Building a DevOps SaaS Solo: Month 1 Retrospective

Building a DevOps SaaS Solo: Month 1 Retrospective One month in. Here is everything that happened, the good and the bad. ## What I Shipped Multi-project dashboard (read-only, v1) AWS account connection via IAM role (not storing credentials) Basic infrastructure status view across all connected accounts Onboarding flow for first-time users ## What Took Longer Than Expected AWS account connection. I underestimated how many different ways people have configured their AWS environments. Some use root accounts directly. Some use SSO. Some have complex cross-account role setups. Building a connector that handles all of these gracefully took 3x longer than I planned. ## What I Got Wrong I built the UI before I had real user feedback. Classic mistake. I had to rebuild parts of the dashboard after the first 5 user interviews showed me I had prioritized the wrong information. ## What Surprised Me How much DevOps engineers appreciate blunt, technical communication. No fluff. No marketing language.