I thought building a SaaS would be the hard part. Turns out the real time sink was everything before the first line of product code.

 Started a small side project a couple months ago after my day job. Just nights + weekends, nothing fancy. 

I assumed the hard part would be writing the product itself. Turns out the real time sink was everything BEFORE that.

The first ~6 weeks basically disappeared into three things: choosing an idea, wiring auth + billing + dashboard stuff, figuring out where the hell to launch. 

Idea stage alone took me 2 weeks. I read Starter Story for inspiration and scraped Reddit complaints trying to see patterns. Ended up validating by DMing ~25 people in a niche Slack community. Only 7 replied but 3 said they'd try it. 

Then infra hell. I tried doing it from scratch with Next.js + Stripe tutorials. That burned another 10-12 days. Auth flows, webhook errors, subscription states… classic stuff. 

Looked at boilerplates like ShipFast and Supastarter too. Both solid honestly, but I kept realizing the bigger issue wasn't just code. I still had no launch plan.

At some point I started bundling the workflow instead of solving each piece separately. Idea research → base SaaS setup → distribution list. 

Part of that stack was a bundle I tried called FounderToolkit. Mostly used it for the boilerplate and a big directory list, but the bigger lesson was just compressing the whole process.

Once I treated launch as part of the build, things moved way faster. MVP shipped in ~9 days. Nothing crazy simple analytics tool for small communities. 

Launch looked like this: submitted to ~40 directories, posted in 6 niche communities, a couple small Reddit threads. Directories surprisingly drove the first wave.

Rough numbers after ~3 weeks: ~60 signups, ~35 from directories, ~15 from communities, rest random.

Big takeaway for me: the slow part of SaaS isn't always coding. It's the messy loop of idea → infra → distribution.

Curious to know what others here actually slows you down the most in the early phase? Idea? Infra? Or getting the first users?