Fast Track SaaS Development with ShipFast

Koen Verburg
3 min readMay 3, 2024

From 0 to First Customer In Hours

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

When it comes to launching a successful SaaS (Software as a Service) product, time is often of the essence. The faster you can bring your product to market, the sooner you can start realizing your vision and reaching potential customers.

ShipFast, a boilerplate that streamlines the development process for SaaS products, offers numerous time-saving benefits that can help you achieve your goals more efficiently.

In this blog post, I will explore the key advantages of using ShipFast and how it can accelerate your journey towards creating a thriving SaaS product.

Email

Done! It includes sending transactional emails. DNS setup so that email will not enter the spam folder. Webhooks to receive and forward emails.
This is all powered by mailgun.

Time Saved: 3 hours

Payment

Setting up payments can be hard, but not with ShipFast, it covers checkout sessions and handles webhooks to update the user's accounts, these updates can be subscriptions, one-time payments, etc.

Included in ShipFast is also a guide to setting up your account on Stripe and reducing chargebacks as well.

Time Saved: 5 hours

Login

User login systems are very complex, I have built them in the past, however it can be made easy. By leveraging Magic links, log in with Google and save this to either MongoDB or Supabase.

And all these API calls are protected and private.

Time Saved: 4 hours

Database

A database can be tough to set up correctly with schemas and such. Luckily, ShipFast comes with two options, MongoDB or Supabase.

Time Saved: 2 hours

SEO

Forget Login systems, payment, and mail. SEO is really important, but also very hard to get right. Within the ShipFast boilerplate, you will have

  • A blog structure
  • Meta tags for ranking on Google
  • Open Graph for Social Media
  • Automated sitemap generation (this will save you so much time when you set this up for any site at the start of the project)
  • UI components that are optimized for SEO

Time Saved: 8 hours

Style

All the styling is done with Tailwind which is very easy to work with, it has support for light and dark modes, Which is included in the boilerplate.
It also comes with 20+ themes with DaisyUI and a lot of components and section variants.

Time Saved: 8 hours

There is more

The ShipFast Boilerplate also includes tips for copywriting, and a discord community to stay accountable. Prompts to generate terms, Privacy Policy, and more for ChatGPT. It even collects emails for a waitlist while you're still writing your product.

In summary, utilizing the ShipFast Boilerplate can save you 30 hours of setting up basic SaaS features. This will benefit you when creating a SaaS product efficiently, and faster, and thus you can focus on just writing the product you want to create.

What will you create? I’m already brainstorming some ideas, let me know in the comments!

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Koen Verburg

Software Engineer based in Rotterdam — Photographer, Art Enthusiast, Dreamer, and thinker.