Developer tool launches with Nico Botha

Jack: Hi everyone. This is Jack Bridger from BitReach and you're listening to Scaling DevTools. The show that investigates how DevTools go from zero to one. I'm joined this week by Nico Botha, the founder of Ship SaaS a next. JS boilerplate, which can save you a load of time writing code that you'd need for a SaaS project. Almost any SaaS project, Nico. It's great to have you here this week.

Nico: Thanks, Jack.

Jack: Nico, what made you start Ship SaaS?

Nico: So like a lot of Indie hackers, I'm a guy with a lot of ideas. And at some point I got tired of rebuilding every idea from scratch. I lost interest before the end of the project, because I had to rebuild and rewrite a lot of code. So then I started looking for a SaaS boilerplate with the tech stack that I wanted to use, but I couldn't find any on the market. I was looking for a SaaS boilerplate with next JS super base and tailwind CSS, and I couldn't find any, so I [00:01:00] figured I can write this fairly quickly and make it available for other people well.

Jack: And how did you go about getting your first customers?

Nico: I tried a couple of different strategies. I shared a lot on Twitter. I made some posts on Reddit, and shared some stuff on Indie hackers, but the platform where I got the most traction, in the beginning, was Twitter. And then I decided to focus on Twitter and that has been one of my main acquisition channels so far.

Jack: And do you have any advice for someone who's starting to build a tool for developers?

Nico: It's more or less the same as building any other tool for any kind of audience, except for the fact that your customers are technically very skilled. So you can expect a lot more technical questions and you always have to be ready to motivate certain decisions. With a normal audience, people won't necessarily ask you about your tech choices or why you made certain decisions, but building a tool for developers, you have more critical customer base. And you'll probably get a lot more technical question.

Jack: When you describe, justifying your tech stack and developers asking lots of questions, how can someone make sure they prepare their tool for that kind of scrutiny?

Nico: Well, always be prepared to motivate why you made a certain decision. Obviously your decisions will never be perfect. Sometimes customers have valid concerns and that's a good thing because you, you get their input and you can improve your product. But most of the time, you just have to have a good reason to use something. There are thousands of libraries out there that, uh, you can use to connect to a database or add some certain component to your app. You just have to have a good reason why you use the one that you chose.

Jack: That makes sense. You touched on it a bit earlier, but could you dig a little bit more about how you plan to grow ship SaaS and your plans for the future?

Nico: So I took a good look at my analytics, on the landing page the other day. And I realized that most of my conversions came from SEO. So it is people searching on Google for a next JS SaaS, boiler plates. And currently I'm fairly high in the Google rankings. It can improve, but it's an okay position at the moment. So my main strategy for growth in the coming months will be to focus more on SEO, add more content blog posts and videos to the site to showcase what you can do with Ship SaaS and the kind of products that you can build.

Jack: How have you currently been thinking about SEO? Cause I saw you have written quite a few blog posts already.

Nico: Yes. So, I got a tool from another Indie Hacker. It's called KatLinks and that's a fairly good tool to show you, what kind of issues, there are SEO wise on your site. And you can also use that to plan your SEO strategy. You can [00:04:00] use it to do some keyword research, check what keywords your competitors are ranking for, and then optimize your post to also get some of that traffic for keywords and this whole range of stuff that you can do with that tool. So that is really my main starting point. To plan a strategy, for my SEO tasks.

Jack: But you managed to rank pretty fast. Probably like a relatively, high volume search term

Nico: Yes. And I think in that sense, I was, I was a bit lucky because there are not a lot of next JS SaaS, boilerplates out there. There are one other one that I know of the one that's ranking above me. But if you search for that, there isn't an abundance of products that come up in the search rankings. Most of it's all irrelevant. So in that sense, it might seem like a difficult keyword to rank for, but it actually wasn't.

Jack: And did you specifically set out to rank for that key term? Or were you just creating content that you thought would be useful?

Nico: I focused on that term specifically, I try to include some other keywords such as, uh, super base and, Stripe tail when CSS, but so far that specific keyword combination has been the most successful one.

Jack: Nico, you mentioned Twitter earlier and one of your other projects is Supermeme, which is, as I understand it, a tool for generating memes using AI, how do you think memes can play into developer marketing?

Nico: Well, I think memes are a very powerful way to convey your message in a very condensed manner where normally people would write a couple of sentences or blog post to get their message across with the right meme. You can convey the same message with just an image much easier to consume, and it's much easier to share. So in my opinion, it has a, a much bigger impact.

Jack: Nico. Thanks so much for joining. If you'd like to learn more about Nico, Ship SAS or super meme, please follow N w Botha that's N W B O T H A on Twitter.

Nico: Thanks for having me, Jack.

Jack: Thanks Nico. And next week we'll be sharing some exciting news. See you soon!