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Ask HN: Go to sources on SaaS development

15 points by ElFitz ↗ HN
Hi everyone!

We're building a SaaS with a friend, and we pretty much finished the product's core's "mvp", but now we have to build... everything else

Users managements, "groups" of users, billing, access control,...

Pretty much everything that makes a SaaS... a SaaS. And I feel like I'm continuously discovering new things that seem essential, which is both awesome and disheartening.

So, what books, blogs, videos, online courses, whatever, would you consider are a must-read ( / watch / listen...) for someone who has never built a SaaS, or even a real product's backend for that matter ^^'

Also, anything related to event-driven architectures would be awesome :-) (I read Martin Fowler's posts and watched his video. They're quite fascinating)

(I'm originally a mobile dev who's been playing around with serverless for the last 2 1/2 years ^^')

12 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] thread
noir_lord
SaaS can be massively broad from core choices like single tenant/multi tenant up.

One thing that I always find useful is go read the source code of the SaaS systems that are open soure, things like GitLab and Taiga are good clean codebases to have a look at the general architecture.

https://github.com/taigaio/

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce

I found this quite good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1fkGyIcePA

Also worth a look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8NWDHgWA28 (by and large GOTO; talks are phenomenal).

ElFitz
Very good advice; I hadn't thought about it, believing it would be a daunting task, but then again... it's what we're building, sooo... ^^

The videos were really instructive too. Thank you!

noir_lord
Shrugs, sometimes not knowing that something is difficult is the best way to start :).
ivanr
Depending on what type of SaaS you're building exactly, you may find the Enterprise Ready web site quite useful: https://www.enterpriseready.io

From their homepage:

'Created for people who build SaaS products (founders, product managers and engineering team leads) to change the enterprise software narrative from "how to SELL to the enterprise" to "how to BUILD for the enterprise".'

ElFitz
This is just pure GOLD!

It doesn't deal with the implementation itself, but it gives a clear view of what others did and what to look into.

Thank you!

philippz
Don't deal with event-driven architecture when you're at MVP stage. Also, which language and framework do you use? Because if you'd go with PHP/Laravel for example, there is a neat SaaS solution called Spark: https://spark.laravel.com/
saluki
y, recommend you check out the Rails and Laravel SaaS in a box offerings.

Rails https://bullettrain.co/

Laravel https://spark.laravel.com/

They are good to get up and running quickly, I used spark on a SaaS and it worked well.

There are lots of great gems/packages that allows you to work without these though, if you want a little more control on how things are setup.

ElFitz
Tried looking for similar frameworks and offerings in Node.js, but no luck so far. That's too bad. Maybe I'll just pickup Rails ^^

Thanks!

ElFitz
That would indeed have been better, but the product itself is pretty much à about handling and processing events, so...

It feels like having the architecture not be event-driven when the whole product is about dealing with events would be the same as going the event-driven architecture route for, let's say, a knowledge-sharing SaaS

But I will definitely keep spark in mind for the future, thank you :-)

Jackypot
> Don't deal with event-driven architecture when you're at MVP stage

Interested in why you'd recommend that? Event-driven architecture decouples everything up front and the benefits are immediate. In this scenario the introduction of billing is en excellent example. User does something they should be billed for? Raise an event. Listen to it to bill them. Next iteration needs to email the user or update some history? Listen to the event. And so on. All the ephemeral saas infrastructure stuff just hangs off of the domain. And writing the code that way really isn't much more onerous than otherwise so I wouldn't discourage it for an MVP.