Build In Public, Witnessing the Birth of NestSaaS Together

Hello, I'm Shawn, a full-stack developer with over a decade of experience navigating the professional world, specializing in the tech stack of front-end React/Vue, Node.js, and web3. In April 2025, I just finished my last job, and seizing this opportunity, I finally decided to step out of my comfort zone and fully dedicate my passion and energy to independent development, aiming to become an Indie Hacker.

Actually, making this decision wasn't easy. When facing the next step, it felt like something was pushing me forward from the shadows. Coincidentally, at this turning point in my career, two different people shared the same book with me, "The War Of Art". So, I bought the book and quickly finished reading it. It helped me recognize my inner resistance. I deeply realized that this inner resistance would constantly pop up and try to make me compromise. If I couldn't break through this powerful force, I might have ended up looking for another stable job. "The War Of Art" was like a wake-up call, making me recognize my inner yearning for creation and my resistance to mediocrity. Instead of continuing to patch and mend within someone else's framework, I decided to build a platform of my own that could continuously generate value.

Having finally decided to go independent, the first question was what to do.

"To create a truly successful and valuable product, the core is to meet social needs and have the potential for scalability."

Based on this principle, I repeatedly considered many directions and ideas. Currently, a relatively clear direction for me is website building, which I see having two very important aspects: content and SaaS services.

For content sites, a continuous and definite direction is to deeply cultivate SEO to monetize through organic traffic from search engines. For SaaS services, the monetization is more direct through selling products or offering paid subscriptions for services. For example, one could build a homepage to showcase personal work, a blog or information site to share knowledge, a navigation site to aggregate resources, or even a platform to sell one's own code or services, and so on.

I've tried various website building and template systems, and I often found the existing tools unsatisfactory. They were either using outdated technology stacks, too bloated and cumbersome to use, or lacked essential features, making it difficult to find a system that could meet my diverse needs. I believe that solving my own pain points can also help many other developers facing similar challenges.

So, I decided to independently build my first wheel — to create a truly handy website system: NestSaaS.

My goal is clear: to build a platform with a streamlined yet powerful model that can flexibly support various content presentation formats and functionalities. It will not only have robust SEO features (metadata, structured data, sitemaps, RSS feeds, etc.) but also seamlessly integrate SaaS capabilities, supporting various business models such as one-time purchases, product licensing, and subscription services.

With this system, I can quickly build various types of websites:

• Navigation Sites: Easily create resource aggregation platforms that can support paid submissions or premium resource subscriptions.
• Article Content Sites: Build SEO-friendly blogs or information websites focused on content creation and sharing.
• Knowledge Sharing Sites: Set up personal or team knowledge bases to systematically present professional insights.
• Product Selling Platforms: If you have excellent code you want to monetize, this system can support automatic delivery upon purchase (inviting collaboration on private GitHub repositories), simplifying the delivery process.
• SaaS Service Platforms: Package your services into a subscription-based model, allowing users to pay for access.
• Content Communities: Build small and focused niche communities to connect like-minded individuals.
• Digital Product Stores: Whether it's code snippets, design assets, or e-books and tutorials, users can receive automatic delivery upon purchase (supporting temporary file links, cloud drive links, and other methods).

I believe that for many developers like myself, having such a flexible, customizable, and directly monetizable website building system will greatly enhance our efficiency and creativity.

Another important alignment for choosing this direction is that I will heavily use it myself for my own website building. A product that I continuously use allows me to constantly refine it and provide more reliable service and support.

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If you've ever had the following thoughts:

• Wanting to create a profitable navigation website to reach more people with valuable resources.
• Hoping to have an SEO-powerful content website to seriously share your independent insights.
• Longing to build your own knowledge base to accumulate and share your professional knowledge.
• Having excellent code or products and wanting a convenient way to sell them online.
• Having a great service idea and wanting to implement a sustainable income model through SaaS.
• Wanting to build a focused niche community to learn and connect with peers.
• Creating digital products and wanting to automate their delivery to buyers after purchase.

Then, the system I'm developing might be exactly what you've been looking for.

This is a tool built by a developer for developers. It originates from my own needs and hopefully will also fulfill your aspirations.

This is an ongoing project, and I will be developing it publicly ("Build In Public"). This means I will openly share my progress, design ideas, and technical implementations. Everyone is welcome to follow along and participate. A portion of this project has already been developed, and I hope to have it ready by May, at which point I will first use it to build my own website.

If you are interested in this project or have any thoughts and suggestions, please feel free to follow and connect with me on Twitter: https://x.com/ShawnHacks