I posted this on the IndieHackers community about a month ago, but felt it’s worth a re-post here.
It’s a story of how I built the Watchtower MVP in 2 weeks. Even though I’m about to reposition Watchtower as an ecommerce monitoring service, I learnt a ton by building fast, launching quickly and having real users use the product.
I wanted to tell my story of how I spent the past 2 weeks building and launching a MVP SAAS product.
I’ve had a goal to build a SAAS product for a very long time. I’ve spent 2-3 years thinking about it, coming up with ideas, over-analysing and reading about other peoples successes, thinking to myself “one day I’ll do that”.
Two weeks ago, I realised that if I was ever going to make this dream happen, I ironically needed to stop dreaming and start doing! Enough messing around, it was go time. It was a Friday and I said to myself, this weekend I am going to build and launch a SAAS product.
Well, come Sunday I had made a lot of progress but I had a little way still to go. The product I was building was essentially 3 different pieces as it includes a WordPress plugin, membership website and backend service worker. I was still fired up to get the product finished though.
In the past, it’s usually at this point that I’d give up and I knew it. It would be a convenient time to use my 3 kids or full time work as an excuse to not continue. But I pushed through and constantly reminded myself of the end goal.
The next week and a bit after the initial build weekend was hard. I worked a number of late nights and had to try balance family life, work and finishing the product.
I’m proud to say that yesterday I launched Watchtower. It’s not perfect and there are a few kinks but it’s live and people are signing up.
To throw a cherry on top, I got my first paying customer!
My hope is that if you’re reading this and are in the same position as I was 2 weeks ago, that you find motivation in this and build your product. And so my question to you is this, what are you building and launching this coming weekend?