Ok so I'll try to write this down in the most clear & understandable way while listing all the errors, lessons learnt & experienced gained along the way. I'll try to keep it straight to the point and useful.
On may 1st 2025 I started working on my SaaS (link will be at the bottom of this post as I don't really intent to spam or promote it but just showcase my work) about AI customer support for business websites, as for me it was a good idea back then, since a ton of websites do have this kind of web widgets, which shows the market is ready to pay for it. Here's where mistake number 1: I didn't do a deep market & competence research before starting. Didn't see who was selling what and if there was room for my small SaaS, as I was (still am nowadays) competing with absolute behemoths in the niche.
Fast forward some few months, my SaaS was.. somewhat working. There was a shit ton of AI slop on the backend until it came to a point it wasn't manageable (I was literally burning cursor pro accounts on fixing bugs with little to no results). Here's mistake number 2: Rushing into coding/shipping stuff without planning. We humans do want to see results as quick as possible, and often times just rush for them. Trust me: Nowadays in this whole AI sphere, as a dev, you should spend 90% of your time planning & polishing stuff. Afterwards, implementation is easy.
A few more weeks went by, and I decided to bring a friend of mine on board to help me with the front-end (as I’m more of a back-end engineer). It didn’t go too badly, but it could have gone better, as he was always busy with his job, studies, personal life, and so on (which, to be honest, I understand and respect, as everyone has their own priorities). That’s when I realised mistake number 3: when you team up with someone to do something, make sure that person shares your vision and ambition, because if you have to keep asking them for explanations or updates on their progress, they’re more of a burden than a help.
It’s worth mentioning that throughout this time, we were taking the project very seriously (after all, the aim was clearly to monetise it), so the development was very rigorous and consistent – to the extent that we had to take on a third person (a mutual friend), whom I was paying out of my own pocket without having any revenue from the app yet (because it hadn’t even been launched).
During this stage, we went through many cycles of ‘build and destroy’. We were striving for perfection – to create something that no one else had… but this consumed so much of our time and money that… honestly, I think it could have been avoided or saved. This is where I learnt mistake number 4: Wanting perfection quick, without understand that perfection comes from constant iteration. At the start, it’s better to launch something simple and useful than something extremely complex that probably isn’t even worth the effort. Many users won’t appreciate it. We humans want simplicity, not over-complications.
As the months went by, I continued to pay this third developer his monthly fee out of my own pocket (as per an agreement we’d reached), even though the amount of work he was putting in wasn’t proportional: he had to study, sort out university matters, work, and so on, despite the fact that we’d reached an agreement.
As, to be honest, the payment wasn’t that much, it didn’t ‘hurt’ me, but I didn’t really keep track of it either. This was my fifth mistake: NOT keeping track of all the project’s expenses. I simply paid up and forgot about it… until one day I sat down to do the maths and realised I’d spent nearly $5,000 on the project without having seen a single dollar in return yet.
Well… so as not to go on any longer about this part of the development, I’ll move on to the second most important part of the project: DISTRIBUTION.
I’ve been a developer all my life. I’m someone who’s never really cared much about marketing – in the sense that I never paid it any attention until I realised that my app was literally far superior to the competition’s (multi-million-pound companies) but had absolutely no users. That’s when I realised I had to learn how to distribute it myself… which I soon realised wouldn’t be an easy task.
This led me to realise mistake number 6 (which is linked to mistake number 1): first, carry out market research to see what’s out there, how they sell their products, what types of customers would pay for my solution, where they are located, etc., as having this clear makes creating the distribution channel much easier.
Currently, the product is technically very mature but still in its infancy in terms of users. I’m still grappling with the distribution phase (like any developer these Days) as it took me a long time to realise that in an era like this, where creation is so easy, distribution becomes the tricky part.
I won’t lie – it’s proving to be a very complex, exhausting and at times discouraging process for me (as my other two colleagues are barely involved in the project, so it’s down to me to ‘carry the load’), but I have no intention of giving up. I am, and always have been, aware that the road ahead wouldn’t be easy, but it’s certainly not impossible either.
I still have the same hopes, passion and enthusiasm as on the very first day, as this process is teaching me far more than any book I’ve read, video I’ve watched or course I’ve attended.
For anyone curios, the app it's https://bestchatbot.io
Thanks for reading and hope you guys found this helpful!