SaaS: Is there an out-of-the-box UI I can use as a starting point?
I've seen many posts about ready-made landing page templates for MVP email capture and the like, but I wondered if there's something out there that will give me a basic UI for my SaSS? Like most developers, design isn't my strong suit but I can tweak an existing set up.
Thanks
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Surprised to see @andrewculver's https://bullettrain.co missing from the list! It's a full stack of UI templates, optimized pricing/subscription pages, account management, security/permissions, and a ton more stuff out of the box that'll save time beyond just the initial UI stuff.
Thanks for the mention, @alexhillman! 🙏
@JonH: So Bullet Train does a lot more than what you've asked for in your question, but I think it's still worth taking a look at, mostly because I think it represents the logical conclusion one would end up at when you keep asking the same question you've asked, but about all the aspects of launching a SaaS that are the same from product to product. UI is one of those things, but also so many critical features are basically the same from project to project as well, so Bullet Train provides a reference implementation for as many of those as we can as well. In addition to the things Alex already mentioned and the things already mentioned our our homepage, we're just continuing to go up the stack and provide higher and higher level features. One example I'm really excited about is the upcoming conversation threads feature, complete with notification emails and centralized inbox. (I posted a preview of these at https://twitter.com/andrewculver/status/1148981196237524993 .)
Anyway, I'd be more than happy to give you a tour of the product and codebase if you think it might be a good fit for your next SaaS product. (You can schedule a call at https://calendly.com/bullettrain/introductions .) Either way, best of luck! 💪
You forgot to mention their pricing, haha :)
Their pricing is a steal.
FWIW - I'm a paying Bullet Train customer and estimated the "equivalent cost" of a BT license at around 200+ hours of my own work. Put another way, I was able to go from an idea to a working SAAS around a month to 6 weeks faster than I would have been able to otherwise. You can quibble at the numbers around the edges (like maybe it only saved me 160 hours of work and not 200) but even if you consider yourself to be twice as productive a developer as I am it's hard to do the buy it vs build it yourself and not come to the conclusion that BT is a massive, ROI positive productivity multiplier.
I just buy a template through ThemeForest or such. Then use a boilerplate in the language of your choice to wire it up. I plan on using https://aspnetboilerplate.com/ to do my .net core backend with angular in the front.
I'm not a great fan of TF's licensing, seems to go to 50x or 10x if wanting to make revenue from a SaaS. Seems ambiguous so I avoid them or similar.
What do you use otherwise? I have always had a deep hatred for TF for no reason at all, but as such try to avoid them as well
Either freebies or create from framework. Sometimes you come across a theme for sale without the baggage extended license crap.
Yep — I usually dig through freebies, and I think the reason I hate TF is because they always have sponsored listings on those "50 free templates" articles and I accidentally click on them to only greet my mortal enemy.
Thanks. For some reason I didn't think of that
You can try our free boilerplate https://github.com/CaravelKit/saas-base
It already has several pages included (login, register, payment pages, user profile, dashboard).
You can use amazing design systems / CSS frameworks such as:
If what you are looking for is actual design assets/files. Feel free to look at:
Thanks jasdeep, I'll look through all these links this evening
Hey @JonH take a look at my Graindashboard UI Kit - https://graindashboard.com/
It's built on Bootstrap 4 and comes with HTML templates along with Laravel-ready views.
Another option - you may use something like TailwindCSS and build your own unique UI.
Thanks Max, checking this out now.
Hey @JonH. If you can provide your product through an API then https://floom.app could be a great fit. You don't have to deal with the UI at all (or user management or customer billing)
Love this idea, and really nice homepage.
The "TAKING THE HEADACHE OUT OF SAAS" thing when you scroll is great too, not seen that before. It's not for me on this occasion but the best of luck
This is an interesting concept — because while you're limited to their own customer-base, it's also a great potential to diversify sales channels outside of just your own brand. So you potentially could build a single API to service both these customers, as well as customers through your own UI. Thanks for sharing!
That's exactly the idea behind it! I'm actually the founder (sorry if that wasn't clear). We're currently looking to hand pick about two dozen products to put on the market before we really start driving traffic. Feel free to email me at [email protected] or check out our seller docs if you're interested in how it works: https://docs.floom.app/sellers/
I'm not sure, which services / APIs users can call with your service?
All of the currently available products are here: https://market.floom.app
Some were built in-house and others are available through integration with existing SaaS companies APIs
Hi,
I see now.
What I still don't understand is how you provide a frontend part. Or do you provide both - frontend and backend? Or users need to code a frontend part on their own?
Thanks!
No need to code a front end! As a seller you can create a "Input Form" for each order which includes text inputs, files, options selects, colors, etc. For a lot of SaaS products this is actually sufficient, but not for everyone. We'll be rolling out a feature so that you can add your own web component but that will be down the road.
Thanks for your response!
I'm sorry but it's still not clear. For example, this case https://market.floom.app/service/saas-report
The report is done in frontend. How is doing it? The provider of API or a developer?
That's a bit of an interesting one. In this case, the "product" would is a web page (or pdf) of SaaS analytics. So the seller needs to develop this web page to actually provide the service. In most cases, like this: https://market.floom.app/service/tweet-to-video-with-watermark, the seller needs to do no front-end coding. Just build the API which turns a tweet into a video
Thanks, it's clear now.
Most of the front end frameworks have material based component libraries, e.g. angular material, vuetify etc.
I would honestly just buy a nice template or get something done on fiverr. I saved a lot of time like that !
Thanks, this might be the way to go.
Still a big fan of Bootstrap. Out of the box it's sufficient for prototyping. Can take it to the next level with existing themes (free and premium) and there's a whole ecosystem of designers out there familiar with it's principles.
Yes, definitely leaning this way. Cheers for the reply
Jumpstart Pro: Here's a video of Building a SaaS Content Product in 8 minutes with it.
Thanks. Checking this out now
That looks great ! Have you used it or made it ? Would love to find the same thing fro nodejs
No, it's not mine! It's from @excid3. I was inspired by his interview here on IH when I realized he was doing the same with his screencasting business I was but further along. I've watched quite a few of his videos and I've also encountered strangers who were happily using his hatchbox.io service.
I'd bet a lot you won't find anything equivalent in Node (though you will find products claiming to be). Rails is already a highly productive MVC framework with a unified ecosystem while Node is lower level and fragmented. There's no built-in router DSL or database migrations or ORM, etc... even with the best template in the world, you're not going to move as fast with Node.
If you're a die-hard JavaScripter, I'd say your best bet is probably learning something like Gatsby and then using an API as a service like Prismic.
I wonder which interview it is. Tried to find but didn't :(
It's here: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/gorails-screencasts-for-ruby-on-rails-developers-15-000-mo-675c2d6749
It's under @channingallen since he was the one who posted interviews then.
Thanks!
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Yes it uses Node, but I'd be shocked to see a someone equally productive with it.
Depending on your business, that may be fine and you may need things that Rails isn't as well suited for.
Thanks for all your replies people. Pretty much decided to go for Laravel Spark: https://spark.laravel.com. It means I have to learn Laravel (I already use vanilla PHP now) so just hoping the learning curve isn't too much. Thanks again.
I purchased this and don't regret a penny: https://1.envato.market/zDGL6
I'm one of the many people also working to try and solve this problem (with https://www.saaspegasus.com/) for my favorite stack of Python/Django.
If you're interested in giving it a shot, don't hesitate to reach out and I'm happy to chat more!
I recommend Tachyons: https://tachyons.io/
I use it on my landing page.