How to ship a micro-SaaS in a weekend (and what to skip)
The exact 48-hour playbook: what to build, what to skip, the four pieces of infra you need, and the deferred-decisions list.
Most micro-SaaS founders take 6 weeks to ship the first version. The ones who ship in 48 hours don't do less work in those 6 weeks — they spread 48 hours of focused work over 6 weeks of context-switching. This is the 48-hour version.
The pre-work (do this BEFORE the weekend)
- One sentence: "[Product] helps [specific person] do [specific job] in [specific way]." If you can't finish all three blanks, the weekend will be wasted.
- Three potential customers who said "I'd try that." Not "interesting" — try that.
- The one workflow that is the entire product. Not the roadmap; the first thing.
Saturday — Build the spine (10 hours)
Hour 0-1: Stack decision and account setup.
- Hosting + Postgres: Vercel + Supabase (or Neon). Don't deliberate.
- Auth: Supabase Auth or Clerk free tier. Don't build your own.
- Payments: Stripe Checkout (not custom). Generate keys.
- Domain: skip — use vercel.app for the demo.
Hour 1-7: The core workflow. ONE flow. Sign up → do the thing → see the result. No settings page. No team management. No password reset (Supabase Auth handles it). No empty state. No 404 page.
Hour 7-9: Stripe Checkout for one tier. One price. One button. Webhook to mark the user as paid. Don't model multiple tiers; you can ship the first paid plan as a single $X/month.
Hour 9-10: A landing page that's 100 lines max. Headline + 3-bullet feature list + a button. Use Tailwind defaults; don't design.
Sunday — Polish, deploy, sell (10 hours)
Hour 0-2: One round of polish. Fix the three things that look most amateurish. Don't add features.
Hour 2-3: Deploy and smoke test. Sign up flow end-to-end. Payment flow end-to-end. Then test the second user — does anything break with two real accounts in the same DB?
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