What it changed
- A SaaS taken from an MVP to ten paying clients, through word of mouth.
- A crawler that moved a recruiter's existing website onto our platform automatically.
- The confidence to build products of our own, which led to HappySkills.
How it started
We worked in a co-working space full of recruiters, and they all complained about the same thing: their website provider. The sites were poor, the support was slow and the price was high. We thought we could do better, cheaper, with better technology and better support.
What we built
The MVP was a crawler. Point it at a recruiter's existing website, and it copied the site and re-hosted it on our platform: no migration project, no rebuilding content by hand. Once that worked, we saw the business in it, and built FairplayTech around it: website creation, hosting and support for specialist recruitment agencies.
How it grew, and why it closed
The product worked, and it grew by word of mouth, to ten clients: good pocket money for a side business. But we were spread across other ventures, and none of us was passionate enough about recruitment websites to make it our main business. So we closed it.
What it taught me
That building a SaaS isn't that complicated: find a real complaint, build the smallest thing that removes it, and charge for it. And that a business needs a founder who cares about its customers' problem, not just its technology.
I've done it many times since, mostly inside clients' businesses: micro-SaaS, small products that aren't the company's main product but that it sells alongside it, and that add up to real revenue together. And for ourselves, with HappySkills. With AI, the pace has changed completely: a micro-SaaS that used to take months can now ship in a week or less, depending on its size.
Why it matters to you
If you're building a SaaS, or a few small ones alongside your main business, I've done it repeatedly since 2016, and as an owner: the product, the pricing, the hosting, the support calls and the decision to stop. That's a different perspective from an engineer who has only ever built someone else's.