I finally launched my first SaaS. The hardest part was deciding when to stop building it.
I've been building my first real SaaS for the past few months, and I kept falling into the same trap: every time I thought it was ready, I found one more thing that "needed" to be fixed before I could show it to strangers.
The product is ActivCue. It's a family activity app that takes things like the kids' ages, available time, energy level, mess tolerance, materials in the house, etc. and generates activities that fit that particular moment.
Getting the core feature working wasn't actually the hardest part.
The harder part was everything around it:
- authentication and account restrictions
- Stripe subscriptions
- database security/RLS
- mobile layouts
- making AI-generated activities consistently age-appropriate
- handling generation latency
- building a demo
- analytics
- privacy/terms
- figuring out when the remaining bugs were "don't launch" bugs versus normal things I could improve later
I finally reached the point where continuing to build without real users was probably giving me less useful information than actually launching.
So today I started promoting it for the first time.
I'm starting with organic posts instead of paid ads because I want to learn whether strangers understand the product, where they drop off, and what objections come up before paying to send traffic at it.
For anyone who's launched a SaaS before: what did you discover only after real strangers started using it that you never would have caught during development?
If anyone wants context for what I built, it's activcue.fun. I'm much more interested in launch/product feedback than selling subscriptions here.