From Fog to Clarity: 4 Months as a Solo SaaS Founder

I’ve always wanted more freedom—time, money, and people who get where I’m coming from. That’s what pushed me to go solo, but I’d be lying if I said I knew what I was getting into.

This wasn’t my first shot. My last project, a financial app, ended when my cofounder and I split over the direction. Looking back, I threw everything I knew at it: Spring Boot backend, Next.js frontend, Elasticsearch, Postgres, Redis, all Dockerized. At the time, I thought that was what “real” startups did. But honestly? I spent more time configuring services than shipping anything useful. When it all fell apart, I realized I was building complexity, not momentum.

Lesson #1: Simple wins. This time, I picked the T3 stack. One repo, one server, straight to Vercel—suddenly, I was actually building features instead of fighting with infrastructure.
It was the first time I realized: shipping fast feels better than being clever.

Payments were next. Stripe was out for new Indian businesses, so I had to untangle Razorpay and jump through compliance hoops just to get live keys.
For a few days, I honestly wondered if all this “real business” stuff was worth it. Suddenly, code felt like the easy part.

When I finally launched, I hit the next wall: users.
My instinct was to go full hustle—scrape emails, fire off cold messages, chase leads on LinkedIn. It felt like “doing sales” for the sake of it. Around then, I read Magnetic Marketing by Dan Kennedy, and it hit me—maybe attracting people by sharing value was smarter than just chasing.
It felt uncomfortable at first, putting myself out there. But getting a reply on a blog post or a Twitter thread started to feel as good as deploying new code.

The biggest surprise? How much my definition of “productive” had to change. For years, shipping code was my metric. But after a few weeks of heads-down building with zero users, I realized none of it mattered if nobody cared.
That’s when I started counting a week as productive if I shipped content that someone actually read or responded to. It’s a weird shift, and honestly, I’m still getting used to it.

What I wish I’d known starting out:

• You’re not lazy for keeping your stack simple. The fastest way forward is often the least glamorous.
• Business “paperwork” and payments always take longer than you expect. Don’t fight it, just factor it in.
• You’re going to feel like an imposter when you start writing or marketing. Do it anyway—the feedback matters more than your comfort zone.
• Progress isn’t lines of code—it’s evidence that someone, somewhere, cares about what you built.

I’m only four months in, and I still don’t have all the answers. But for the first time, the path actually feels real. The fog is clearing a little. If you’re somewhere in the middle of the uncertainty, you’re not alone.

If you’re on a similar journey, have thoughts about building solo, or just want to swap stories, feel free to reply or DM me. Always happy to connect with others figuring it out as they go.