How will SaaS of the future be built?
Taking the Next-Gen `Indie SaaS` PathStarting an Indie SaaS company gets easier every day.
In a NYT article titled “Welcome to the YOLO Economy”, writer Kevin Roose examines the cultural shift happening with people quitting their jobs, starting businesses, or taking the side-hustle full-time. In the article, Roose mentions a Microsoft survey showing 40% of workers globally have considered leaving their jobs this year. Another study by Blind found the figure to be closer to 49% within tech.
We’ve been dreaming of this future for a long time: small Indie teams bootstrapping successful ventures. Not huge enterprises. Modest teams of passionate creatives.
Indie Hackers is proving out the solidarity of this movement. By showcasing stories of success, independent founders can choose to go the bootstrapped path and avoid fund-raising altogether. Teams put the customer first, and find the right specialist partners from day one.
Stripe acquired Indie Hackers (IH) in 2017 in an effort to be seen as the go-to solution for independent companies and to “grow the GDP of the internet”, according to co-founder, Allen. While these companies might eventually land in the hands of industry giants, they all begin with a modest team of passionate experts.
Taking the Indie path certainly comes with its challenges. It’s not for everyone, but for those who know it’s their calling, we’d love to hear from you.
This post was originally published on 4/23/2021.
WHAT WE'RE EYEING
Level up realistic app prototypes with micro-interactions using Figma Interactive Components
gqless is a GraphQL client built for rapid iteration. Write the view and let the client decide what to query.
The quest for a truly remote dev process gets a step closer with Mutagen to sync code to the cloud in real time.
Nodewood gives you a solid base for creating a new SaaS project. For a great price, too. What other types of codebases would you pay for?
Add React Flow, an appealing diagram library for React, to the list of libraries I'm looking for a good excuse to use.
lofi.cafe for some solid background music for deep work.
RECOMMENDED READS
💎PAK’s Experimental NFT Performance Art
PAK — PAK is an ultra-secretive banksy-esque artist who has made waves since our last NFT issue. They have been encoding easter eggs into their art that have been discovered later. Most of the pieces are purposefully vague, with nail-biting twitter with countdowns for their reveals. It’s the primary drop on nifty gateway right now in partnership with Sothebys. There was one piece in particular called the “unsold” that everyone thought Elon Musk would buy, but it remained unsold.
🗳Evaluating Modest SaaS Business Ideas
Dan Hulton — A 2-day event hosted by Microsoft on Twitch.tv with some great talks in this all-remote conference aimed at beginners. The laid back presenters covered a range of industry topics from what different languages are like to office culture and cybersecurity. There was plenty of great content for aspiring devs and veterans alike. Check out the replays on YouTube.
🔦How Core Web Vitals Will Impact Google Rankings in 2021
Vercel — A 2-day event hosted by Microsoft on Twitch.tv with some great talks in this all-remote conference aimed at beginners. The laid back presenters covered a range of industry topics from what different languages are like to office culture and cybersecurity. There was plenty of great content for aspiring devs and veterans alike. Check out the replays on YouTube.
🙏🏼Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist
Erik Bernhardsson — A 2-day event hosted by Microsoft on Twitch.tv with some great talks in this all-remote conference aimed at beginners. The laid back presenters covered a range of industry topics from what different languages are like to office culture and cybersecurity. There was plenty of great content for aspiring devs and veterans alike. Check out the replays on YouTube.
❤️Favorite Config2021 TalksLoved by 2C : FigJam — The (potential) Miro-Killer. It feels like a lightweight version of designing in Figma for broader team collaboration. Announced at the opening keynote, FigJam is currently in beta but we already have plans to use it for workshopping.
My Pick : Pushing Figma to its Limits — Hackers will love this. Creative ways to use Figma's features to get what you need out of the product for design-to-dev handoff, this is a collection of power-users demonstrating just how far you can go to make Figma work for you.
Loved by Chieri : Even by Design — Chieri says, "My favorite was Even by Design by Linda Dounia Rebeiz who outlined the dangers of a homogenous design culture. As members of a Eurocentric community, we must acknowledge that our biases breed exclusion in our designs. She also created a toolkit (available in Figma Community!) to help shift the power from designers to users to make the design process more equitable and diverse. It was such a powerful talk and I can’t wait to dig in deeper! BUT ALSO her style is just *chefs kiss* 😭"
Loved by Marco : Playing with Plugins — Marco says, "Just 🤯about endless possibilities for automating as a way to explore creativity and improve processes 😉"
As always, special shoutout to Taylor Beseda for helping curate this content.
Follow him on twitter @tbeseda.