Recap

We want to create a docker hosting solution for freelancers and web development agencies.

In the last episode I mentioned that, against all recommendations to validate our idea first, we dove straight into building a prototype.

Now, I want to introduce you to this prototype and give some background info about the build process.

The series

We are two passionate developers from Germany on a journey to building our own profitable SaaS startup from scratch. In this series I will share everything we learn along the way, from coming up with the idea, coding a prototype, getting our first users and scaling to infinity. We are starting from absolutely nothing but our coding skills. We will not rely on any external funding. We are Lukas Mauser and Jonas Scholz and this is Zero to Startup.

3 Min Walkthrough

Some facts about building the first prototype

How long did it take to build?

We did not track total build time. We started building in April already, not full time though.

The average time working on Sliplane was around 20-30 hours per week per person including all marketing activities as well.

We are both still working on other projects as our day job to bring in money, but we try to gradually reduce the workload there.

Getting to a usable version of our product took us approx. 2 months but we kept iterating on the product since then.

How did we launch?

One of the first things we did is buy a domain and publish a landing page with only the hero section on it. That way we were live within an hour and did not drag out our “launch”.

Instead of a big launch, we did and continue to do announcements of important milestones. And between them we just keep adding new features and post a product update along with some learnings here and there.

What’s the core feature set right now?

Deploy repositories from GitHub on every new commit to the repository. In the background we provision servers, setup firewalls and https, blue-green build and run the container and perform regular health checks and send email notifications if it is down.

Additionally, you can connect a custom domain, manage environment variables and check application logs through our platform.

What tech stack did we use?

Frontend is build with Nuxt.js, backend is written in Go. On provisioned servers we use Caddy as a Webserver as it comes with SSL out of the box. We use Stripe for billing, but apart from that, we don’t really use a ton of other third party services. The main factor for choosing the stack was our experience with it and how fast we could build a prototype.

Summary

Sliplane allows you to easily deploy your docker containers for a cheap price. We've been building this first prototype for almost half a year now. Next episode, I will explain to you, how we managed to develop and release this prototype while still working a full time day job.

ℹ️ Additional notes

Feel free to comment or get in touch with us to talk about any topics you are interested in or questions you have about the project in general.

Check out the product on https://sliplane.io.

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