Before I start building my new SaaS business, I figured it’d be a good idea to work through a few key questions regarding this business. Such as:

• Where do you even start?
• How do you build the product?
• What problems will it solve?
• Who is your core audience?
• How will you monetize?
• ...and more

In this livestream, I walk through all of these questions, and more, on my own "micro-SaaS" product.

I found this exercise extremely helpful in clarifying my thoughts. In particular, writing them down or saying them out loud helped me explore ideas even further than if I just kept them in the back of my mind.

https://youtu.be/hcL3X0-xQeo

Here's what I've come up with so far:

Inspiration

I share my inspiration for this product here: Inspiration page

Problem Statement

Non-technical clients or managers don't know how to use Github to review project status. Freelance developers do not have an easy way to use Github issues to present their progress to non-technical stakeholders. They have to resort to copying and pasting, or finding some hack-ish workaround to present their issues in a sensible way to non-Github users.

Github and other Github-dependent apps (ie Zenhub) do have many project management features, such as Kanban boards that help developers manage their issues. However, they have some limitations:

• The Kanban column has a fixed height and can only show a few issues. To see the remaining issues, you have to scroll down the column. This is not ideal when presenting the dashboard on a screen in a meeting room.

• Issues can only exist in 1 Kanban column at a time. This causes issues when you want to show an issue in multiple contexts. For example, if an issue is both a "priority" item, as well as "required by legal team," we'd like to include the issue in both of those columns

  • Some have suggested using Github's "labels" to organize issues. This is a halfway decent workaround. However, there's still no straightforward way to display issues based on labels. You can save the search filter as a URL: https://github.com/<organization>/<repository>/issues?label%3Apriority. However, this is less than ideal. You'll have to save a list of these URLs, and probably pre-load them before your meeting.

• Other people also find Kanban boards somewhat limiting

• If I’m interpreting these comments correctly, these people also find it limiting to allowing cards to only be on a single column.

  Kanlist

Solution