The Story Behind StoryTok: Launching My First SaaS
If you've been scrolling through TikTok lately, you might have noticed a new trend taking over your feed: "reddit stories". These videos, which feature narrated stories from Reddit posts, have become incredibly popular on the platform. As a developer, I saw an opportunity to automate the process of creating these videos and decided to build a tool to do just that.
From Proof of Concept to Product
I started by creating a proof of concept and experimenting with it myself. I spent a few weeks uploading TikToks that I made using the tool, and then adjusted it based on what I thought could be improved. Over time, I was able to make the tool more efficient and the videos looked better as well.
Since I already had the system for rendering videos, I decided to turn it into a SaaS so that other people could use it too. Using a tech stack that I'm very familiar with (Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase), I was able to create an MVP in just a weekend.
Launching and Learning
I launched the project around 2 months ago, albeit a bit quietly since I only posted about it in a few places. Despite getting a few thousand people on the site, there were only 2 conversions. One of those conversions actually sent some emails to our support email, which provided valuable feedback on how to improve the product.
I shared the project with some friends, and a few of them (shoutouts Mark and Rohan!) were interested in it. We decided to work together as a team to improve the tool and add some features that we thought were important for this second launch, specifically a way for users to create videos without having to pay (some type of free trial).
Building a Community
To encourage more people to try out the app and provide direct feedback, we decided to add a Discord server to our project. Users can join our Discord in exchange for some free credits on our site. This way, we can build a community of engaged users who can help shape the future of the product while adding in some type of free trial.
Reflecting on the Journey
Although I've made a bunch of web projects before, this is my first real product where people can actually pay me for software that I wrote. It's been an exciting experience, and I'm looking forward to seeing where StoryTok goes in the future. Regardless of the outcome, I've learned a lot and had a lot of fun along the way.