After several React projects, I recently went “back to the roots” and created an app with server-generated HTML using the ages-old Mustache templates.

For interactivity, I added a bit of HTMX, and to have beautiful forms, I added the web components from Shoelace, all wrapped up in a Vite build.

And I must say that this was a relaxing experience: No complicated React stuff anymore, and the Typescript-based server components on AWS Lambda render the pages within 30 msecs each. AWS DynamoDB powers the data layer.

Feels like 1997 again, but I am Happy with the new stack!

As a solo founder, I know perfectly how difficult it is to market a product. So I thought: Let's work as a group to make our products look awesome. Let's find customers and convince them to buy. And let's discover how to gain real traction with our products. It's easier when you do it in a peer group, with other business owners.

Great! What was your first successful SaaS about?

A specific, meanwhile mostly solved, issue about emailing, nothing special, just special enough to build a unique selling point.

By the way, I couldn't find that site. Mind sharing a link?

As software engineers who run a startup, we disregard or even look down on marketing.

I wrote a blog post about a change in mindset that I needed to make in order to get my SaaS startups off the ground.

What are your ideas about this?

This is cool. Could you please add a LICENSE file so that it's clear what people are allowed to do with your code?

So many good links here, thanks to the OP for sharing, and to all commenters as well!

Should I add my tool to the site? ;-)

You're right. My tool (in its current form) is for people who know what they should do but simply don't do it.

However, if it's more like "how???", then you might like this popular blog post: https://2quiet2market.com/blog/spme-marketing-habit-for-solo...

Tell me what you think about it.

So true. I can totally relate because I had the same problem.

Whenever I write code, it either runs, or does not. It’s my fault, or I could say: it is my responsibility.

This is different with marketing. It depends not only on me but on other people’s behavior. And most of the time, I couldn’t see any relationship between effort and results.

Therefore, I have on my product roadmap a gamified loop with feedback, so that reluctant marketers have fun and keep being engaged to use the platform and stick to their habit.

Build a model? In the sense of machine learning or in another sense? Cool idea, what could that look like?

Yes, an ML model. If you built the machinery to connect marketing actions to business outcomes, as the OP complains about, you could recommend what actions to take. It's a straightforward machine learning task (supervised learning).

Cool thing. Guess I shouldn't reinvent the wheel here. Is there an open source example that I could learn from?

I don't think you will get far without knowing some ML but you could look at https://github.com/google/lightweight_mmm

Ah, there is food for thought and learning, here. Thanks for sharing, I will try to understand what's going on there.