One point mentioned in the article is the caching for global users and shared hosting does not give you that. At most you can replace S3 with shared hosting, not CDN part.
I've been running docsapp.io, a SaaS for documentation hub. It is growing and profitable but not a lot. I work between 1-8 hours per month, mostly development and little support.
I run a SaaS that building and hosting developer hub https://www.docsapp.io using the following technologies.
Backend: Scala and Playframework
Frontend: Jquery
DB: RDS, Postgresql on AWS
Hosting: Baremetal on Scaleway
DNS: AWS Route53
Object Store: AWS S3
CDN: AWS CloudFront
Infrastructure: Ansible and Kubernetes
Monitoring: CloudWatch and Influxdb + Grafana in k8s
Logging: ELK in k8s
Scaleway is a great hosting with cheap price. Instead of finding reliable but expensive hosting, I prefer cheaper hosting, but more servers and build HA to handle server issue. Server die all the time.
I am working on SaaS DocsApp (https://www.docsapp.io/) solo and bootstrapped. DocsApp is a platform to manage your product documentation. DocsApp now is profitable and growing. Currently I am focusing on marketing to grow more. DocsApp was born as a result of frustration to building documentation for Product/SaaS.
I have been working on DocsApp for 3 years and only now start profitable. The hardest problem I faced was marketing and sales. Development is only 30% of the work.
I built https://www.docsapp.io/ while learning new programming language. Now DocsApp generating passive income for me, not a lot, but small profit. Next step is to build content around my product to generate more traffic.
Anyone know where to find good technical content writers?
Congratulation on launching! I built DocsApp to solve similar pain point. For documentation hub, performance is a feature :). Feel free to contact me (email in my profile) to chat.
Been working on my project https://www.docsapp.io/ for more then one year and now growing slowly.
Initially I work on this project to learn Scala + Play! Framework and now I turn it into real project with real customers.
What I learnt from working on this project:
1. Time to market - Push your product to market and find customers ASAP to get real feedback.
2. Hosting - Build on cheap hosting provider with self setup that support HA. Machine fail all the time even you use expensive hosting (Cloud)
DocsApp https://www.docsapp.io/ - Started ~ 2 years ago but only profitable since few months ago.
I built DocsApp to provide platform to publish documentation easily. Instead of spending time to build your documentation site, DocsApp allow you to start publish documentation in minutes.
The challenges to build a profitable SaaS is marketing, especially for people with only technical background.
No extensive marketing done yet so users growth slowly. A lot improvement to be done especially on UX side.
So far no revenue because I focus on building features. While DocsApp already launched 8 months ago, I still don`t see any growth in term of active users.
So far only one active user with two sites and few users sign up to test then abandon completely, possibly go to competitor site with much expensive pricing.
Here is what I think did wrong:
1. No marketing effort to reach more users.
2. UX really important.
3. Actively reach out to users to gather feedback.