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Note for SaaS builders

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

While building statuscovid19.com in March, I learnt a few things which I thought might help other SaaS app builders and might act as better reference points for future self while making decisions.

Empathy for your end user.

A key driver while doing this project was anxiety. I was afraid for my friends and family and wanted to build this tool which could help them make better judgements. There was too much noise and very few signals.

The information that was public was very sparse. What was scary for me at the time was the spread of the virus. The incubation period in some reports was 28 days!

There was no centralised source which gave a clear picture on the overall state of the virus, so I decided to make one which would be simple enough that it would minimise the time for my friends and family to know what is going on.

Focus on outcomes not solutions.

The outcome with this project was to minimise the time for the end user to grasp what the thing was.

This was the outcome of the project and now there were possible solutions like:

  • Writing a blog: Too long and people don't really read blogs, they skim blogs(+1 if you are still reading and not skimming).
  • Make a video: And fight for attention with cat videos? (impossible)
  • Write a tweet: Probably a good idea too.
  • Single page app: A single page app which was concise and simple to understand. (I settled on this)

Focusing on outcome allowed me to choose the best possible way to solve it.

Competition provides inputs.

After going through 10--20 sources including the WHO website I couldn't find answers to 4 key questions:

  1. What are the symptoms of this virus?
  2. What can I do to prevent it from spreading?
  3. What is the overall current state i.e., numbers ?
  4. What are the top 5 countries affected?

None of the websites I found gave a concise information on all of those. There were definitely few which were better at providing the overall state i.e., numbers, but none were good enough at providing what to do?

Individuals search for truth, groups search for consensus.

WHO declared this a global pandemic on 15th March, but if you were tuned into the right people like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Naval Ravikant, Marc Andreessen and Paul Grahm, it was clear that the spread was bad.

Shoutout to my friend Kesava who made https://coronaprep.info, that inspired me to delve more into this.

These are the people who apply their individual judgements for understanding a situation, tuning into them is a gold mine of wisdom anytime.

Listen to feedback.

Before the lock down, when the situation was better I was asking a few friends in my close circle whether this was helping them. This friend of mine asked "but what about India??" and I was thinking damn, even I don't know how many there are in India. So I added a country option.

Listening to feedback is very helpful.

Be open to possibilities.

After the lock down, information on symptoms were getting clearer and popsci posted this:

Maybe people won't really understand on a scale of 1--3 what their symptoms are. I can barely think if I have a headache.

That inspired me to make a quiz which helped people decide whether they had the virus or not based on how they were feeling

Disclaimer: Not a doctor, make your judgements if you use this.

https://statuscovid19.com/check-for-covid19

Allow an option for people to pay you.

A radical notion to some, but allow a payment option. It was definitely a radical notion for me until a friend of mine Fajar Siddiq gave some suggestions on how to monetize, was very helpful. I had trouble setting up "Buy me coffee ". So I added a link to my paypal and made that button "☕ Buy me tea" as a pun on buy me coffee.

Funny enough a friend of mine paypaled me ₹150. It was not the amount, but just seeing an email that someone had paypaled me was so exciting.

Find a way with which people can pay you.

PS: I have a thread on twitter from day 0 describing how everything went down