5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Building My First SaaS (Would Have Saved Me 3 Months)

I've shipped 4 SaaS products in the last year. The first one took me 3 months. The latest one — FormCatch , a form backend service — took 3 days. The difference wasn't skill. It was knowing what actually matters. Here are 5 lessons I learned the hard way, so you don't have to. 1. Nobody Cares About Your Tech Stack (But It Can Still Kill You) My first SaaS started with two weeks of deliberation. Should I use tRPC or REST? Drizzle or Prisma? App Router or Pages Router? Here's the truth: your users will never know or care what ORM you chose. But picking the wrong stack — or worse, switching mid-project — can absolutely destroy your momentum. What actually matters: Pick boring, well-documented tools. Next.js + Supabase + Prisma is not exciting. It's reliable. That's the point. Optimize for speed-to-ship, not theoretical performance. You don't have scale problems when you have zero users. Authentication and payments are solved problems. If you're writing auth logic from scratch in 2026, you