u/TastyIndependence956

So, I have a good idea for a SaaS, I know I'd be first to market with it, and based on a somewhat similar product I have seen before, this is certain to be a profitable endeavor.

I also have worked as a solo founding engineer in a startup previously, bringing other products in the same industry to life and getting it to profitability, so I know exactly how to execute this. I know there is a demand, I know the customers, I know the technical limitations (and honestly, the technical limitations of this is where I excel at, I'd say there are like a dozen people in the world which are better at this than me).

My conservative estimates are that I'd need around U$55k and 6 months to get the product to the market and start getting some revenue, but the actual window of release would be somewhere between 3 and 9 months from today, the actual date depends on factors outside of my control (when I say first to market, I mean it, the largest barrier for releasing it is outside of my own control).

On the 6 months timeline:
- U$42k would be to pay my own salary (U$7k/mo, which is substantially below my previous salary, but still enough that I can focus on the 100% of my time on the project).
- U$2400~3000 in AI subscriptions.
- Remaining amount would be for operational costs near launch period (very little hosting costs, but I'd need domains, some marketing materials, ad spend, etc etc).

There is also a possibility of spending on legal fees to resolve a possible legal issue which I will describe at the end of the topic. This is not included in the U$55k estimate I mentioned above.

The upside:

To be clear, although I strongly believe this is a profitable idea which is very likely to result in a profitable product, I know there is a ceiling for it. I don't know what the revenue ceiling is, but it exists. I see three possible outcomes for this company:

1. We increase our MRR with this first product to a point where we are profitable enough to self-fund additional products and low-effort spin-offs of the first project (I know exactly how these spin-offs would work and what they could bring to the table).
2. Exit within the first year or two by being bought out by a VCs with similar companies in their portfolio.
3. Exit shortly after getting to market, being bought by one specific individual. I can't go in detail but I know that if this idea blows up within the first few months we will receive an offer from this individual.
4. Exit later in the life-cycle due to the valuable customer base.

Risks:

There are pre-release risks. There is a non-zero chance that we can never get to market (won't go into the details publicly), the only way to avoid this would be to wait enough time that we wouldn't be able to be the first to market.

How we got here:

I came up with this idea while working in my previous employer, a small company in the US (~100 employees). A little bit ago I became the leader of a department which was focused almost exclusively in building this sort of project, however, leadership had twisted ideas of how this sort of thing worked, they wanted me to build 9 SaaS in 9 weeks, and I was responsible for doing it from scratch, I told them it was impossible to do it at that rate solo considering I had to do literally everything. They would only tell me the idea and I would be responsible for every single thing, from designing the UI/UX, architecture of the software, development, entire devops, support, marketing materials, demo for customers, security, quite literally every single thing. I was creating the entire product based on 10 words describing what they thought would be a good product (even though they had 0 experience creating this type of product, and I had like 7 years of doing it). We ended up launching two products in two months

First product was the most promising one and the one I believed in, within the first month it got operationally profitable, but due to a factor outside of our control, the addressable market of that product got a lot smaller. It would still be a profitable product, but I can't see it bringing more than a few thousand dollars per month.

Second product was less promising, it was also an idea I was told to implement without the option of refusing. I had actually built that product already when I worked at a startup 2~3 years prior to that, I knew it was more of a dud, and I knew there was competition (which was also poorly managed), but from a technical standpoint there was almost no difference. On the other hand, it's pretty much just passive income. Almost 0 operational costs, but specially with the leaderships pricing structure I knew this would never pay for my salary.

The idea:

While working on these two other products, I noticed an opportunity appearing in the market. Once I identified it, I brought the idea in vague terms to leadership's attention and told them I wanted to start working on it ASAP, they gave me the green flag as it was obviously a good idea. But they never gave me the time to really go into it. At the time, the release date of the dependency I need for this idea was unclear but could have been October. I dug around with some insiders and was told that it certainly would not be October.

I then decided to take my vacation so I could be ready to work on it as soon as the tools were available. And when I got back from vacation, my contract was terminated citing an internal re-structuring, since I was the only one actively working on those types of products (the main revenue of the company came from other streams), I believe they gave up on that sector entirely.

