How to Build a SaaS Factory - Ship 10x Faster

Welcome to my SAS Factory! This is where I built my SAS product. I used this place to create eight base, feed hiive, link drip, and a lot of other products you haven't even heard of. This seems broken. SAS became really competitive; let's face it, going all in on a SAS is risky. Constantly testing the market with new ideas is the best way to increase your chances of success. But you need the right tooling to do this sustainably.

In this video, I'll show you how you can build a SAS Factory just like this for yourself, and I'll show you what to avoid at all costs.

The reality is that it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that your SAS product will fail. If you're a beginner and it's your first product, it's extremely likely—almost a guarantee. Even some of the biggest and most successful business owners are playing this game. Take a look at Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft. They all have a massive graveyard of failed products, which is much bigger than their portfolio of successful products.

If you take a look at the most successful Indie hackers, it's the same deal. The reason they're successful is that they've been pushing and failing more and faster than most other people. This is why you should build a SAS Factory to make it easier for you to test new products, launch new products, and take new products to market faster.

The first thing we need is a place to store code. Here, let me show you. In here we have a lot of packages containing a lot of code. We have custom utilities that we use over and over, packages to easily manipulate lists, themes, utility functions to handle common stripe operations, and much more. These are packages we install in mostly all new projects because they help speed up common operations such as login, user permissions, subscription, workspaces, managing teams, and so on.

We also have a lot of templates and boilerplates. The tech stack this Factory is built on uses React, Chakra UI, AWS, and Palumi. Every new project we build comes out on the very same tech stack. We have boilerplates that enable us to spin up a fully functional SAS, including a backend, front end, authentication, payment, and a basic UI, in less than 30 minutes! All new products start from here. The key is to stay organized.

In the heat and excitement of building a new SAS, people—especially Indie hackers—tend to under-prioritize organization. In order to build this part of the Factory, you need just one thing: a GitHub organization. Now get into the habit of stopping regularly: go through your code and pick out pieces that you know—or at least feel very sure—could be reused. Refactor it and turn it into a general-purpose solution. Then push it to a repository on GitHub and turn it into an npm package you can install in future projects. Think of future you! Spend some time writing a nice README with documentation and getting started instructions. The same goes for the boilerplates; although these do take a bit more work, on GitHub you can turn a repository into a template, and with a click of a button, you'll have a new repository ready using the boilerplate.

With our full-stack SAS boilerplate, we even created a small CLI, so when we first start a project, we're taken through a few questions and choices, and boom—the new SAS is ready! Soon enough, you will have a GitHub organization filled with packages, boilerplates, gists, code snippets, and starter guides including all the things you need to set up a base for new SAS fast.

Hey Simon, yes? What is it? The latest SAS broke again. It seems like the version of Chakra is out of date. Can't you ask Devon to look into it? He tried but couldn't figure it out. Okay, I'll look into it. Thanks!

Yes, this takes time to set up, and yes, you do need to maintain this since you need to keep your packages updated and compatible with each other. But trust me, once this part of your SAS Factory is well-developed and running, you're going to save hundreds, if not thousands, of hours on probably the most expensive part of your SAS business—engineering.

The next thing we need is a place for no-code automation. This is one of our most important rooms. People have this idea that it's either code or no-code, but in order to build a proper SAS Factory, you should have both. We're using tools like Zapier and Make to perform a lot of backend operations that include third-party tools.

For instance, when we add new users to a retargeting list for Facebook and Google, we use no-code automation. When we segment users in a list for email drips, we use no-code automation. When we write product updates in Notion and push it to Feed Hiive to share on social media, we use no-code automation. When new users sign up, and we add the sale to a spreadsheet for financial planning, we use no-code automation too! In fact, we use no-code automation for a long list of things that are not directly related to the backend of the app, including third-party tools. And why not turn this into a library of no-code templates that can be reused?

Here's what a lot of you don't know: Zapier has an excellent integration platform that allows you to create custom integrations. If you keep these private, you don't need to have them approved by the Zapier team. You can create these completely free of charge and hook them up with your own APIs to use them directly within your own Zapier account. So instead of spending hours setting up complex automation for every new SAS you build, create a custom integration once and make it reusable for any new SAS you build. This works perfectly with your GitHub packages and custom boilerplates.

Of course, once again, this will take time to learn and to set up initially. That's the whole point of a factory; it's time-consuming once but fast in the future. Now that we got both code and no-code covered, we need to go downstairs to the creative library.

But first, let me tell you about eight base. Eight Base is an AI-powered all-in-one support solution for your SAS. It's one of the SAS products that was built in this Factory by me and my team. You see, all SAS bars need customer support, and with eight base, we have covered the whole thing. You start by adding an AI chatbot to your website and your app, which will serve as live chat support and direct access to your FAQ and help desk articles, which you can create directly from eight base. You then build a custom ticket form using our no-code form builder to capture important information and help users with issues that are a bit too hard for an AI to solve. Finally, you create an email inbox to manage support emails from eight base too. Everything is from one unified dashboard.

