Zero to SaaS - The Formula

If you arent aware, Im going to be building one app a month for the next 12 months or so. (Read more about it here )

Zero to SaaS - Falling in love with the process

This means going from idea launch in roughly four weeks which sounds like a crazy idea!

I believe its achievable if I stick to a formula. Formula, what? You cant hack your way to shippable apps with a formula.

No, of course not, but I can define a sprint structure that gives me the the structure needed to be able to take an idea from concept, to MVP and eventually to something I can release out there into the wild.

Ok, whats this formula then. hmm?. Well, given the average month consists of 4.3 weeks, rounding down to 4 weeks that gives me 28 days of real estate to work with.

As Im employed full time and the primary objective of this experiment is to enjoy building apps again, I wont be utilizing the full 28 days. Rather, just weekends. Assuming I work roughly 5 hours a day, Saturday and Sunday, that gives me 40 hours to create something I can ship.

Ok, that sounds pretty crazy now that Im spelling it out. But thats the point, this should be fun and exciting. Who cares if I ship something thats a mess. I want to enjoy building something.

With that out of the way, how can I best utilize these 40 hours to get the most bang for my buck? Heres what Im thinking:

Week 1 (Sprint 1):

• Idea selection (1 hour)
• Product design; name, logo, domain name, etc. (5 hours)
• Waitlist page creation; early access sign up (4 hours)

Week 2 (Sprint 2):

• Frontend design mockups (5 hours)
• Database design (5 hours)

Week 3 (Sprint 3):

• API design (5 hours)
• Frontend implementation (5 hours)

Week 4 (Sprint 4):

• Backend implementation; Cloud hosting, etc. (5 hours)
• Testing & Launching (5 hours)

Following this formula looks like it will produce some pretty rough-around-the-edges work. Thats fine.

These arent meant to be polished, enterprise level applications. More like Minimal Viable Products (MVP).

Ideally, I would use the same technologies and implement templates for things like authentication which will help me stay within the small sprints. Perhaps Ill build some of these early on? But thats beyond the scope of this blog post.

Ill be kicking off PI (Program Increment) next week and will talk more about the technical decisions in a future blog post so stay tuned!