Lessons from Building a SaaS as a Solo Developer

The Idea

It started with a problem I had myself. I was building a portfolio and needed testimonials, but chasing clients for feedback over email was painful. Half wouldn't respond. The other half would send a one-liner that wasn't usable.

I thought: what if there was a simple tool to collect, manage, and display testimonials? One link. One form. Done.

That became Testimonial Collector, which I ran as a real product before archiving it.

What Went Right

Shipping the MVP Fast

I gave myself two weeks for the MVP. No feature creep. The first version had:

• •A public testimonial submission form
• •A dashboard to review and approve submissions
• •A basic embed widget

That was it. No Stripe. No teams. No fancy analytics. Just the core loop: collect, review, display.

Choosing Boring Technology

• •Next.js for the frontend and API routes
• •Supabase for auth, database, and storage
• •Stripe for billing (added in v2)
• •Resend for transactional emails
• •Vercel for deployment

Nothing exotic. Everything well-documented. When you're solo, debugging obscure framework issues at 2 AM is not a good time.

Dogfooding

I used Testimonial Collector to collect testimonials for... Testimonial Collector. And for MaverickBytes. The testimonials on this site? Collected through my own product. Nothing builds confidence like eating your own cooking.

What I'd Do Differently

1. Start with Billing

I added Stripe in version 2, which meant I had users on the free tier who were hard to convert. If I did it again, I'd have the Pro tier from day one, even if the free tier is generous. It sets the expectation that this is a real product.

2. Marketing from Day Zero

I spent 90% of my time on code and 10% on marketing. Should have been closer to 60/40. The best product nobody knows about is just a hobby project.

3. Simpler Onboarding

My first onboarding flow had too many steps. Users want to see value in under 60 seconds. I eventually simplified it to: sign up, create a collection, share the link. Three steps. That's it.

The Numbers (Honest)

I'm not going to pretend it was a rocketship. Solo SaaS growth is slow. But the numbers were real:

• •Built and launched in ~3 weeks
• •Organic signups from Product Hunt and Twitter
• •Revenue covered infrastructure costs
• •Most importantly: people actually used it

For a side project built by one person, that was a win.

Solo Dev Survival Tips

1. •Timebox everything. Without a team, scope creep is your biggest enemy. Set deadlines and ship.
2. •Automate your pipeline early. CI/CD, linting, formatting. Set it up once so you never think about it.
3. •Pick a stack you know. This is not the time to learn a new framework. Use what makes you fast.
4. •Talk to users, not features. Every feature you add is a feature you maintain. Ask users what they need before building what you think they need.
5. •Ship ugly, then polish. The first version of my dashboard looked terrible. Users didn't care. They cared that it worked.

Where Testimonial Collector Landed

The roadmap when I sunset it looked like this:

• •Embeddable widget redesign (more customizable)
• •Video testimonial support
• •AI-powered testimonial suggestions (help users write better reviews)
• •Team collaboration features for agencies

None of it shipped, because the product had already answered the question I built it to answer. It was a product experiment rather than a business, and it went the whole way from idea to billing to real paying customers before I archived it. The lesson survived the product: build something you need, then find others who need it too.

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Building in public on Twitter. Follow for updates on whatever I'm building next.