Introduction

SaaS Founder OS is a portfolio operating system for solo founders with too many SaaS ideas. Instead of a folder of half-finished products, you get a scored portfolio: every product carries an opportunity score, an evidence-based stage, and a guided playbook that always tells you what to prove next.

The core idea

Most side-project SaaS die from one of two failures: building the wrong thing, or never deciding anything at all. SaaS Founder OS forces both questions into the open:

1. Opportunity — is this idea worth pursuing, scored on 12 weighted signals?
2. Evidence — what would need to be true to move this product to the next stage? Gates advance on evidence, not enthusiasm.

Where this fits your stack

If you already work out of a project tracker — Linear, Trello, GitHub Issues — keep it. Trackers are excellent at executing work that has already been decided. SaaS Founder OS lives upstream of that: it's where a half-formed idea earns its way into your tracker (or doesn't), where the portfolio is ranked, and where kill decisions get made on evidence instead of guilt. Once a product is green-lit, the day-to-day building still happens wherever you work best — the decision layer stays here.

The lifecycle

Products move through seven stages — and the order is enforced: each transition is a gate, so you can't skip the homework.

Three exits — MAINTAIN, PARK, and KILL — exist for deliberate decisions, because a well-reasoned kill decision is a win for the portfolio, not a failure. The status strip on every product's Overview shows where each product sits on this path.

Notifications

The bell in the top bar keeps watch over your portfolio so you don't have to:

• Review reminders — when a product's next review date arrives (or slips past), the bell lets you know.
• Gate readiness — the moment every requirement for a product's current stage gate is satisfied, you'll hear about it: the evidence is there, advance or make the call.
• Feed problems — if a Live Data Feed delivery is rejected (bad signature, malformed payload), you'll know the same way instead of wondering why your MRR went stale.

Unread items show a badge on the bell; "Mark all read" clears it.

Templates

Shipping your second (or fifth) SaaS? Don't rebuild the same playbook twice:

• Add Product on the Portfolio page is a short wizard with two starting points. Start from scratch lets you tick the standard building blocks you use — GitHub, Stripe, Sentry, Vercel, Neon, Resend, Clerk and more — and creates connection records, starter resources, and a stage-appropriate checklist so the workspace is structured from minute one. The playbook stays deliberately blank: strategy is earned, not pre-filled.
• Templates: pick any of your saved setups and carry over as much or as little as you want.
• Save as template from any product's Settings → Template captures its whole setup — playbook answers, opportunity scorecard, experiment designs, risk register, connections, Build Workspace scaffolding.
• Templates carry structure, never live data — MRR, customers, experiment results, and dates always start at zero. Connection records copy over, but credentials and feed secrets never do.

Reports

The Reports page turns your portfolio into investor-ready numbers:

• Totals — portfolio MRR, paying customers, ARPU, and a founder-adjusted net (MRR − infrastructure − founder hours × your rate, where the rate is a per-product setting defaulting to $100/h).
• MRR trend — the last 60 days of portfolio MRR, recorded from Live Data Feed deliveries. Products without a feed still appear in the economics table with their current numbers, but no history is invented.
• Product economics — per-product MRR, customers, ARPU, costs, net, and each product's share of portfolio MRR.
• Concentration & sellability — how much of your MRR rides on your biggest product (investors read >50% as "this portfolio is really one asset"), plus how many products are scored, earning, and decided.

Financial reports are a Pro feature. The Print report button (or your browser's Print → Save as PDF) produces a clean, shareable copy — the app chrome is hidden in print automatically.

Organizing the portfolio

The Portfolio table adapts to how you think:

• Columns — the Columns button lets you toggle and reorder table columns (hide what you don't scan, put MRR first if that's your lens). Your layout is saved in your browser.
• Tags — add free-form labels (like b2b, ai, weekend-project) from each product's Settings. Tags are a real tag input: type and press Enter to add a chip, Backspace to pop the last one, and the field suggests tags already in use elsewhere in your workspace. Each tag gets a stable color (derived from its name, so it matches everywhere) and shows as a chip in the grid where you can filter the table by tag.

The demo

New accounts come with ChurnPilot (Demo) — a fully worked-through example product: complete scorecard, filled playbook, experiments in every state, risk register, and decision history. Use it to see what "done" looks like before committing to your own products.

• It's clearly badged DEMO in your portfolio and never counts toward your dashboard numbers or review queue.
• Remove it any time from its Settings → Danger zone ("Remove demo") — your real products are never touched.

Where to go next

• Your first hour — sign-up to working portfolio
• The Opportunity Score
• Stage Gates
• The Playbook
• The SaaS Founder's Guide — from idea to MRR, chaptered
• Plans & Pricing