How to Build a SaaS Factory - Ship 10x Faster

- SaaS is risky and it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that your SaaS product will fail. This is why it is important to build a saaS factory to make it easier to test new products, launch new products and take new products to market faster. - In order to build a proper SaaS factory, you should have both code and third-party tools. Speaker A suggests creating a library of no code templates that can be reused. - Speaker A tells the audience about eight base, an AI powered, all in one support solution for SaaS. Eight base has covered the whole thing and it should be a part of yours too. So they're giving up subscriptions at 50% off. - He suggests using Figma for images and Adobe after effects for essential graphics.

Speaker A: Welcome to my SaaS factory. This is where I built my SaaS products. I used this place to create aid base, feed, hive, link drip, and a lot of other products you haven't even heard of. This seems broken. SaaS became really competitive. Let's face it, going all in on SaaS is risky. Constantly testing the market with new ideas is the best way to increase your chances of success. But you need the right tooling to do this sustainably. And in this video, I'll show you how you can build a SaaS factory just like this for yourself. And I'll show you what to avoid at all cost. The reality is that it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that your SaaS product will fail. If you're a beginner and it's your first product, it's extremely likely, almost a guarantee. But even some of the biggest and most successful business owners are playing this game. Take a look at Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft. They all have a massive graveyard of failed products, much, much bigger than their portfolio of successful products. If you take a look at the most successful indie hackers, it's the same deal. The reason they're successful is that they've been pushing and failing more and faster than most other people. And this is why you should build a SaaS factory, to make it easier for you to test new products, launch new products, and take new products to market faster. The first thing we need is a place to store code. Here, let me show you. In here we have a lot of packages containing a lot of code. We have custom utilities that we use over and over. Packages to easily manipulate lists, themes, utility functions to handle common stripe operations, and much more. These are packages we install in mostly all new projects because they help speed up common operations such as login user permissions, subscription workspaces, spaces, managing teams, and so on. And we also have a lot of templates and boilerplates. The tech stack this factory is built on is using react, chakra Ui, AWS and Pulumi, and every new project we built comes out on the very same tech stack. We have boilerplates that enable us to spin up a fully functional SaaS, including a back end frontend authentication payment and a basic UI in less than 30 minutes. All new products start from here. The key is to stay organized in the heat and excitement of building a new SaaS. People, especially indie hackers, tend to under prioritize this. In order to build this part of the factory, you need just one, a GitHub organization. Now get into the habit of stopping regularly, go through your code and pick out pieces that you know or at least feel very sure could be reused, refactor it and turn it into a general purpose solution. Then push it to a repository on GitHub and turn it into an NPM package you can install in future projects and try to think of future you. Be nice to future you. Spend some time writing a nice readme with documentation and get started instructions. The same goes for the boilerplates, although these do take a bit more work and effort. On GitHub you can turn a repository into a template and with the click of a button you'll have a new repository ready using the boilerplate. With our full stack SAS boilerplate, we even created a small so when we first start a project, we're taken to a few questions and choices and boom, a new SaaS is ready. Soon enough you will have a GitHub organization filled with packages, boilerplates, gist, code snippets, starter guides including all the things you need to set up a base for new sass fast hey Simon yes, what is it?

Speaker B: The latest SAS broke again. It seems like the version of chakra is out of date.

Speaker A: Cant you ask Devin to look into it?

Speaker B: He tried but he couldnt figure it out.

Speaker A: Okay, ill look into it.

Speaker B: Thanks.

