Why is there no Shopify for SaaS? I asked Travis Fischer who tried to build just that.

1

Superhuman

I want to pause here for a second because to me this sounds like the perfect way to think about the problem. The core functionality of almost any SaaS product can be wrapped in an API. (Here's an excellent primer on the API-first ecosystem. Also, there are of course SaaS products where a lot of the unique value actually comes from the UX, e.g. Superhuman.).

#Email #Email Clients #Email Productivity 25 social mentions

2

Laravel Spark

Another popular solution are boilerplates like Bullettrain, Jumpstart for Rails, and Laravel Spark. While these certainly help, they still require manual work to set up and maintain. Another downside is that they usually require a hefty upfront investment. As a result, they're not viable for people just starting out (who coincidentally would need it the most) and anyone running lots of small experiments.

#Developer Tools #SaaS #React 23 social mentions

3

RapidAPI

There is already RapidAPI (which recently raised $60M) - a marketplace that makes it easy to monetize an API. However, you can only sell direct access to your API endpoints. Since only developers know how to use APIs, this is the only customer group you can reach on RapidAPI. So a service that makes it easy to sell your API to regular users would be a huge upgrade.

#API Tools #API Directory #API Discovery 63 social mentions

He also launched Automagical (AI-based video creation tool) that was acquired by Verblio in Fall 2018.

#Video #Productivity #SaaS 1 social mentions