
Ask HN: Building a SaaS by connecting services instead of custom-dev everything? - _jdams
I&#x27;ve been reading a lot on Indie Hackers lately about SaaS businesses, typically smaller &quot;micro-saas&quot; which serve some hyper-specific features&#x2F;business model until there are opportunities to expand. Is it possible to piece a SaaS together by combining a website framework such as Wordpress with payment processing from Stripe, and maybe a few other services, without having to re-invent the wheel or learn full-on development?<p>To be honest I haven&#x27;t even come up with an idea yet, so I&#x27;m not ready to start, but I&#x27;m doing a weekend of research to determine feasibility of getting the barebones of a SaaS started while leaving me with an opportunity to seek contracted&#x2F;outsourced help for small tasks as opposed to developing everything myself.  Any experience in this area?  I&#x27;ll also be digging through IndieHackers interviews to see if I can find others who have shared similar experiences with little custom development work (until it was needed).
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kposehn
I’ve actually done something similar before - using stripe and Sendgrid to
make a small (and unremarkable) email service.

I had a very basic management app in rails but nothing else. In the end, I
spent maybe 40 hours of dev and less than $100 to make it (domain name and ssl
cert). It was a proof of concept for myself.

The drawback was assembling the elements to make it resulted in little to no
unique value in the product itself. It had no compelling value prop and as
such I never released it.

So, you can do this but you’ll probably have to do some dev work and make sure
the end product is both compelling, solves a real need and can deliver
continuous value.

As an aside, a product that I did enjoy a while ago (the name escapes me) was
really just a single person sending a newsletter with a curated list of web
dev/design contracts. He used gum road to charge $40/month for it. While I
used it, it was totally a valuable offering - and involved zero dev work.

Value can be created in other ways too :)

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_jdams
Thanks for the feedback and for sharing your personal experiences. I think
your comment about value being created in other ways (and in sometimes
incredibly simple, non-techy ways) is something important to not lose sight
of. Also, just in that example alone, future enhancement of a service like
that could be automating the newsletter into multiple formats, for viewing on
the go (such as a kindle format, PDF, etc.), instead of leaving it email only.

But yea, like I said in my OP, I don't even have a business idea yet. Whatever
it is, it will need to have a real value prop to be worth doing.

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sharemywin
Here's a link to an article for something like that:

[https://www.process.st/mvp-app/](https://www.process.st/mvp-app/)

