From Idea to the First Review – the Story of My First SAAS

Hello everyone, my name is Álex and I’m a young software developer who recently launched his first SaaS. I started coding before I was 15, and since then I’ve been fascinated by the web and entrepreneurship. I set out to learn programming so that one day I could make a living from what I love. And here I am—there’s still a long road ahead, but I’m ready to face it with the same drive I had when I started.

Since the beginning of this year I’d been looking for ideas to build a SaaS using different methods, but nothing worked. Until one day I came across it in the simplest way possible: I had a Spotify family plan with my friends that we paid monthly, and I always noticed someone forgot to pay (even the person managing the shared payment). Add to that other subscriptions and even trial periods, which made me think it would be a great idea to create an app for this problem. That’s how SubBuddy (subbuddy.io) was born.

I did some market research and saw there was considerable room for improvement, since the main solutions focused only on working as a planner, no reminders or automations to make the user experience easier. Here’s how the development phase went:

First month of development: Together with a friend, we started building the app using AI, which didn’t turn out so well, as it produced very messy code and created complex solutions to simple problems. So the first lesson was to stop seeing the AI agent as a magician and work with it as if it were a very fast junior dev.

Second month of development: Development was moving quickly and it was starting to look great; however, the more features we built, the more we thought of—something we initially saw as a good thing. Nothing could be further from the truth: building increasingly complex features made development drag on too much. So we decided to go back to basics and launch a simpler version so we could improve the app thanks to user feedback, implementing features users actually need.

On launch day I got a couple of customers, and one of them left a review praising the product and suggesting a couple of changes that would make it more complete. Honestly, it’s something I’m very proud of—especially given that this is my first adventure in the startup world. Now it’s about keeping at the app and bringing in new customers at the pace I’ve started. I’m sure there’s a great story ahead from here on out!!