And of course, you use eight base to train custom AI models on your data, your websites, PDFs, YouTube videos, and so on. Integrating it into your app takes seconds, and once it’s live, our team of AI robots will help you handle customer support without you getting involved in every single step. Eight base is a part of my SAS Factory, and it should be a part of yours too. That's why we're giving our subscriptions at 50% off for the entire first year! Use the code Factory 50 to start your subscription today; the link is in the comments below.

Now, back to the Factory! This is our creative library. In here, we store reusable images and graphics. We use these for thumbnails, ad creatives, graphics for social media, and much more! Getting stuck creatively is horrible, so instead, whenever we need something new, we just go in here and pick up a template. We even have video templates and essential graphics for video editing. For instance, if you want to publish a new video demo or create a new video ad, we use these as building blocks to speed up editing.

In order to build this part of the Factory, I suggest using Figma for images and Adobe After Effects for essential graphics. In Figma, you can use components to create template graphics. These can include different variants of elements, so you can compose new pieces of graphics easily. Additionally, you can build up a library of reusable graphic parts like fonts, scribble characters, icons, and much more. In Adobe After Effects, you can turn animations and clips into essential graphics and make each layer customizable too. This makes it easy to reuse different pre-made clips and graphics and adjust them in Adobe Premiere when you edit.

I feel like I'm repeating myself a bit here, but do spend some time making this nice and organized for yourself. Building a SAS Factory is all about making your future life easier. And if you really don't want to spend time setting all this up, you can always buy a ready-made factory.

Simon, did you forget what happened to your old factory? Oh well, I thought that... Please don't make that same mistake again! It took us ages to rebuild this place. Remember? You're right, you're right! Okay, there's something I need to tell you: this is not my first SAS Factory. A while back, I was in a hurry to get my first SAS started and I found this SAS Factory that was for sale. I called the seller, and apparently it was my lucky day! So I went down there to meet him.

[Music]

And this SAS Factory has everything available inside it! Absolutely! So you can start printing SAS products right away and have your first product ready by tomorrow! How about that? That's amazing! I'll take it!

Perfect! You'll be very happy with your new SAS Factory!

Wow, I can't believe this is mine now. But I had no idea how to operate this Factory. The manual was extremely poorly written, and nothing really made sense to me. I was trying a bunch of different things to get my first SAS product ready, but nothing was working. I spent a ton of money on this thing, so I was getting very frustrated. At some point, I pressed some button, and something went wrong, and the whole place caught fire!

A few moments later, and the whole thing burned to the ground. It was terrible. All the money and time I had spent wasted. But at that very moment, when I was the most demoralized, I made a decision: I was going to build a new Factory from scratch. I started planning how my factory would work in detail. I knew this was going to take a lot of hard work and effort, but slowly, piece by piece, I got my new Factory working. And this time, because I built it from scratch, I knew it inside and out. It was not going to fail on me this time!

We still need two things in order to run a successful SAS Factory. The first is a protocol. Keep a checklist and a setup of requirements. All new SAS products need this. This should include things such as payment systems, email systems, user authentication, but also things like privacy policy, terms and conditions, and so on. I suggest using a tool like Notion for this. Save all your legal documents as templates and keep checklists for all parts of your SAS development. Every time you set up a new SAS, make sure you can cross everything on the list. Consider this quality control as part of doing protocol and quality checks. Make sure all parts of your SAS Factory are well documented, and all processes are well described. Don't let yourself end up in a situation where you get confused and don't remember what to do!

Finally, you need a playbook. A playbook is something that goes beyond the factory itself. It's a guideline, a framework that outlines your practices and strategies—a rule set you follow and use to plan and execute each SAS. Most successful serial entrepreneurs do exactly this. If you look at some of the most successful founders, you'll notice that they tend to play the same game again and again. If you look at most successful Indie creators, it's the same thing; I do this too! Look at how I launch and market my products. If you've been following my journey, you've probably noticed that I follow the same playbook too.

This is the perfect opportunity to announce that you can now buy my playbook and my entire SAS Factory. But I'm obviously not going to do that because I'm not some snake oil salesman. If I sold you my playbook, I would probably make a lot of money, and even if my playbook works for me, it’s highly unlikely that it’s going to work for you. Using someone else's Factory and expecting the same results is most likely going to end in disaster.

What truly gives you superpowers is the process of building the factory: all the hard-earned lessons that make up the foundation you're building on. That's what really makes a difference, and it's not something you can buy. So get started building your own SAS Factory today!

Thanks for watching!