What Launching a Solo SaaS Actually Requires
The unglamorous work behind an uneventful launch day
This post is not about growth, validation, or marketing tactics. I don’t have anything new to add there, and you’ve likely read all of it already. I mean sure I could say you need to market here and be sure to do SEO there, and oh yeah don’t forget your socials, etc.. but if you’re already reading this post there is a good chance you’ve read that advice a million times before.
So who is this post for? This post is for anyone in the pre-launch stage of developing their SaaS or even still in the idea stage that wants to know what it truly takes to bring their idea from just that an idea to launched 🚀. I’m going to cover the topics that don’t often get discussed but are some of the most important parts of getting to launch day successfully.
Operational Readiness
In my opinion, this is probably one of the most overlooked steps that newer founders make on the journey to launch. So what is operational readiness?
It’s simple, you remove the unknowns.
Unknowns about deployments, unknowns about security, unknowns about data integrity, etc..
Do you have the capability to deploy a hotfix at 3am?
Do you have the monitoring to surface errors?
Do you have the understanding of how to rollback a failed deployment?
Do you have the playback for restoring your database due to data loss?
Can you scale your services because of peak traffic?
Do you have alerts for the performance of your hardware?
These are the types of questions that you want to answers to prior to your launch and they don’t take nearly as long to answer as you would think. Especially when you are able to answer them while not already in a crisis.
“Operational Readiness” is the prerequisite to “Operational Calm” and that calmness creates trust. When issues crop up they are just handled. Why? Because you took the time to playbook them before it was a crisis.
Product Boundaries
One of my all time favorite tv shows is Halt and Catch Fire and at one point in Season 3 Joe MacMillan erases a whiteboard filled with ideas. Ryan Ray protests but Joe says (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Anything important enough to be on that board we’ll remember tomorrow”. This scene has lived rent free in my head ever since I’ve seen it and speaks to a lot of what founders deal with in terms of product boundaries. Scope creep is real and insidious. By the time you realize it the sunk cost fallacy rears its head and what was just a nice feature before launch has pushed things back by weeks if not longer.
For the launch of Anchorline I was obsessive about ensuring this did not happen this time. And for the most part I was successful. I shipped a bare bones export that allows users to get their data out if they like but cut import entirely for launch. Filtering, search, and sorting for a lot of tables got punted. I wanted a more feature rich collection of presets but ultimately settled on what I could get done in a few hours. Being surgical about what I punted let me focus on the areas where I wasn’t willing to compromise.
For example, onboarding was extremely important to me and I take a lot of pride in the work I did there. It took me nearly two weeks to get the onboarding flows exactly how I wanted them but I really wanted users to have a pleasant onboarding journey and not just get dropped into an empty admin left to figure things out on their own.
Trust Your Primitives
Similar in vein to “Operational Readiness” but where that is about your ability to act, trusting your primitives is about which failures are unacceptable. So what am I referring to when I say primitives? They are what I would call a class of systems that exist in every SaaS that you do not have the luxury of getting “mostly right”. They are not features, they are primitives.
Auth
Billing
Data Models
Backups
Privacy
etc..
Auth should not “mostly work.” Billing should not “usually be correct.” Data should not “probably be safe.” These are not areas where recovery is good enough. They are areas where correctness is the expected baseline.
Shipping features on top of any untrusted primitives does not increase speed to launch it only increases the blast radius.
The most useful rule of thumb to follow in this area is if a failure in this system could permanently lose you user trust then you need to really stress test it prior to launch.
Narrative Clarity
Before launch, you need a description of your product that you can repeat without adjusting it for the audience. I want to be very clear here, this is not marketing copy. It is not a pitch. It is the answer to a simple internal question: what is this thing, and just as importantly, what is it not?
If your explanation changes depending on whether you’re talking to a developer, a potential user, or a friend, that is a sign the product boundaries are still fuzzy. So when a potential user asks what the product is for, you should not be inventing language on the fly. Once people form their own mental model of your product, correcting it is far harder than preventing it.
Personally, I underestimated how long this takes especially because in my case Anchorline is genuinely complex. It’s a system with a mental model, and most people will try to map it onto something they already know, spreadsheets, Notion, etc.. so for me it took nearly 2 mos. to arrive at something I was happy with.
Once that description finally settled, everything else got easier. It clarified how I talked about the product, influenced product decisions, and shaped the direction of the marketing.
What You Don’t Need
Now here is what you don’t need and I expect that some of these will be slightly controversial. Most pre-launch advice that you’ll read is going to be frame around accumulation. More users, more validation, more certainty, more momentum. But none of those are prerequisites for the single most important thing .. shipping.
You do not need an audience. Many of the most successful products launch quietly and only find their users later.
You do not need the perfect roadmap. Roadmaps created before real usage are mostly guesses, and they tend to anchor you to decisions made without evidence.
You do not need external validation to get started. It is very easy to get people to say they would pay for something. That does not tell you whether they will break out the wallet once it’s actually time.
You do not need external validation to get started.
You do not need certainty. And lets be honest you’re not going to get it.
Closing
Launch day is where the real accountability for your SaaS begins. Mistakes move from private and theoretical, to public, real and at time embarrassing. If your launch is boring, uneventful, and anti-climactic then I would wager that your founder journey hit a lot of the points above.