jezzsantos
commented
10 months ago Announcement 1: LinkedIn post, maybe a techcrunch post.
I've decided to put a bunch of my expertise (over more than a decade of experience in leading early-stage startup teams) into creating a new asset aimed at getting new tech startups off the ground. It is called SaaStack.
It is a template for building SaaS products when starting on day one. It is designed to save months, if not years, of time and cost, in getting your product idea into the market ASAP. But that is not all. It has been carefully designed to make that evolving product durable, supportable, and maintainable to high degrees so that your team will keep moving fast with it, over the next 1-5 years! Something that many startups fail to do soon enough at enormous expense to their business opportunity.
No longer do you have to build as fast as you can and then rewrite all over again just as the business is getting off the ground? Especially significant for startups that can't raise enough capital early enough to hire teams of engineers to re-write all their core software for the business.
Now, depending on who you have writing code for your new startup, they may or may not be interested in SaaStack. But they should be.
Likely, if you were to hire a junior or intermediate developer as your first startup CTO or tech lead, then they will likely start writing code for your startup using the tools, and practices that they know, and start from scratch little thought about future supportability and maintability for the business. Because it's all that they know how to do and some of the more advanced things in SaaStack they will think they don't any time soon. We will just chalk that up to inexperience.
If, however, you hire a more experienced developer as your CTO, who has experience starting new projects/products from scratch (and they've done that over and over again before), then they are more likely to see the value in using something like SaaStack as a better starting point.
Of course, there will always be those overconfident ones who will fool themselves that they are the only ones they can trust to start building their own baby, and will do it all themselves anyway. Nothing anyone can do about that.
So why should you consider using SaaStack?
Well, firstly SaaStack is based upon proven architectural styles and patterns for building SaaS products that have been learned, in the wild, across building many Saas products. It is as lean as it gets. Nothing, more and nothing less.
Secondly, the patterns contained within it (which you will have to repeat) will look super familiar to anyone who has done this kind of work before, and anyone who is up to speed on the latest and greatest patterns in the .Net community.
Thirdly, SaaStack is a codebase template of about 75,000 lines of code that someone will have to write at some point in time. Why bother reinventing it all? Wouldn't you rather just get on with the important stuff about your particular tech idea? Certainly, if you are up to speed with the latest and greatest on the .NET stack, you are probably going to know already (and agree with) most of the design decisions that have been made for it. We've worked super hard to capture all those design decisions in our Architectural Decision Log (ADRs) so you can see why. Don't like a decision? Cool, then you'll see pretty quickly that it is easy to change it to be the way you like it. Why? Firstly, we have built simple abstractions around most of the concepts present in this codebase, to allow you to effectively plug and play. Secondly, because you have no dependency on someone else's stuff. You own all this code outright. This is the beauty in starting with a codebase template, rather than depending on someone else's NuGet package, that you can t change.
Not used to seeing so much documentation for a template? Yeah, we get it. That's one of the top reasons most developers find it hard to adopt new patterns and practices when it comes to starting a new product. So we've mitigated that by providing you the details you need to understand what going on.
Fourthly, SaaStack is fully tested. Overlapping testing suites in many layers. It comes with a giant regression suite already built in from day one! All you have to do is keep writing tests for the things you add to the codebase, and you will no longer fear changing the code, and you will spend significantly more time on building features, and less on fixing production defects. Maybe even less than one production defect per month!
Items to consider:
A LinkedIn post announcing SaaStacjk and seeking feedback on the need for it.
A LinkedIn post with this caption: "We have chosen to use [Domain Driven Design](https://github.com/jezzsantos/saastack-dotnet/issues/0040-modeling.md) as the tool for capturing and encoding our "conceptual models" of the world to align with the mental models our customers have, of the problems we are trying to solve for them."
others to come.