Start your SaaS

Most SaaS advice tells you how to build. This guide tells you how to decide.

Solo founders rarely fail from lack of technical skill — shipping has never been cheaper. They fail from commercial decisions made on vibes: starting to code before anyone wanted the thing, building MVPs three sizes too big, keeping zombie products alive out of sunk cost, and running five unfinished products with no way to compare them.

This is a guide for the founder with too many ideas and too little evidence. Eight chapters, one per decision you actually face:

1. Pick your first SaaS — how to choose among ideas honestly
2. Validate before you build — evidence, experiments, and the cheap tests
3. Build the small thing — MVP scope discipline for people who can build
4. Launch — finding the first users on one channel
5. Pricing and the first dollar — charging for it without apology
6. From MRR to scale — the metrics that matter and when they matter
7. The portfolio game — park, kill, and running many bets at once

Two principles run through all of it:

Evidence beats enthusiasm. Every claim you make about your product — "people want this", "they'd pay for it", "it's working" — is either supported by something you collected or it's a guess. Both are allowed; only one is a foundation.

Deciding is the job. A portfolio that advances on evidence — and kills on evidence — will outperform a busier one. The SaaS Founder OS app exists to run this guide as a daily practice: the Opportunity Score ranks the ideas, stage gates force the evidence, experiments are the unit of progress, and reviews make the calls permanent.

Start at Chapter 1 — or skim any chapter standalone; each stands on its own.