How Solo Founders Can Avoid Development Stress With MakerKit

Ever feel like launching a SaaS is like a solo climb up Everest? It is. Here’s why.

You're a solo founder.

You have an idea. Maybe you’ve tested it on the market and gotten feedback.

You have a picture of what the app might look like. Great!

But now you have to build something, and that can be rough.

Technical skills? Probably not your forte.

Money? It's tight. Hiring a team is a distant dream.

Outsourcing? Expensive in time and money. You inevitably need a reliable developer that can pump out code quickly and help you get out of your own way.

Time management. Marketing. Sales. You’re doing it all. It’s overwhelming.

You’ve done some outreach during the day. At night, you’re trying to stitch together five GitHub repos. You’ve got code from a dozen places and cooked up a copy-pasta that won’t work.

What if you could save time, money, and stress on development with a ready-to-develop codebase for a few hundred dollars?

Enter MakerKit.

Now this boilerplate won’t just save you time, money, and stress; it’ll do it in style.

I mean, look at this demo.

You get a beautiful landing page that you can just add your logo to, change a few colors, and write some copy to match your brand.

After logging in, you get an onboarding screen. This is really useful if you’re making a B2B SaaS and you need to distinguish between different companies using your product. I bet you weren’t even thinking about setting that up!

Now you’re done onboarding and see a pretty layout with a sidebar that you can use for various pages in your application. There are user profiles and more, but I’ll do a deeper dive into MakerKit’s features another time.

Now you’re thinking, “This looks pretty, but what do I do with it?”

Here are some options:

1. If you’ve got some development experience, you can tinker around and use their components to put together a basic version of your app, even an MVP.

2. If you’ve got no development experience, you can hire a developer who is familiar with Next.js, Supabase and Tailwind CSS to build out features for you.

Another big plus is that you don’t have to be a designer or product person and wonder, “How would I show my data in this app?”

You can look at their components and start thinking along the lines of, “I could just have it show up in their modal” or “They have this really nice table I can use.” Keep it simple.

You don’t have to find an authentication library, read its documentation, and attempt to set up users.

You don’t have to read through Stripe’s documentation and copy-paste snippets to set up payments yourself.

You don’t have to code up a blog or a fancy landing page.

You don’t have to wonder what all this “npm” stuff means and why you’re getting weird errors while installing different pieces of the puzzle.

MakerKit has these basics covered. You can focus on the bigger picture.

Now, as much as I sound like an absolute shill for MakerKit, I’m not their developer. That would be Giancarlo Buomprisco, who has built an absolute Ferrari of a boilerplate.

He’s really active on Discord and has an organized system for support tickets and feature requests as well. Most importantly, he’s always updating the kit and does so full-time.

If you’re not much of a developer and want to learn, he even has a short course on Next.js, which will guide you through building a simple AI SaaS app.

Speaking of AI, he even has a few plugins, such as an AI Chatbot that you can install quickly and integrate anywhere in your application.

If you’re on the fence, check out some of the projects in the wild that use MakerKit. One I personally like that is a good example of the approach of tweaking logos, colors, and copy that I talked about above is ChefGPT.

You can get access to all their kit versions for $299. Check out the MakerKit website for more details and pricing.

In future posts, I’ll dive into some of the technical benefits of MakerKit for developers and ways to really speed up development with it.