The "ai Saas Dream" Is A Lie

You ever see some post like "How I made 10K per month with new AI SaaS" and think, "wow, I should make one". Well, I don't blame you, I'd say this is the ultimate developer dream. To build something that solely yours and it generates enough money to let you quit your job. To be on some beach, eating lobster while your AI SaaS makes you passive income.

But, you've been lied to. This dream, isn't as easy as people make it out to be.

If you've been on X (formerly Twitter) in the recent years, you'll notice that a lot of developers have moved to creating their own SaaS project. For some, they've succeeded but I'd say for the large majority of devs, most project never even reach 100 users.

Lately, we've seen solutions like V0, Lovable, Bolt, Cursor etc that let's you vibe code whole projects. You type "Build me an app that handles real-time voice transcription" and magically, it appears in your browser. And your mind explodes with a billion ideas all of which could make you a trillionaire.

Sure, these new AI platforms automate the coding, but not the architecture, security, marketing etc. So anyway, let's actually talk about the lie. We're going to use my personal project for this.

My Own SaaS

Recently, I thought I should create my own SaaS. I noticed that I really enjoyed journaling — it's my form of therapy, a place for all my thoughts and ideas, a place for me to think through everything.

Now I used Daybook as my main journal, but as dev, I found the UI super frustrating, I hated the lack of features, I hated how much was behind a paywall. Their mobile app has a rich-text bar that pops up while typing, out of 12 actions, 10 of them require you to pay for the pro tier. That's an unreasonable limitation.

Check out https://jadebook.app/ for the chance to receive a chocolate chip cookie sometime in the next 20 years (not legally binding btw)

Okay, so I have an idea: let's build a journal platform. I thought it was going to be easy, I mean look all these people on X who apparently started earning 10k per month after building a SaaS in 2 weeks.

But here comes the first problem: You only see the ones that succeeded.

If making 10K per month was as easy as 2 weeks of work, no one would want to work anymore. So, it took me a literally month just to make sure the underlying infrastructure would work correctly and scale. For example, testing the limitations of all the rich-text editors and how they work. That's not even minimally viable.

Actually Building

Here's the next problem, when you build something for yourself, you understand all the limitations, and everything is tailored to your use case. But when you build for the public, now you have a lot to deal with:

• A huge focus on fixing bugs and handling edge cases
  Having correct security measures like not accessing the db on the client

• Making sure you have protection from attacks and malicious actions through rate-limiting, permission checks, etc.

• Making sure all content is encrypted

• Making sure the app is responsive, and the UI can be used by anyone (not just you)

If you can't tell, this is actually a lot. For Jadebook, I had to spend 3 weeks just learning everything about encryption like "how on earth does one add searching to encrypted content?" (The answer was semantic search btw).

That's something that isn't part of the vibe-coding experience which means that often, these newer SaaS end up with a lot of cracks in their armour.

The Marketing Blindspot

If there is literally nothing unique about your business, you'll fail. Now, this competitive advantage can be anything, maybe your marketing is way better than your competitors, maybe you're using an infrastructure that scales better and cheaper, maybe your UI is simply far superior.

But there are 2 main components: the product and the marketing.

Product

The product is your SaaS, it's your website, your service etc. Now developers are insanely good for creating products. We can produce MVPs like it's nothing — The very first version of Jadebook was made in a single month with basic auth, and most of the core functionality.

But engineers aren't normal people. Because of the way we work, we subconsciously fear risk and creativity.

Let's say you're in charge of building a bridge; A single mistake could cost millions of damage. Or you're working at a start up, a single mess up could make or break your idea. For Jadebook, I built the beta and gave it to all my friends. Can you guess what their questions were? What does this do?, How do I create a tag?, Where are the AI features?

While building the product, I forgot to add any sort of onboarding, I had basically nothing descriptive, and they had no clue as to how things worked. Even without the marketing being the problem, my product failed to be usable for actual normal people.

Dev Work

Even the way we devs work becomes a barrier, all of our projects need structure, everything needs to be labelled, we work in an extremely controlled environment. Everything we do has documentation and everything flows together.

The problem with this is over time, you start lacking the ability to be creative or do anything that lacks structure. There's a reason why we have UI Designers and Developers as separate roles. Creativity requires you to get out of structure, to take risks, be bold, do things that make no functional sense simply to improve the design.

Marketing

But like I mentioned, business requires 2 things: product and marketing. Most devs can make the product but if no one knows about it then you'll never get any users. And what does marketing require? Making content, posting on social media, branding, understanding a bit of psychology, constant iterations and the best of all, absolutely no clue what will work and what won't.

It takes ages to get good at marketing, and you'll post a bunch of stuff that won't work or it'll get no view, maybe it'll even look horrible. It's going to be so painful to having to sit down and create something with no boundaries or structure.

This is a tough spot to be in. On one hand, you're a genius but your inability to convert that genius into actually money is frustrating as hell.

The Future of SaaS

Recently, due to the advancements of AI, a lot of devs are just creating personal SaaS projects. What's the point of paying 8 bucks a month for a todo list? Just have AI make you one with all the features you want, throw it on Vercel and that's it. You just saved 8 bucks per month and 96 bucks a year.

But if you're planning on making money using SaaS, you need to understand that there's a reason so many fail. A lot of people romanticise the idea of having a business, as if you can go from nothing to 10K a month and somehow that's realistic.

It's taken 8 months to build Jadebook into a platform that's finally somewhat ready for users. Now, I did a lot of it without any AI tools but even if I did, I realised that AI wasn't even that useful. The main pain points were architecting the whole thing, dealing with edge cases, understanding marketing etc.

Don't lose hope

AI can't do everything for you. Don't lie to yourself and believe that you'll spend 2 weeks on some website and then instantly get rich over night. It takes a lot of effort and the thing is, almost anyone can win with enough consistency. If I had given up with the first iteration, Jadebook would have no value. But over time, it kept improving and eventually it became something genuinely useful.

If my journey resonates with you, or you're curious to see the fruit of these lessons, I invite you to explore https://jadebook.app/

But these were just some of my experiences. Thanks, for reading and hopefully you gained something from this :)