Five easy steps to build your first SaaS tool in 48 hours with GPT-4!

One of the most obtainable paths to creating generational wealth in the past two decades is to create your own SaaS (software as a service) tool. Think of software such as Slack, Figma, Salesforce, Shopify, Zoom, and many more. One thing they have in common? They’re all SaaS tools. 

Building generational wealth through SaaS tools is nothing new. But building a SaaS tool used to take time, complex development processes, lots of money, and highly paid and technically skilled employees. It used to be very hard to build a SaaS tool. 

Well, not anymore. Today you can build a SaaS tool with the help of GPT-4 over one weekend (yes, you read that right, one single weekend is all it takes to be one step closer to financial freedom). 

In this article, we will go through 5 simple steps on how to use ChatGPT to help you build SaaS MVP over one single weekend.

Real-world use case

First of all, let me introduce myself… I am Anže, a CEO at Calda, a mobile & web app development agency. Today, I am going to tell you a story about how I built an AI-based SaaS tool over one weekend. 

Before I tell you more about how to build a SaaS tool in 48 hours with the help of GPT-4, there’s an important piece of information you need to know – even though I am an owner of a software development company, I myself don’t possess any programming knowledge. I don’t know how to code, nor did I ever learn about it. I understand the basic processes of software development, but that’s about it when it comes to my technical knowledge. 

One random Friday, an idea popped into my head. I saw one of our designers struggling to write copy for one of the apps we were developing and thought to myself, “Why is the designer one that needs to do this? Why is he spending his time and effort on a task that could be easily automated?”. 

An idea was born and with it, a goal – I want to build an AI Figma plugin over the next two days. And I did it! 

Here are 5 easy steps on how I did it… 

STEP 1: Understand what you’re building

Probably the most important step of all is to really understand what it is that you want to build. If you don’t understand the product in and out before you begin with the development, you have already set yourself up for failure. 

I started by drawing and mapping out the basic features and user flows on a whiteboard. I suggest you do the same – take a pen and a piece of paper and write down how your app is going to be used. What is the main purpose behind it? What features should it include?

Another important thing you must understand from the very beginning is that you don’t want to build a perfect product. You want to build an MVP because right now, it’s much more important that you launch your product quickly and see if there’s a need for it on the market. Keep that in mind. 

In my case, this step already included the basic UX and UI design, where I designed the screens in my Figma account (with the help of the co-founder of our company, Nikola). This helped us understand which features and screens we needed to build. 

STEP 2: Set up your development environment

The next step, after you know the product you want to develop, is to set up your development environment. If you are not sure what tech stack to use to build your SaaS tool, ask GPT for some advice. 

In our case, we had to write the frontend in HTML and CSS, while the backend was written in Typescript. This is something that was pre-defined by Figma and their guidelines for building Figma plugins. 

We wrote our code in Visual Studio code program, which is one of the best (if not the best) tools to use, as it allows great features, which can help inexperienced developers write better code. Among those are error handling and plugins that allow you to make your code more readable. 

But this is one of the steps that are app-specific. Meaning, that it depends on what kind of tool you are developing. For example, if you were to develop a Chrome plugin, you would probably write your code in HTML/CSS and JavaScript. 

When setting up your development environment, it’s really important that you can test your tool constantly during the development process. Not only that you need to have the option to do the tests, but it’s also very helpful to have a console that allows you to print certain parts of code and thus debug the app more easily. 

STEP 3: Start prompting (step-by-step)

Okay, now we’re talking! Once you have everything that you need to actually start writing code, it’s time to explore everything that ChatGPT has to offer.

Advice number 1: Do it step-by-step.

The biggest advice I can give you is to build your code step-by-step! You will never ever build more complex solutions if you try to prompt the whole app in one single prompt. 

We started by developing the frontend of the plugin. One of our first prompts was, “Hey, I am building a Figma plugin. First of all, I need to have a text input field with a button to submit the text input from frontend to backend.” 

As you can see a very, very basic prompt for a basic part of our tool. But this is the key to building with ChatGPT – do it step by step and in a very basic manner.

Advice number 2: Understand the purpose and the logic behind the code.

Another important thing for us, when building our first tool, was understanding what the code that we are implementing actually does. Not going into too much detail, but rather understanding the basic principles of what each part of the code does. 

