Learning Web Development & Launching a SaaS in 50 days

@Aulig another question regarding your blog: What kind of content do you post? Posts about your general niche? Why to use your product? Tutorials / Guides how to use your product (do you have public available help pages - could be good for SEO, right?)?
Yea its mostly about my product, what features it has, what variants there are with their advantages and disadvantages, why people need it. Also I'll do a comparison article where I show why my product is better :D
I'll try to branch out a bit more to make it less focused on my product and more focused on why people need it and everything around that. And yea I think the more content, the better. As long as it's not complete garbage, it should help. I'll regularly go over my articles and improve and update them, as I think google likes to see that. So I'll push out the first version quickly, with the intention to clean it up later on.

Also some bad news, I dropped a lot on rankings when searching for my domain name. I used to be ranked 2 for "mydomain com" and now it's like 40. Apparently that can be a sign of a google penalty, but I'll just try to not freak out and assume it's because it's a relatively new site. Hope I'll bounce back stronger.
 
Thinking about launching a SaaS myself in the IM field. Seems like you're out of the development process, right?
What are running costs for you? Such as servers for DB etc.
 
Thinking about launching a SaaS myself in the IM field. Seems like you're out of the development process, right?
What are running costs for you? Such as servers for DB etc.
I'm mostly out of the development process, however I'm creating add-ons right now, one of which is very important but is taking a ton of work atm. Running costs are minimal, I'm only using a digitalocean droplet. Currently it's running on the $100 free credit you get for signing up with a referral code, but that expires after 60 days. After that I'll probably downgrade to the smallest droplet whcih should still be enough for hosting my site for now, that costs just $5 a month. For that I'll use the $50 free credit I get as a student, which hopefully doesn't expire after 60 days, so that could last me up to 10 months :D Apart from that it's just the domain, which I also got for free for 1 year in a promo. The only other service I use is mailgun I think, which I also get for free as a student (for a year or something), however even the free plan would probably be enough for a while. So yea, you can get a ton of stuff from the github student developer pack. You just need to have an edu email (you can buy one on this forum too, but idk how long those work. Theyre not too expensive though, so worth a try for sure)
 
I'm mostly out of the development process, however I'm creating add-ons right now, one of which is very important but is taking a ton of work atm. Running costs are minimal, I'm only using a digitalocean droplet. Currently it's running on the $100 free credit you get for signing up with a referral code, but that expires after 60 days. After that I'll probably downgrade to the smallest droplet whcih should still be enough for hosting my site for now, that costs just $5 a month. For that I'll use the $50 free credit I get as a student, which hopefully doesn't expire after 60 days, so that could last me up to 10 months :D Apart from that it's just the domain, which I also got for free for 1 year in a promo. The only other service I use is mailgun I think, which I also get for free as a student (for a year or something), however even the free plan would probably be enough for a while. So yea, you can get a ton of stuff from the github student developer pack. You just need to have an edu email (you can buy one on this forum too, but idk how long those work. Theyre not too expensive though, so worth a try for sure)
Wow! Good shit you could launch an entire SaaS almost for free haha.
I would need a ton of stuff which I suppose you don't... I'd need proxies, a ton of bandwidth, and servers running python scripts for my customers...
But I could also charge up to like 50$/month for all tools together, so...

It's the marketing that concerns me, I'd have to pay for adWords I think, and that's quite expensive in itself.

Oh well, would love to have a chat once you launched it so I can get a bit of inspiration :)

Best of luck!
 
Wow! Good shit you could launch an entire SaaS almost for free haha.
I would need a ton of stuff which I suppose you don't... I'd need proxies, a ton of bandwidth, and servers running python scripts for my customers...
But I could also charge up to like 50$/month for all tools together, so...

It's the marketing that concerns me, I'd have to pay for adWords I think, and that's quite expensive in itself.

Oh well, would love to have a chat once you launched it so I can get a bit of inspiration :)

Best of luck!

Thanks mate! Yea we can for sure, just hit me up on skype or discord whenever you want :)
Adwords is probably expensive to get it running yea, that's why im not doing it for now. Once I have some budget I'll invest it in that too :)


Thanks!
 
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Wow! Good shit you could launch an entire SaaS almost for free haha.
I would need a ton of stuff which I suppose you don't... I'd need proxies, a ton of bandwidth, and servers running python scripts for my customers...
But I could also charge up to like 50$/month for all tools together, so...

It's the marketing that concerns me, I'd have to pay for adWords I think, and that's quite expensive in itself.

Oh well, would love to have a chat once you launched it so I can get a bit of inspiration :)

Best of luck!
Same goes with me, but that's why I found this journey so inspirational. (and perfect for Python, because it's Flask)
 
I'd need proxies, a ton of bandwidth, and servers running python scripts for my customers...
But I could also charge up to like 50$/month for all tools together, so...
Don't worry about the server cost. Development time will be the higher "investment" anyway. You can also go for a small server and a handful of proxies too while you are developing. And even after that, code that is at least a little bit optimized should not be too expensive to run. I'm a full-time web developer and we serve a very data-intense CRM for 30 full-time employees as well as heavy data processing and web scraping for a total of fewer than 500 bucks for servers and proxies a month. And that includes backup servers that just run idle and jump in if anything happens.
 
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:D I hope this means that google is finally taking my page seriously and my main keywords will move into the top 100 soon. However from analyzing what ranks on google it's either competitors homepages or really long (3k words and more) blog articles/guides related to the product. So I think I will combine my articles that are all about the product into one big one.
Also I saw this on BHW: https://waymark.com/videos/collections/covid19-response
You can make a free video about your business there. Doesn't need to be about the coronavirus, you can customize it enough. I'll make one there (aside the other video I'm getting made) and see if I can use that on my website or just rank it on youtube.
 
