Why my first SaaS failed

In July 2019, my first ever indie hacker Saas was born. I had just comitted the first code ever to the Git repository for my idea “Draftical” - although back then it was still called “Storymaker”, a prototype name, until I came up with something better.

What was Draftical? It was a Saas business for authors, helping them draft their stories. You would structure your story via scenes, which you could then move around the way you thought the story should chronically go. You could also add characters, locations and items to every scene. That way you would’ve been able to filter scenes depending on that data.

Draftical’s logo

It was a great idea. I was its first user, as I wanted to create it to have a tool like that myself. There were - of course - competitors on the market already, but I just wasn’t up for paying for a tool I could build myself (the “Software developer dilemma”). I had more potential users in my friends who were authors themselves. The start was pretty solid right?

But the product never launched. The website, that is still up, says “We are in Beta right now. Version 1 will be released in early 2022”. I already updated this, two times obviously. First it said early 2020. But the date got pushed and pushed again and it just never released. In January 2022 I decided to officially abandon the project.

Getting lost in technology

Like always, it’s a few things that pushed me to eventually abandon the project. When I started developing Draftical’s code, I wasn’t as experienced as I am today. The backend was written in pretty barebones Express.js code and in the first version I didn’t even use an ORM to connect to the database. Pure SQL just straight into the database. No migrations possible, nothing.

Then came the second version, with SQLite. Turns out migrations weren’t great with that either. So I moved to a different ORM, Prisma. Now everything with the database was cool, but I had rewritten the backend two times. Mostly from scratch. It was, as you can imagine pretty exhausting. Oh, I forgot to mention I wrote the authentication/authorization code from scratch as well. No auth0, no nothing.

The frontend code wasn’t much better. I had written the app in React, which would still be fine by today’s standards. BUT, it was written in React class components. Then I rewrote that. I used Redux in the first version, then rewrote that to Redux Toolkit. Then I started to introduce React hooks, as they became stable. You can kinda see the picture.

In the end, I had rewritten the entire app three times or more. I was done. I didn’t want to look at the code anymore. Didn’t want to work on it anymore. And that’s what really was the end for the project.

Getting discouraged

Other than the code being rewritten every four months, I had run into different problems. I tried to create an active Twitter account, but I did it all the wrong way (as I know today). I just blindly followed everyone that talked about writing a book, found lists of #writingcommunity people and followed all of those. And you can kinda calculate that 20-30% of people will eventually follow you back. But they won’t engage with you. They won’t take a look at your website. They’ll just become mute followers with no value to you - while you also don’t provide much value to them. Don’t do this…

I also entered Draftical into two startup competitions. In one, nobody was interested in the idea. Nobody got that this could be a legitimate tool. The jurors were very technical and businessy, nobody came from a creative space. In the other competition, people showed interest! I had some jurors from the creative industry that became excited. But in the end, I wasn’t chosen as one of the winners. I had a call with the host of the competition. In one of the three rounds I presented, somebody asked me what the greatest outcome would be. I answered “Having 5000 users, then I could hire 2-3 people and take this to a whole nother level, doing it full time”. They were looking for somebody that wanted to scale to millions. I felt unheard and kinda disillusioned after that. The bootstrapped mindset wasn’t something that investors were interested in. This was also still in low interest times, so just get that money and immediately scale to millions! Meh. I’d rather build a company that spends the money that it has.

So at this point I didn’t have any movement apart from the people I knew, nobody in the investment space was interested and I couldn’t find a community for it. You see the problem now?

Why didn’t you do user interviews?

Yeah.

Something I would know better and do better today is to chose my first step when creating a new indie hacker project or startup idea. I’m gonna write it in big letters, as this is the number 1 tip I would give anyone.

DO. USER. INTERVIEWS. BEFORE. DEVELOPING. THE. APP.

Talk to your users to see what their actual problems are

I didn’t know if there was a community that wanted to go digital with their story drafts. I didn’t know if they had the money to spend on an app like this - let’s be honest, most creatives aren’t made of money. I also didn’t talk to many people about the features they wanted to see in the app. What to avoid. What would not be needed.

This is the ONE thing that EVERY startup / indie hacker business should do. Talk to the potential users. And do it before you’re actually building anything. This will save you potentially YEARS of wasted developing time. Don’t repeat me.

The good thing

So is there any positive thing to discover here? For sure! I learned so much creating Draftical, it doesn’t really matter that it never became successful. I learned a lot about databases, about ORM frameworks and what I value in those. I deployed an app via a root server and docker containers, never did that before! I wrote an authentication service myself, to see how damn hard that is and now I always trust the professionals instead of rolling my own.

I also did marketing for the first time. I learned a lot about strategies that don’t work.

I entered into competitions, stood in front of real investors and got shut down. Got asked really hard questions for which I didn’t have an answer for sometimes. Important learnings that will be so so valuable if I ever return to that stage.

I became a better developer, a marketer, a business organizer. And in the end the creation of Draftical was only the beginning. I started new projects, I went into freelancing full time, leaving my comfortable job at a design agency behind.

Everything started with Draftical. It doesn’t have to end with it, too.