And if they haven't, I know they are incapable of implementing my idea any way, so at best they would pursue the other product ideas they already had in mind. I say this without any sort of disrespect, but the average SWE in that company is bad, and even though there are a handful of good ones, they don't have the specific skills needed to take this project to market. Plus I don't think they would have terminated my contract if they wanted to get this out of the door since it was clear to everyone that I was the most capable to work on it.

The legal issue:

My contract with the previous employer assigned inventions while under contract to the company. As described above, I had the idea while under the contract and mentioned it to them, reading the contract naively, the most likely answer is that they have ownership of the idea as a company invention. And although I am not a lawyer, I strongly believe the contract wouldn't hold up in court given a series of circumstances I won't be disclosing publicly.

And while in the area of speculations: I don't think they would pursue this legally.

My question is: Where do I go from here?

I mentioned above I got laid-off very recently, and I am considering pursuing this idea, but I also need to survive. I have enough savings for 3 "ok" months, I could get to 6 if I really stretched things out, but I wouldn't be able to focus on the development (or pay the tokens I would need to actually get this out of the door in this timeline).

I have a ton of expertise on what I do so finding a new job wouldn't exactly be hard, and I even believe some of the people I know (CEOs, founders) would be interested in hiring me to develop this product for them (paying me a much bigger salary), but then I'd have little to no ownership.

TLDR: I work with weird SDKs and APIs and I am tired of repeating myself when using Codex, give me your best tips, suggestions and references on how to create a plugin with Skills and Agents that can actually reduce the amount of course-correcting I need to do manually, MCP invocations to access poorly written docs, uncertainties and mistakes caused by the lack of public information regarding the usage of these SDKs.

I am a software engineer and work with a few very niche SDKs and APIs which don't have the best documentation (although it does have an MCP that facilitates access to said documentation), and for months I've been trying to manually enforce best practices and course-correct Codex every time it goes into a path I know is wrong, or spending time checking the MCP for information that I already know and have been repeated in numerous other sessions.

All of this is further complicated by the fact that I am kind of a "project janitor", most of my work is jumping into a new project I have 0 context on, resolve critical issues related to a subset of these SDKs that I am particularly good at, then move on to the next crisis, rinse and repeat. So project structure and AI documentation within projects is mostly out of my control.

So I decided to create my very own plugin (private at least for now) to help me with this, but I don't know how to create a good and effective plugin. My main goal is to be able to enforce best practices and remember domain-specific knowledge.

I was thinking about having 3 agents, an "implementer", a "reviewer", and a "docs-consultant" (names are not final).

And then also a few skills, like for example a "sdk-docs" skill which instructs the agent how to prompt the docs-consultant for the best results, and tells the agent to use the docs-consultant instead of accessing the docs directly (mainly to avoid inserting garbage into the main agent's context).

I am also considering using a few harness' hooks but I feel like for now I should start with the basics.

Any tips, tricks, suggestions, references, feedback or whatever else are appreciated.

Also, sorry if you see a very similar post in another subreddit. I want to build this plugin to work on both of the harnesses I use, so I will be posting on both their subreddits, plus a slightly different question in the Vibecoding subreddit.

I should get this out of the way: I am not super demanding when it comes to graphics. 3 out of the 4 games I played the longest in my life were released 25+ years ago (Tibia, RuneScape, Eve Online).

That said, WotH1 anti-aliasing was and is a big pain point for me. Either you use DLSS/FSR which looked ok (not great, but ok) in static envs, but introduced major ghosting when things started to move, or you used the Temporal/FXAA which just look horrible all around.

Is the situation any better on WotH2? As far as everything else on WotH1, I am happy enough that I don't really care about buying a new game, but proper AA would be a killer feature for me. MacOS support would also be great, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The part below is just speculation, I might be completely wrong about it:

I remember trying to resolve the issue in WotH1 a few years ago and it looked like the main problem was that the game was internally rendered at a very low-res and then upscaled to your target resolution, which would explain why AA was such a massive requirement for the game to be playable, and also why AA was bad (garbage-in, garbage-out).