Speaker A: Yes this takes time to set up and yes you do need to maintain this since you need to keep your packages updated and compatible with each other. But trust me, once this part of your SaaS factory is well developed and running, youre going to save hundreds if nothing thousands of hours on probably the most expensive part of your SaaS business, engineering. The next thing we need is a place for no code automation. This is one of our most important rooms. People have this idea that it's either code or no code, but in order to build a proper SaaS factory you should have both. We're using tools like SAP year and make to perform a lot of backend operations that include third party tools. When we add new users to a retargeting list for Facebook and Google, we use no code automation. When we segment users in a list for email trips, we use no code automation. When we write product updates in notion and push it to feed hive to share on social media, we use no code automation. When new users sign up and we add the sale to a spreadsheet for financial planning, we use no code automation. In fact, we use no code automation for a long list of things that are not directly related to the backend of the app and includes third party tools. And why not turn this into a library of no code templates that can be reused. Here's what a lot of you don't know. Zapier has an excellent integration platform that allows you to create custom integrations, and if you keep these private, you don't need to have them approved by the Zapier team. You can create these completely free of charge and hook them up with your own APIs and use them directly within your own Zapier account. So instead of spending hours setting up complex automation for every new SaaS you built, create a custom integration once and make it reusable with any new SaaS you build. And this works perfectly with your GitHub packages and custom boilerplates. For a new Sass. All you have to do is install an NPM package, use a custom SAP and you're ready. Of course, once again, this will take time to learn and to set up initially. That's the whole point of a factory. It's time consuming once and fast in the future. All right, now that we got both code and no code covered, the next thing we need is can someone come and clean up this mess? I'm sorry about that. We need to go downstairs to the creative library. But first, let me tell you about eight base. Eight base is an AI powered, all in one support solution for your SaaS. It's one of the SaaS products that was built in this factory for this factory by me and my team. You see, all SaaS products need customer support, and with eight base we have covered the whole thing. You start by adding an AI chatbot to your website and your app, which will serve as live chat support and direct access to your faq and help disk articles, which you can create directly from AIbase. You then build a custom ticket form using our no code form builder to capture important information and help users with issues that are a bit too hard for an AI to solve. Finally, you create an email inbox so you can receive and manage support emails from eight base, two, everything from one unified dashboard. And of course, you use eight base to train custom AI models on your data, your website, PDF's, YouTube videos and so on. Integrating it into your app takes seconds. Once it's live, our team of AI robots will help you handle customer support without you getting involved in every single step. Eight base is a part of my SaaS factory. It should be a part of yours too. That's why we're giving up subscriptions at 50% off for the entire first year. Use the code factory 50 and start your subscription today. The link is in the comment below. Now back to the factory. This is our creative library. In here, we store reusable images and graphics. We use these for thumbnails, ad creatives, graphics for social media, and much more. Getting stuck creatively is horrible. So instead, whenever we need something new, we just go in here and pick up a template. We even have video templates and essential graphics for video editing. For instance, if we want to publish a new video demo or create a new video ad, we use these as building blocks to speed up editing. In order to build this part of the factory, I suggest using Figma for images and Adobe after effects for essential graphics. In Figma, you can use components to create template graphics. These can include different variants of elements so you can compose new pieces of graphics easily. Additionally, you can build up a library of reusable graphic parts like fonts, scribbles, characters, icons, and much more. In Adobe after effects, you can turn animations and clips into essential graphics and make each layer customizable too. This makes it easy to reuse different pre made clips and graphics and adjust them in Adobe premiere when you edit and I feel like I'm repeating myself a bit here, but do spend some time making this nice and organized for yourself. Building a SaaS factory is all about making your future life easier. And if you really don't want to spend time setting all this up, you can always buy a ready made Simon.

Speaker B: Did you forget what happened to your old factory?

Speaker A: Oh, well, I just thought that.

Speaker B: Please don't make that same mistake again. It took us ages to rebuild this place, remember?

Speaker A: You're right. You're right. Okay, there's something I need to tell you. This is not my first sass factory. A while back, I was in a hurry to get my first sass started, and I found this sass factory that was for sale. I called the seller, and apparently it was my lucky day. So I went down there to meet him. And this sass factory has everything available inside. It absolutely does. Simon, you can start printing SAS products right away and have your first product ready tomorrow. How about that? That's amazing. I'll. I'll take it. Perfect. Simon, you'll be very happy with your new SAS factory. Wow. I can't believe this is mine now. But I had no idea how to operate this factory. The manual was extremely poorly written and nothing really made sense to me. I was trying a bunch of different things to get my first SAS product ready, but nothing was working. I spent a ton of money on this thing, so I was getting very frustrated. At some point, I pressed some button and something went wrong and the whole place caught fire a few moments later and the whole thing burned to the ground. It was terrible. All the money and time I had spent wasted. But at that very moment when I was the most demoralized, I made a decision. I was going to build a new factory from scratch. I started planning how my factory would work in details. I knew this was going to take a lot of hard work and effort. But slowly, piece by piece, I got my new factory working. And this time, because I built it from scratch, I knew it inside and out. It was not going to fail on me this time. We still need two things in order to run a successful SAS factory. The first is a protocol keep, a checklist and a set of requirements all new SaaS products need. This should include things such as a payment system, email system, user authentication, but also things like privacy policy, terms and conditions, and so on. I suggest using a tool like notion for this save all your legal documents as templates and keep checklists for all parts of your SaaS development. Every time you set up a new SaaS, make sure you can cross everything on the list. Consider this quality control and as part of doing protocol and quality check, make sure all parts of your SAS factory are well documented and all processes are well described. Don't let yourself end up in a situation where you get confused and don't remember what to do. Finally, you need a playbook. A playbook is something that goes beyond the factory itself. It's a guideline, a framework that outlines your practices and strategies, a rule set you follow and use to plan and execute each SaaS. Most successful serial entrepreneurs do exactly this. If you look at some of the most successful founders, youll notice that they tend to play the same game again and again. If you look at most successful indie creators, its the same thing. I do this too. Look at how I launch and market my products. If youve been following my journey, youve probably noticed that I follow the same playbook too. And this is the perfect opportunity to announce that you can now buy my playbook and my entire Sass factory. But I'm obviously not gonna do that cause I'm not some snake oil salesman. If I sold you my playbook, I would probably make a lot of money. And even if my playbook works for me, it's highly unlikely that it's gonna work for you. And using someone else's factory and expecting the same results is most likely gonna end in disaster. What truly gives you superpowers is the process of building the factory all the hard earned lessons that make up the foundation you're building on. That's what really makes a difference. And it's not something you can buy. So get started building your own sass factory today. Thanks for watching.