How I got to building a small SaaS as a 15 year old
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Yes, you heard me right: I’m 15 years old and I’m currently building a small SaaS.
I started programming about four years ago using HTML, CSS and PHP. I got into programming because of my dad. Later I started learning JavaScript as well. I absolutly love programming, because you can do almost anything you can imagine. At first I wasn’t very good at it, and I’m still not very good at CSS (btw: Tailwind helped me a lot!), but I just kept on going.
Later I started to learn a CMS called Processwire. It uses PHP and is really easy to learn. But I realised it wasn’t what I wanted to do.
During Covid I started learning Swift and SwiftUI to develop apps in the Apple ecosystem and I’m still doing that today. I think it’s great that you just tell iOS what your app does and it decides what looks the best for that action. It is much easier than CSS and HTML. But eventually I returned to web development, though I can’t remember why. I was still doing a lot of stuff with SwiftUI and one day my dad asked me if I wanted to build a small time tracking tool. Of course I said yes and started working on it (I didn’t really finish it but that’s not important). I needed a backend to persist data across multiple devices, so I first chose Processwire with a package to build a Rest API. I know this wasn’t Processwire’s intended use, but it just was what I was most familiar with. I then decided to learn Laravel to build a web frontend for this program, but I didn’t have the passion to learn it at the time.
A few months later I needed to create a program to search through a songbook and compare it with others. As I still wanted to learn Laravel, I chose it for this project. During the development of the website I learned a lot about Laravel, Blade and Eloquent.
About five months later my fathter came to me with a project idea: A programme for churches to manage recorded sermons. I quickly decided I wanted to use Laravel again but this time with a JavaScript framework. I was looking at Svelte at the time, so I chose to use Inertia with it. This was also the first time I used Docker seriously and I don’t want to develop applications like this again without it.
I started with a lot of passion, but had many moments where I almost gave up. Once I was so desperate that I thought about rewriting the whole frontend. That sounds pretty stupid now, but at the time it made sense. Apart from that the development itself was quite fun and I don’t want to use anything other than Svelte in the fronteend again.
However, my biggest problem was staying focused and not watching YouTube all day. So I looked at project management tools and decided to use GitHub Projects because it’s tightly integrated with the rest of GitHub, like issues and PRs. I created tasks for each feature/change and even added a priority value. The next step was to create a roadmap which also helped a lot because I set deadlines even though I didn’t always meet them.
At the time of writing this almost all major features are implemented so know it’s time for the remaining 10%… yay
I even got to work a few weeks and earned my first salary as a programmer. I used the money to buy a new Computer. Oh, and I switched from VSCode to Neovim and I don’t regret it! Next year I’m going to start an apprenticeship as a programmer
In conclusion this project has been a really good idea so far and I’ve learnt a lot about some programming concepts (and will learn about testing). I wouldn’t recommend this as one of your first projects but, the satisfaction of almost finishing something like this is already reason enough to create a small SaaS.
