I Quit My Job to Build a SaaS. Here's Month One.
No co-founder, no funding, no safety net. Just a laptop and an idea about chatbots for small businesses.
March 1st was my last day at my job. March 2nd I opened my laptop and thought: "Now what?"
I had an idea. Chatbots for small businesses. Not the enterprise kind with flowcharts and decision trees. Something simple - you type your Q&A, it answers your visitors. That's it.
Week 1-2: Building Too Much
My first mistake was classic: I over-engineered everything.
I spent a week building an admin dashboard with features nobody asked for. Analytics charts, multi-language settings, theme customization - all before a single person had used the product.
I was building for an imaginary user with imaginary needs. It felt productive. It wasn't.
Week 3: Talking to People
Someone told me to stop building and start talking. So I messaged 20 small business owners. Salon owners, tutors, gym operators. Just asked: "How do you handle customer questions on your website?"
Most said some version of: "We don't, really."
That was the signal. Not a feature request. Not a detailed spec. Just a gap that nobody was filling for businesses this size.
Week 4: First User
I stripped the product down to the bare minimum. Create a bot, add Q&A, embed a widget. No analytics. No themes. No fancy anything.
Put it out there. Got my first signup.
The feeling was unreal. Someone I'd never met trusted this thing enough to put it on their website. I watched the first real conversation happen through the dashboard - a visitor asking about pricing, the bot answering correctly.
That 30-second interaction validated more than all the code I'd written.
The Honest Scorecard
Mistakes made: Over-building before validating. Not talking to users for the first two weeks. Picking a tech stack based on what I wanted to learn, not what shipped fastest.
Wins: First real user. First real conversation. Proved the concept works for a real business.
Bank account status: Declining steadily.
Mood: Terrified and excited in equal measure.
What I'd Tell Past-Me
Ship the ugly version first. Talk to people before writing code. Your first 10 users will teach you more than your first 10,000 lines of code.
Month two starts tomorrow. Let's see what happens.