requires manual button clicking to setup sender authentication. In addition the services often require MFA.

Many DNS services don’t have an API, which is fine in your case if you are handling the registration as well, but if the customer brings their own domain name you’d be a bit stuck if they registered it with a crappy service.

Personally i wouldn’t be keen on you having my domain registered, i would register it with a trusted domain registrar myself and then point the DNS records.

At the end of this, what does the customer get? A collection of subscriptions to different services handed over as a PDF with passwords etc? Or are you providing a managed service for the whole thing?

If you manage it and keep all the keys, and my product takes off, how do migrate somewhere else or scale?

 

[sniffaroo]

@godislove333 Yeah big issue,
Was thinking, you could login to the respective platforms and a puppeteer bot hijacks the webpage and automatically fills and submits the forms ?

 

[mnfanboy4life]

@sniffaroo The right way to do this would be with a headless selenium running in the cloud, but you might face some issues scaling.

"Right" being subjective, of course. I'm speaking from an engineering and user experience perspective.

 

[churchbuilder]

@sniffaroo This is possible. You can build your own APIs on top of a web interface while the user is submitting data in a single environment (web app). Alternatively, you could create a wizard driven process and embed the third party sites into an iframe. Consider how you would keep the user's data secure.

 

[shiawaseippai]

@sniffaroo most of the things you need to touch once. I don't see how any value in automating it, since you would need to enter the data anyway. It would be just a different system in that case. maybe one instead of 13, but then again, zero options to deviate.

What about offering SaaS shell, where everything is setup end-to-end (company, bank, billing, website, CRM, subscription management, frontend, backend etc) .

Customer needs to update the product description on the website and create a individual plan. They checkout the code and start buildng the application once commit the application gets deployed.

such a setup would be worth 10k

 

[sniffaroo]

@shiawaseippai Now this is interesting.

 

[katrina_]

@shiawaseippai This is a similar concept that we are offering: https://engine.stormhub.cloud/

 

[shiawaseippai]

@katrina_ Goes a bit in that direction but doesn’t cover what inhale in mind . It’s more of a framework of yours. I was thinking more of existing and well proven buildings blocks where the blocks exist on their own.

You would get a not a framework but rather complete company with a running hello world SaaS

Kind of a turn key solution

 

[katrina_]

@shiawaseippai StormHub Engine is exactly that. Set of components you just turn on and you can use it out of the box. Of course for custom application needs you still need to build custom logic, but you easily do that by interacting with different components of the Engine or the Platform where everything is running.

 

[bigoink]

@sniffaroo A word of caution, all of the setup tasks happen once in a project.

This really restricts your market. Because while people have multiple projects, it would be harder to justify the cost on non-serious projects. And people tend to only have one, maybe two serious projects.

Not to mention, there’s a lot of opinionated approaches to setup. To make it feel like home for a particular dev, they’d basically need to be able to configure a lot of this manually in your system. Diminishing the value you can provide.

 

[ersjbmah]

@sniffaroo I had a similar idea, but instead of automation I was thinking about building a hosting + API services specifically for SaaS.

That is, Heroku except it has DNS, Email, an integrated payment gateway, an up to date boilerplate with landing page, pricing page, etc.

Of course, it'd be impossible to go wide so I'd probably go narrow - support a single framework like Rails/Next.js.

 

[613jono]

@sniffaroo im building template for this,

nextjs supabase (db and auth), drizzle resend trpc and maaaany more

 

[truthseeker2033]

@sniffaroo Anything email setup related is huge. It’s one of the things that really hinders founders because a lot of people simply don’t know about all the thing that need to be done.

It’s also annoying as hell the first few times you do it.

 

[new_christian]

@sniffaroo Setting up name that is good for SEO. Also logo. Another would be testing using Jmeter or some other platform. Concurrency testing , load testing , etc.

 

[spiritoffaith]

@sniffaroo This got me thinking. Is everyone validating and pivoting a lot too? Maybe the better problem to solve is to increase the success rate of idea validation, so I can do the setup less often. (Of course there are pros who just launch successful repeatedly, which I aspire to be one day)

 

[njn]

@sniffaroo https://shipfa.st/

I have no affiliation to this product, but I use it.

 

[kameaux]

@njn In case you need to more feature like multi-tenancy & team support, more database support (Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB), Multi-factor authentication, Testing (unit, integration & E2E), ... you can check out Nextless.js, React Boilerplate

Disclaimer: I'm the author of Nextless.js

 

[sniffaroo]

@njn Not exactly, this just provides a starter template. It doesn't do any administration