What is the best Infrastructure for Bootstrapped SaaS?

Welcome back to your fortnightly retrospective on all the most interesting stories and code from people building great software. I hope you've enjoyed your Easter break and recovered from all the chocolate you've received.

This week has been particularly exciting for me in that I got my first covid jab. The process was very swift as I'd actually phoned to reschedule my paper invitation, but ended up getting an invite within the hour. I also met my niece for the first time ever over in England. It has meant more driving for me over the course of 2 days than in the last 6 months.

In todays issue we focus on the architecture of your SaaS. Should it be simple with less features, using something like Heroku - or more complex, featuring every AWS service under the sun? I even decided to make a video on the topic linked below.

New for this issue, I've decided to include a couple of interesting discounted kindle links of books I've seen. I can't guarantee I'll do this every issue, but thought these were good enough to be worth mentioning. These are affiliate links, so I'll get a small commission if you decide to buy through them at no extra cost to you.

As always, if you have any comments or content suggestions for future issues, please feel free to reply to this email and let me know.

Until next time, keep on shipping!

Ian

Stories

Evaluating Modest SaaS Business Ideas

A list of sensible questions that Dan Hulton uses to evaluate SaaS business ideas.

5 years of Gruntwork

You're probably very familiar with GruntWork if you've ever used Terraform modules. How Yevgeniy Brikman founded and built it up over the last 5 years is an interesting read.

The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup

This article got a lot of attention on Hacker news recently due to how complex the architecture seemingly is. It details how Anthony Simon is building a low-stress, one-person company (PanelBear) that he runs from his flat.

Code

burnash/gspread: Google Sheets Python API

A really simple interface for working with the Google Sheets API from Python. I'm always thinking of ideas to make with Google sheets so this seems like a really good fit for me.

SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases

I always think about whether a full blown postgres database is the correct approach to problems these days. In most cases I think that small companies can probably get away with something simpler - this article details some reasons why.

typpo/quickchart: Chart image and QR code web API

Charts are one of those assets that work really well in serverless environments. This chart image API looks really useful if you have cause to generate them quickly.

New Video

I talk about what bootstrapped businesses might want to consider before deciding on their approach to infrastructure.

Bargain Kindle Books

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E Gerber - £1.99 on Kindle

Own your Weird: An Oddly Effective Way for Finding Happiness in Work, Life, and Love by Jason Zook (aka the "I Wear Your Shirt" guy) - £1.99 on Kindle

My Favourite Tweet

If you thought you needed to use complex frameworks to build your products, you may want to think again. Peter Levels gave some insight behind his remoteok.io site this week. This became something of a meme between bootstrappers who were then tweeting their own fake infrastructure descriptions of services.