Can I build & market a SaaS app to $100 in 1 month?

#webdev #saas #marketing #ai

Everyone’s saying it. We’re living in the golden age for software development.

With the current suite of tools, it’s getting easier for hackers to create and market their apps. Or, as Mckay Wrigley puts it, what used to take a team of developers, and tons of money, can now be built be a single developer using Cursor.

I agree, although I do think the claims are a tad bit exaggerated, I believe we will see many more solo-developers building profitable businesses, either as side projects, or as their main focus.

In fact, as the creator and maintainer of Open SaaS, a free, open-source SaaS starter, I’m seeing this first hand. Builders using Open SaaS are sharing their success stories, such as getting their SaaS apps acquired within a couple weeks of building it.

It’s pretty amazing, to be honest.

But not only has the success of my fellow builders impressed me, it’s also inspired me. And it’s motivating me to challenge myself to do the same. So here’s what I have planned.

I am going to challenge myself to build and market a SaaS app to $100 dollars within about 1 month.

The best part is, I am going to document the process almost in its entirety, by live-streaming all my coding and marketing sessions, as well as posting summaries to social media. So if you want to follow my journey, check out the following profiles

x.com/hot_town
tiktok.com/@hot_town_
youtube.com/@wasplang (where I’ll be live-streaming)

For this challenge, I am going to use my Open SaaS template as a starting point. I’m also assuming the app will use some AI capabilities, such as OpenAI’s API, and maybe Flux image generation via Replicate.com. But, for now, I still haven’t settled on a concrete app idea (I’ll probably have this figured out by day 1 of the challenge).

Now, it should be known that this type of challenge isn’t really something new. Peter Levels (aka levelsio) did this back in 2014 before the rise of LLMs with his 12 startups in 12 months challenge. His reasons for pursuing this idea were that he wanted to get into the habit of just shipping stuff and iterating quickly on his ideas to figure out which ones have potential, and to get out of the habit of ruminating too long on any single app.

For me, I also want to push myself to build and launch more, but I also want to put the current tools to the test and see if it’s really possible to be a 1000x engineer in the age of AI. That’s why I’ll be using the following:

Cursor — AI code editor
Claude 3.5 sonnet — Top notch LLM for coding
Open SaaS — Open-source SaaS starter w/ Stripe, AWS S3, Admin dashboard, …
Wasp — The Batteries-included React, NodeJS, & Prisma framework that Open SaaS is built on top of
OpenAI API — For the “GPT Wrapper” side of things
Replicate.com — API for other open-source AI models (LLMs, Image gen, etc.)

Not only will this challenge help me launch more, but it will also help build my marketing muscle. I unfortunately don't have hundreds of thousands of twitter or tiktok followers, so I'm gonna really have to get my hands dirty and do some grassroots marketing. And by documenting the entire process via streams, video, and posts, it’ll help me get better at “building in public” and finding marketing channels for the right audiences.

I should mention that I’m not stranger to building profitable SaaS apps, as I already have an open-source SaaS app that makes ~$550 MRR. So the nice thing about this challenge will be to see if I just got lucky the first time, or if I have it in me to bring a good idea to life and market it effectively again.

Well, I’ll just have to get to work and see. Come follow along as I do!