AAh okay, I thought you are still in the development process :) Good luck.
Actually im in the same boat as op building a saas on django im still learning bootstrap4 but why should someone use tailwind css instead?? Btw op this thread gave me the motivation i need thank you and good luck with your application
 
Actually im in the same boat as op building a saas on django im still learning bootstrap4 but why should someone use tailwind css instead?? Btw op this thread gave me the motivation i need thank you and good luck with your application

Quoted from Tailwindcss.com:

Most CSS frameworks do too much.
They come with all sorts of predesigned components like buttons, cards, and alerts that might help you move quickly at first, but cause more pain than they cure when it comes time to make your site stand out with a custom design.

Tailwind is different.

Instead of opinionated predesigned components, Tailwind provides low-level utility classes that let you build completely custom designs without ever leaving your HTML.
 
Actually im in the same boat as op building a saas on django im still learning bootstrap4 but why should someone use tailwind css instead?? Btw op this thread gave me the motivation i need thank you and good luck with your application
Thanks, good luck to you too!

I spent the last 3 days setting up the technical part of making my site multilingual. It was quite a bit of work to make sure it complies with googles seo practices and produces no duplicate content. Now I put in automatic translations but am working on making that more readable and less robotic lol. I decided to do that because competition on google.de is way less.
Also google is finally showing some of the links i built in the webmaster console which is good. Aside from that I'm getting some guest posts and building a web 2.0.
 
Good news, rankings have improved, still not seeing my page in the top 100 for my big target keywords though. However my german pages are getting indexed (I requested indexation in the gsc) and quickly ranking on german google. I've also created a trustpilot entry but I'm kind of regretting it now lol. I gave myself a 5 star rating, however their calculation is weird so its now showing as a 3.7 average even though theres just my 5 star review. Also it's outranking me when searching for my website name :D Oh well, it'll sort itself out eventually I think.

Edit: Just checked again and GSC shows my main english keywords are around rank ~90! Very happy to see that, I'll continue building links and getting guest posts to move up.
 
...Running costs are minimal, I'm only using a digitalocean droplet. Currently it's running on the $100 free credit you get for signing up with a referral code, but that expires after 60 days. After that I'll probably downgrade to the smallest droplet whcih should still be enough for hosting my site for now, that costs just $5 a month. For that I'll use the $50 free credit I get as a student, which hopefully doesn't expire after 60 days, so that could last me up to 10 months :D Apart from that it's just the domain, which I also got for free for 1 year in a promo.
If I may, I'd suggest AWS or Google Cloud free tier, both free for 1 year
 
If I may, I'd suggest AWS or Google Cloud free tier, both free for 1 year
Yea, I was considering doing AWS by deploying with zappa because that's supposed to be quite easy for flask applications. However now that I already have everything configured on digitalocean I think I'll stick with it. I don't expect too much traffic, so I think my costs will always be below $15 a month for the server, even after my free credits have run out.
 
Damn I just got 2 people to sign up, 1 of them requested a free demo, we will see if i can make that a sale. I didn't expect any of this, maybe a guest post drove a bunch of traffic? not sure how this happened. Will have to wait for google analytics to update.
 
Damn I just got 2 people to sign up, 1 of them requested a free demo, we will see if i can make that a sale. I didn't expect any of this, maybe a guest post drove a bunch of traffic? not sure how this happened. Will have to wait for google analytics to update.

Congrats on the early success. Hopefully you can find the source and scale it up. Keep us posted.
 
Congrats on the early success. Hopefully you can find the source and scale it up. Keep us posted.
Thank you! I think it was direct traffic, not sure if google analytics can give me any more detail there as I'm still a noob in that regard :p
I don't really want to scale yet if I'm being honest because my last semester of university is starting today (which will take a lot if time away from me). But I guess that's also the perfect time to start outsourcing and automating as much as possible. Specifically I was thinking of trying out content writers from bhw. If the content is good, I'll use it for my blog and otherwise I'll use it for backlinks. Maybe I'll also hire a VA for building the backlinks.
 
Thank you! I think it was direct traffic, not sure if google analytics can give me any more detail there as I'm still a noob in that regard :p
I don't really want to scale yet if I'm being honest because my last semester of university is starting today (which will take a lot if time away from me). But I guess that's also the perfect time to start outsourcing and automating as much as possible. Specifically I was thinking of trying out content writers from bhw. If the content is good, I'll use it for my blog and otherwise I'll use it for backlinks. Maybe I'll also hire a VA for building the backlinks.

Stats showing as direct is inevitable, but if you haven't already, add UTMs to your all your link so you can better track exactly where clicks come from.
 
Stats showing as direct is inevitable, but if you haven't already, add UTMs to your all your link so you can better track exactly where clicks come from.
Thats a good tip, I should do that in the future!

So it looks like I've moved onto page 1 for the keyword without spaces that i have domain match for :) Both in the US and germany btw. Now I just need to rank for it with spaces, but i think that will follow later. My free signups didnt turn into a sale yet, one guy said he will come back to it later, which is totally fine with me, just wanted to make sure there was no bug or something that prohibited him from purchasing. The other requested a demo but still hasn't responded to my email and instead requested another demo lol. Not sure what that's about.

Apart from that not much news, uni started again but I still managed to do some work on this project. Nothing major though. Still building some relevant free backlinks. I'll also start trying out all the contentwriters that I've seen recommended on bhw. Any crap content will just be used for backlinks and web 2.0 sites lol
 
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