If you don’t understand what each part of the code does, it will be very, very hard to build the tool, as you add new lines of code and new features to the tool. The code needs to be consistent and it requires lots of logic when and how each part of the code runs. If you don’t understand this, GPT won’t be able to help you (at least not yet).  

You will absolutely get lost, if you don’t do your best to understand the purpose and the logic behind the code. 

Advice number 3: Comment on the code.

This is an extension of the previous advice. To be able to build on and understand how your tool is working, one of the best pieces of advice we can give you is to comment on the code. Do it all the time! This applies to basically all the developers out there, but especially for someone who has no experience and has a hard time understanding what the code does. If you comment on the code, you will always be able to come back, look at the code, and understand the logic behind it. 

Advice number 4: Test. And then test again. 

We tested as much as we developed. Basically, after each successful implementation of minor code snippets, we tested if this part of the code (and the product overall) is working as expected.

This is especially important because when you’re putting together code with the help of AI, there will be lots of occasions where you will break your existing code because you don’t fully understand where and how to implement a new snippet GPT gave you. 

This is why you always have to test. This is how you know which parts of the code work and which version of the tool was the last one to work properly. 

Advice number 5: Don’t be afraid to use multiple prompts to find a solution. 

One of the biggest challenges when building software with the help of ChatGPT is that GPT is not as smart as your brain. It’s really smart and really capable and it allows you to build amazing stuff. But, on the other hand, sometimes, it’s evidently stupid. 

This can be seen when you get errors in the code you are trying to implement, or when your previous code breaks down. We got multiple occasions where GPT cycled itself and was unable to provide a solution to our problem. 

That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to open a new prompt thread to find a solution to your problem. Trying to break down the problem piece by piece. Try to ask questions from different angles. Go step-by-step. 

Advice number 6: Trust that you’ll find a solution and be ready to compromise.

I admit, there was an occasion or two when I wanted to drop everything and appoint one of my developers to finish the tool on their own. But this was not the point, it was my goal to finish the tool on my own over the weekend and I was determined to do it. 
I guarantee you that, at times, you will feel helpless and probably think about quitting. Don’t, because there’s always a way. If you have to quit, quit on having that extra feature that you don’t know how to develop. Remember, you’re not building a perfect product, you are building a product.

Just to get an idea of the features we did not include in our first iteration of the tool, because we weren’t able to get it done in due time:

• Paywall for subscriptions;
• Email login (initially, it was just free to use!);
• User data, such as tool usage;
• Freemium limit;
• Many other features which would make the UX much better. 

It’s hard to make compromises, but it’s practically impossible to finish the development without them. 

Overall, never let yourself quit. If you must, quit on a feature, not the whole product! Trust that you’ll find a way, take a step away from the desk, come back refreshed, and you’ll do it!

STEP 4: Test and fix

Voila, you did it! Right?

Well, not so much. Now it’s time to test. This is probably the scariest part of the development because you think you have a working product, but deep down, you know that if you try, you’ll break the tool. 

And that’s exactly what we did. We tried to think of all of the possible scenarios on how our users will use the tool and found many different edge cases, where the tool was not working properly. It’s scary because it requires going back and making the changes to the code that you worked so hard to make it work. And now you have to change it?!

But, that’s the reality of inexperienced developers. You will never be able to predict all of the edge cases in advance, so you’ll make your code robust and strong. But, it is what it is, that’s the truth you have to accept.

STEP 5: Start acquiring users

Now, we go to the hard part. The easy part is the development of the tool, the hard one is acquiring users. This could be an article of its own, but I just wanted to reiterate that your job is not done when you have a working product (or an MVP). This is where it all begins…

Want to build a complex AI app and don’t know how? Get your free prototype in 3 days!

Even though building your first AI app on your own is possible with the help of apps such as GPT-4, it’s still hard. You probably will have to invest much more time and effort than initially expected. 

Nevertheless, there are low-code app development agencies, which specialize in MVP development of AI-based apps, that do it in days, not months. One of those agencies, is also Calda, my own agency. We have experience building apps with integration of OpenAI API and have a proven track record of great projects which we successfully launched in days, not months. 

If you have an idea for an AI app, we will gladly put together a free prototype of it, no strings attached! 

This is an AutoGPT community limited offer, as we know what AI has to offer, and we know the future of our society depends on it. You got the idea, we make it a reality! 

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This post was written by: Anže Šterbenc @ CALDA