How to Ship Your First SaaS in a Weekend
Most weekend SaaS attempts die on Saturday afternoon. Not because the idea was bad, but because the builder spent six hours setting up authentication, fighting Stripe webhook signatures, and debugging hydration errors — and never touched the actual product. The fix is not coding faster. It is skipping the plumbing entirely.
"Shipped" Means a URL That Takes Money
Before you write a line of code, define what "done" looks like. For a weekend project, done is:
- A live URL someone can visit
- A way to sign up and log in
- One core feature that works
- A pricing page with a real payment link
That is it. Not a settings page. Not team management. Not dark mode. A weekend SaaS is a proof of concept that someone will pay for, not a finished product. If you cannot describe what your app does in one sentence, your scope is too big for 48 hours.
Friday Night: Pick One Problem, One User
Scope is what kills weekend projects. "Invoice tracker for freelancers" is a weekend project. "Business management platform" is not. The difference is specificity.
Pick one user type (freelance designers, not "businesses") and one problem (tracking unpaid invoices, not "managing finances"). Then define the simplest workflow that solves it: the user enters an invoice, the app shows which ones are overdue. One input, one output.
Write this down before you open your editor. Something like: "A freelancer pastes their invoice details, and the app sends them a reminder when payment is late." If you cannot fit it in a sentence, cut features until you can.
Saturday Morning: Start With the Plumbing Already Done
Here is where most weekend builders lose. An indie hacker on Indie Hackers documented building a SaaS in 9 days for $200 — and two of those nine days went entirely to spec, setup, and configuration. Auth, database, payments, deployment config. None of that is your product. All of it eats your clock.
The move is to start with a boilerplate or starter kit that already has authentication, a database, and Stripe wired up. Next.js starter kits, Rails templates, Laravel boilerplates — pick whatever matches your stack. The goal is to run npm install, configure your environment variables, and have a working app with login and payments within an hour, not a day.
This is not cheating. Every SaaS needs the same infrastructure. Building it from scratch every time is like hand-writing your own HTTP server before building a web app. Use what exists and spend your time on the part that is actually yours.
Saturday Afternoon: Build the One Thing That Matters
You have auth. You have a database. You have a deployment pipeline. Now build the single workflow you defined on Friday night.
Resist the urge to make it flexible. Hardcode things. Skip the admin panel. If your app tracks invoices, build the form that creates an invoice and the page that lists them. No filtering, no sorting, no CSV export. Those are week-two features.
A practical rule: if you are building something that is not directly visible to the user when they complete the core task, stop and ask whether it can wait. Background jobs, caching layers, rate limiting — all of it can wait. The user does not care about your architecture. They care about whether the app solves their problem.
By Saturday evening, you should be able to demo the core loop to someone: sign up, do the thing, see the result.
Sunday: Landing Page, Deploy, and Get a Real User
Sunday morning is for the landing page. You need a headline that says what the app does, a paragraph that explains who it is for, a pricing section, and a sign-up button. Sixty minutes, tops. Use a landing page template from your starter kit or copy the structure from a product you admire.
Deploy to Vercel, Netlify, Railway — wherever your stack runs. Set up your custom domain if you have one. Connect your Stripe account in live mode with a real price. This is the part people skip, and it is the part that matters most. A product on localhost is a hobby project. A product with a URL and a payment form is a business.
Then find three to five real users. Not your friends — people who actually have the problem you are solving. Post in a relevant subreddit, a Discord community, a Slack group. The message is simple: "I built a tool that does X. It's early. Can you try it and tell me what's broken?"
As one founder put it after launching on Hacker News: building is the easy part now. Distribution is the real work.
What Happens on Monday
Monday is when the weekend project becomes a real product — or doesn't. The goal is not to add features. The goal is to talk to the people who signed up.
Did they finish the core task? Where did they get stuck? What did they expect that was not there? The answers will surprise you. The invoice tracker you built might get feedback like "I don't need reminders, I need a link I can send to clients." That is not a failure. That is the product telling you what it actually is.
Most founders who ship a weekend MVP learn that their first assumptions were at least partially wrong. That is the whole point. You did not spend three months building the wrong thing. You spent a weekend finding out what the right thing is.
Start with the smallest version you would be embarrassed to charge for. Then ask someone to pay for it. What they say next is worth more than any feature you could build in a month.