Intermediate · 10 steps
Ship your first SaaS
This path takes you from "I can build screens" to "I have a SaaS people can sign up for and pay me." You'll lock in a stack, stand up the data and auth layer, wire Stripe billing and transactional email, then harden and ship with secrets, a pre-launch pass, deploy, error tracking, and analytics. Follow it in order and each step assumes the previous one is done.
- 1Guide
Choose your stack in 2026
Decide your stack before writing a line — every later step assumes you've committed to one, and rework here is expensive.
- 2Recipe
Set up a database
Your data layer is the foundation everything else (users, subscriptions, content) writes to, so it comes first.
- 3Recipe
Add authentication
A SaaS needs accounts; auth gives you the user identity that billing and per-tenant data hang off of.
- 4Recipe
Manage env vars & secrets
Before you start pasting Stripe and email API keys around, learn to handle them so nothing leaks into git.
- 5Recipe
Accept payments
This is the 'S' in SaaS — wire Stripe subscriptions to the users you just created.
- 6Recipe
Send transactional email
Payments and auth both need email: receipts, verification, password resets — set up Resend once and reuse it.
- 7Guide
The pre-launch checklist
A deliberate pass to catch the security, billing, and config gaps that bite right after launch.
- 8Recipe
Deploy your app
Now ship it — take everything above from localhost to a real production URL.
- 9Recipe
Catch errors in production
The moment real users hit it, you need to see failures instead of hearing about them in support emails.
- 10Recipe
Add analytics
Close the loop: measure signups, conversion, and churn so you know what to fix next.