Yes, and classic ASP, WCF, ASP.NET 2.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, etc…
It’s “fun” in the sense of piecing together history from subtle clues such as file owners, files on desktops of other admins’ profiles, etc…
I feel like this is what it must be like to open a pharaoh’s tomb. You get to step into someone else’s life from long ago, walk in their shoes for a bit, see the world through their eyes.
“What horrors did you witness brother sysadmin that made you abandon this place with uneaten takeaway lunch still on your desk next to the desiccated powder that once was a half drunk Red Bull?”
https://achromatic.dev - Next.js SaaS starter kit that is not crap. That's it in a nutshell haha
It become the #3 selling one (after Shipfast and Makerkit) in under 3 month.
I know the website itself is not the most descriptive, but I do prio feature and customer requests over website/marketing. Soon the starter kit will also have multi-organization support :)
2025 is gonna be interesting since I plan to add multiple boilerplates to the same package deal. Realized I'm not a business that needs to be greedy and grow, just helping others is enough.
Riches in the niches. Analyse some niches, then niche even more down. TAM between $5-50 billion in the US is a good indicator that there is no real competition (market is too small for the big guys).
After 7 years as the market leader you can expect
- $50 billion TAM => $100 million ARR
- $10 billion TAM => $20 million ARR
Usually you start with a small TAM so you can enter the market with some B2B sales. B2B sales are easier because you have a verify specific ideal customer profile (ICP). Later you can decide to expand your TAM so you can become interesting for VC funding. This is ideal for verticals like salons, restaurants, etc. and actually where the growth is at the moment.
Another approach is to just do something everyone needs but is annoying to handle yourself like AWS SES wrapper (Loops, Resend, ...) or Auth+Organizations (Clerk, Stack-Auth, ...). This is ideal if you target tech startups.
Another approach is to to combine two or more products into one. Requires a lot of code. This is super risky, but can be a gold mine if you target sales, marketing, HR, etc.
The last "approach" is special software for enterprise, but you need to work there to know what is needed. It is very hard to come up with an idea for special software. I know one startup who did this and the founder was writing his doctorate about a very niche enterprise topic.
PS: If you need a SaaS boilerplate, grab mine https://achromatic.dev (Next.js) to skip the first 2-3 months of your journey.
Choice had a big impact, because I don't have to context switch, only have to implement validation once, can re-use a lot of the logic between frontend and backend and the UI part also looks neat. Furthermore with React server components and server actions a lot of the boilerplate code for an internal API is just.. gone. Super easy.
Now with Next.js 15 RC 2 and stable coming out next Friday, I'm in a very good position. Using the app router with Next.js 13 or Next.js 14 was like having warts. But now with Next.js 15 caching is good again and the speed improvements for dev mode were good enough to not bother me anymore.
