Building a SaaS Product with WordPress

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What is the most valuable thing you could imagine giving someone?

>Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, feed him for a lifetime.

In 2015, I wrote a blog post that went on to get shared to Tim Ferriss’s newsletter.

It was called, [Steal My App, I Dare You]).

My hypothesis was that the more value you give away, the better the content would do. And I was right, it worked. It got shared to one of the most reputable newsletters in the world.

But really I was doing nothing more than giving people a small fish.

Last time, I only gave away a design and prototype.

**That’s why this time, I’m giving away** [**the MVP on Github**]**.**

Designing a decent prototype was easy. It only took a weekend.

Turning an app into a functional MVP? Looking back, it probably would have taken me years.

I felt like if I was going to build an MVP, it needed to be something that I could justify putting years into learning.

**The question, is what to build and with what tools?**

I wanted to get into building iOS apps, but I’d never done it before. So I stuck to what I was getting paid to do, which was WordPress.

Web apps have some advantages over iOS. Especially the part where Apple doesn’t take a percentage. If you start with a web app, you can actually use that as a work around if you build an iOS app later. Companies like Spotify and Audible have used this to get around paying the Apple fee, because the billing runs on the web app.

## Why Not WordPress?

WordPress was the easiest way for me to become a full-stack developer.

**The biggest advantages are:**

* You can build an MVP with a lean team. Easily 1-2 people.
* You can tap into a vast amount of documentation and community support
* Most people in tech are familiar with WordPress

But that’s also the problem with WordPress. A lot of people have also had bad experiences. Full-stack can mean a lot of different things to different people. And to be fair, most WordPress developers are probably closer to no-stack developers, than full-stack developers.

WordPress is the wild west of cowboy coders, who end up making a bad name for WP. It can be done in so many different ways, that there’s no standard, and it ends up making the experiences bloated, buggy, insecure, and prone to things breaking a lot.

That was my painful experience as well.

That is until I started developing on [Roots]). Which in my opinion, is **Wordpress done right**. It’s all the upside of WordPress, with almost none of the downside. The biggest downside is that the learning curve is a bit steep for newbies. For me, it was my first introduction to adopting the DRY principle, deploying from Github via SSH, using a staging environment, and doing my own IT automation. Using it forced me to become a better developer, and adopt standards.

That’s right, no more accidents using FTP. No more MAMP. No more cowboy coding and getting into bar fights at the tavern.

Nobody can deny that WordPress is a powerful tool. It runs nearly half the web. It has one of the biggest developer communities on Earth. The issue, is that plain vanilla WordPress kinda sucks.

Roots WordPress can be run like a modern app. It taps into WP-CLI and WP-API to do anything a “real” developer would want to do with it. You can deploy the website straight from your command line running a single line of code. All without any downtime.

If you were going to build a SaaS tool on WordPress, Roots would be the way to do it.

Roots decouples WordPress, so if you ever change your mind later, you could swap it out like an engine. But I don’t think you’ll be doing that anytime soon.

*This is far from a sponsored ad about Roots. I build on it because I legitimately love it.*

## Eat The Fish

This time, I’m giving away enough fish to feed a family or a small village. But it’s not going to last forever.

That’s why I’ve document as much of the process as humanly possible, from the very beginning.

You can find that through [documentation]), [tutorials]), and [live streams]).

If you’d like to learn how you can get paid to steal Bonsai, you can learn more here:

[https://youtu.be/IQvjojf65dg])

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