How to get started building

These are the steps I take to start a new product. I would say project, but I intend for my projects to make money.

Most of these are one time setups. Thinking of an idea, buying the domain and setting up email will happen with every product.

Total cost for this step is $34 / year plus a one time $149 purchase.

Think of an idea

• I can find ideas from something I’m doing - a hobby, a job I’ve worked at, a sport, etc.

• I can find ideas from people I know - their hobbies, their jobs

• I can find ideas from expired domain listings

• Pieter Levels wrote about this in his book Make

• Marc Lou wrote about this in his newsletter Ship Fast

• Peter Askew wrote about this on Deep South Ventures

Setup an account at PorkBun

You will use this account to handle buying a domain name, setting up email and managing your DNS. You really could use any registrar but PorkBun is good and can handle all the parts coming next.

You can use your personal email address to setup this account and use the same account for all your domains. If you end up buying domains elsewhere it’s easy to transfer them in. Consolidation is the name of the game.

Buy a domain name at PorkBun

I pretty much only buy .com domains (see Peter Askew for the reasons why). Everything you post on the internet needs a domain name.

I try to keep the domain to two words, no digits, no hyphens. The words should be easy to spell and not confused with another spelling. And the words should be generic, nothing another brand would claim as theirs. Marc has a good write up.

You’ll be accessing the Details of your domain a lot, so get familiar with it.

Check the Nameserver settings for your new domain and make sure they are set to the PorkBun defaults by looking at the domain Details.

Cost: $10 / year

Setup an email address at PorkBun

PorkBun has email hosting for your domain. It’s not the greatest at detecting spam, but it is only $2 / month and it is integrated with your domain settings.

You’ll need to receive email from users and you probably want to keep it separate from your personal email. We’ll use this email address in a later step.

You’ll want to buy this by clicking the “Add Hosted Email Account” in your domain settings.

After you buy and configure the email account, you’ll see this new section. You want to setup DMARC for your email.

You should send yourself a test email to the new account and make sure you can receive it. I setup the account on my laptop, my phone and I can use the web interface. If you having trouble receiving emails, you may want to click this button on the email screen. It’ll add a few DNS entries to your domain.

Cost: $24 / year

Setup a GitHub account

You can use your personal email address when setting up this account. It should be easy enough to move your product to another account if you ever end up needing that.

You can store the source code for all your products under a single account.

GitHub is where all the source code for your product will be stored. It acts as an online backup for the files on your personal computer as well as a central hub other services can pull from.

You won’t need to setup anything else at this point, just having an account with a username and password will do.

Cost: free

Setup a Vercel account

You can also use your personal email address here. It’s also easy to move the hosting for your product to another account if needed later on.

You can host all of your products under a single account and a personal account is fine for getting started. You’ll know if you need to upgrade later on.

Vercel will be your web hosting company. They’ll build and host our product for the world to access. They can do a lot more, but I’ll cover that in time.

Again, just setup a personal account for now, we’ll use this later on.

Cost: free

Buy the ShipFast template

The ShipFast template gives you all the boilerplate that a product needs. You’ll purchase this once and use it for every product you start. You can use your personal email for this since we’ll use it for every product.

I plan to write about every part of the template in depth so stay subscribed.

ShipFast gives you all the basic code every SaaS product needs and makes certain decisions about what tech to use. Having someone else make the tech decisions for us helps us move much faster. This eliminated the hang up I had which was causing me to constantly switch tech stacks.

If you are already a developer we’ll be using JavaScript and NextJS along with a bunch of other parts. If you don’t like these I’d recommend just going along with it for now. Ship a bunch of products with this stack and if one takes off, then you can choose to move it to a different stack. This is all about getting something out quick.

You’ll need your GitHub account name from the previous step to gain access to the private repository. A repository is like a folder in your GitHub that holds all the code needed for a product separate from all the products.

You’ll also need a Discord account to access the community.

Once you receive the GitHub invite email just accept it for now. Also, sign into the Discord community and say hi.

(note this is an affiliate link, it doesn’t cost you anything but I’ll get a small commission)

Cost: $149 one time purchase (the community is worth the extra $20)

Install software on your personal computer

There are just a few tools you to install on your personal computer.

Install Git - this is the software you use to keep track of changes to your source code and interact with GitHub. There are many ways to install it depending on your operating system. For macOS I use homebrew.

Cost: free

Install NodeJS - The long term support (LTS) version will be enough. Node is a JavaScript runtime that allows all our code to run locally. It also comes with a package manager called NPM which we use to extend our product to use software written by others. Vercel uses it on the server to run our application. Install the version for your operating system (or install it using homebrew).

Cost: free

Install VS Code - Download and install a version for your operating system. VS Code is an editor for writing source code. We’ll configure it later, for now all the defaults will be fine.

Cost: free

With these 3 software applications on your local computer you can write and ship all the SaaS applications you can dream of.

Next Step

Wait for step 2 😀 

(In future newsletters I’ll cover how all of the parts of Ship Fast work and how you can modify it to build your own product)