My Nimble SaaS Stack

This SaaS stack that has worked out great for me so far. When I was building, I knew I wanted these things:

So if that sounds like what you’re after, read on.

While there are loads more things I use, these are the main 4 that I almost always use for every SaaS project. I’ll get more into the optional stuff below.

I opted to split the frontend between a few subdomains. It changes depending on the needs of the SaaS, but the typically SaaS frontends might look something like this:

Splitting your site up into smaller subdomains is especially useful for small startups as you can pivot very easily. If your blog needs to change, you don’t also have to change your documentation, ecommerce, and landing pages. You just change your blogging platform without any side effects to the rest of your stack. Agility is very important for startups. You can, and should, be adjusting things frequently based on user feedback.

Some people argue this causes a disjointed experience between parts of the stack. But I would counter that the UI should be different for when catering to the user at different parts of their journey. For example, your paying customers who are doing work in your dashboard probably don’t need to see your CTA in the nav since they’re already paying. In some cases, overloading users with paths that aren’t for them can actually decrease conversion rates. Keep your path to conversion simple, clear, and tailor it to meet the needs of where your customer is in that exact moment.

I don’t always use these, but they can be useful in some situations:

Another major benefit is the quick development time. Development is pretty fast since the stack is mostly low-code. Of course, it can vary wildly depending on what you’re trying to build. But in general, I just have to build/copy a Webflow site from some templates, add the schema I need to Sanity, and add whatever APIs, forms, and tables I need to Next.js so the user can access & manipulate their data. I never have to worry about building out an admin dashboard by hand, setting up authentication, or building a marketing website from scratch based on a mock-up. I can usually have some sort of MVP up and running in a few weeks or even days.

Of course, this is just the stack that’s working for me. You should use your own judgment, skills, and experience when determining what is right for you. If you are building on behalf of a client, you should base your choices off of the skills and needs of the client.

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