Building Microstart in Public: Month One
Revenue, mistakes, and lessons from the first 30 days of building a micro-SaaS marketplace. Full transparency on what worked and what didn't.
We're building Microstart in public. That means sharing real numbers, real mistakes, and real lessons — not the curated highlight reel. Here's month one.
The idea for Microstart came from a personal frustration. As developers, we'd built several micro-SaaS products and noticed the same pattern: 80% of the code was identical across projects. Auth, billing, dashboards, settings, email — it's all boilerplate. What if we could sell that 80% and let buyers focus on the unique 20%?
Week one was all architecture. We chose a monorepo (Turborepo) with a PayloadCMS backend and a Next.js storefront. This gave us a content management system for products, built-in admin UI, and a fast customer-facing site — all in one repo.
Week two, we hit our first real problem: pricing. We tested three models — subscription access, per-product pricing, and bundles. After talking to 15 potential customers, per-product pricing won decisively. People wanted to buy exactly what they needed, not pay monthly for access to things they'd never use.
Week three was product development. We packaged our first three micro-SaaS codebases: a waitlist tool, a feedback widget, and a simple CRM. Each took about two days to clean up, document, and prepare for sale.
Week four was launch prep. We set up Stripe, wrote the landing page, and posted in a few indie hacker communities. No paid ads, no influencer outreach — just honest posts about what we built and why.
Month one results: 4 sales totaling $1,196 in revenue. Not life-changing, but validating. More importantly, the feedback from buyers shaped our roadmap for month two. The number one request? Setup services — people wanted help deploying and customizing the code they bought.