Cleaning SAAS Progress Thread

[Bounce Back]

Hey folks,

You may recall from my intro post that I've been on the forum since around 2016. I've forgotten my previous account in a break I took while building and selling my commercial cleaning business. After the sale I took some time to slowlane up some cash to pay off some debts and what not but over the last couple of months have been ramping up to start a SAAS venture.

After some flakiness from a seller on a SAAS I was going to purchase from them, I have pulled out of the deal. I felt I had to trust my gut.

So back at the drawing board this week I had one thought on my mind: "How can I just get started? Even buying a SAAS is taking too long..." and the echo in mind of reading posts about doing something with which I have "domain authority".

Finally something I had sidelined some years back for a variety of reasons seemed so much more appealing now. I had got decently far into developing a management tool of sorts for the janitorial industry but had a lot of growing pains in my primary business (the cleaning one) at the time (long story for another time) that it just fell out of my scope of concern. Since being back slowlane it became more and more distant and out of mind as well.

In the meantime the industry has gotten a little more competitive but the main one I planned to compete toe to toe with looks to have taken on a bunch of debt, feature creep, blown up in employee count (expenses), and now no longer advertises their prices openly so I am going to guess got even more expensive (I already thought I could compete on price easily if need be).

This may change but my two current goals are:
1. Switch over to doing this full time at 200k ARR (I am blessed to make more than this at my day job but will take the cut to focus on it full time when this happens).
2. Exit at 1M ARR (unless I am doing like +20% month over month or something).

I've decided, screw it, despite all the issues I have with it - it is what I am going with and I will handle them. So here is the start of I think my first ever progress thread on this forum ladies and gents. Cheers!

 

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[Bounce Back]

First official progress post:

Alright so as part of my return to slowlane I also decided to wrap up a masters degree I had started before launching my business which I've been doing while working (which has also gotten pretty crazy but slowlane is going to slowlane). I am in my last semester of that with my graduate project and what not and most intense course so this will add yet another thing but I don't care I am hungry for it. I will do what I can and figure it out from there.

As of now here is what I will start chipping away at:

Mid-term goal (will guide the next few months of progress):

1. Goal of being beta-able by end of this semester (let's say May 15th)
   1. At that time I will call up companies and get 3-5 of 'em to test it for free and do a case study on them.
2. Figure out initial pricing

Short-term goals (things to work on in between updates/over next few updates):

1. I need to shake the cobwebs off the code and my dev setup. My hard-drive has died since I last had this running locally so I don't even remember my full setup/flow. Need to pull the code back down from the server and just get it to run. (Don't even get me started on remembering the convoluted flow I had to be able to deploy the mobile apps).
2. I need to take inventory of what I have and determine what the MVP (minimum viable product) is truly to get this launched. I will move to start tracking in JIRA or something like I do at my day job - previously I was just doing this in a text doc even though I know better.
3. I know I am going to rip out the custom made auth solution I did - I did it out of desperation of keeping costs low and now am not worried about that as much as I am using some half-baked BS I came up with - will replace it with most likely Auth0. This will create some rework to parts of the code but is very much for the better.
4. I want to reconsider some other core solution I had built out myself again. There is an industry standard way to handle this part (has to do with calendars/scheduling things) but I recall that standard fell short of a lot of things I had planned in the future. I want to see if for keeping things simple if there is anyway at all I could just adopt that standard and scratch all my custom stuff (that honestly gives me headaches dealing with and slows down development a lot).
5. Decouple the landing/marketing site from my react app or see how to integrate it into something like wordpress. I'd like to be able to change that quicker/on the fly and have some of the SEO plugins wordpress provides - thinking the sooner the better as I could start paying to have some content/blog posts generated as I code up to the beta.

 

[CONAN]

Fellow developer here...
It is my great wish to build a (micro) SaaS business and there were tries in the past. Many hours of development spent before learning that I should (somehow) validate the idea and present it to the marketplace in cheapest possible way (which is definitely not months of development) ...
So I hope you're sure you're at the stage in which grinding code is the next step...

As for your goals:

3. Definitely! Custom auth is not worth it you need true and tried solutions both for easy of development and for security
5. You mentioned React app. I would recommend using existing components like Material UI and not do custom ones as much.

And just an advice for remembering setup/flow. There's no need to remember those I recommend you build CI/CD pipelines early on which will enable you to deploy way faster and detect errors easier

Good luck!

 

[MattR82]

How does your SaaS differentiate itself from ones like Deputy or route? I'm new to the commercial cleaning industry and have never heard of any cc biz owner fully happy with what they have. The main advantage to deputy is GPS tracking of staff I believe.

 

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[Bounce Back]

How does your SaaS differentiate itself from ones like Deputy or route? I'm new to the commercial cleaning industry and have never heard of any cc biz owner fully happy with what they have. The main advantage to deputy is GPS tracking of staff I believe.

So I've never used Deputy or Route but my quick take on them:

• Deputy: More a generic timeclock sort of tool similar to something like Chronotek that is very popularly used in the cleaning industry - not really management software or a "unified" solution. But more and more "generic" solutions keep entering this market for example Quickbooks Time sheets.
• Route: Never heard of it before but this looks somewhat close to what I am building/have built - the website doesn't explain too many of the features and the video was pretty generic too. Looks pretty early concept type stage to be honest looking at the scheduling section.

I agree with that statement of what you said "have never heard of any cc biz owner fully happy with what they have" - what I plan to do with my software is making a subsection of the market basically 100% happy with the software which requires making opinionated features instead of generic tools. It is going to be more a system for running a commercial cleaning business that also has slick software rather than just bland software that just kinda helps. It will be based on a list of pain points I experienced running my cleaning business for 3-4 years.

My current target customer:

• Has at least 10 cleaning employees and at least one supervisor
• Has already tried at least one other janitorial management software
• Employs their cleaners mostly and rarely or minimally subcontracting
• Is not using a sales CRM and/or not experienced with tracking leads/prospecting in a systematic way OR does not like their current CRM flow

Small-ish update that relates to above:
Day job and school have been all kinds of busy for me - under quite a bit of pressure - free time has been almost non-existent but have tried to make progress. So far this is notable things I've done:

• Got domain repurchased and fixed some email issues that were hanging about from when I last was trying to stand this up which ended up with dealing with some previous unpaid invoice that was sitting in an email box I thought was forwarding but was not.
• Applied for and was accepted into Microsoft Azure's startup program. This will help keep costs down and as long as I am proving out my concept can potentially cut out $150k in costs over next few years as I keep applying for higher tiers.
• Previously my marketing site was built into the web app code - I decided instead to have the marketing site be a wordpress site so its more maintainable SEO + content wise. This was a bit of a learning curve but got it up and going on Azure Wordpress. Bought a theme and while configuring it and its underlying Elementor implementation decided it was junk and moved to Bricks.
  • For now it is really just a "sign up for an email when we launch" page. Bricks has built in support for MailCheat(Chimp) and sendgrid - so applied for sendgrid account and was given some lame denied email with no information provided. For now I whipped up some code to save the emails to a google sheet so I can move on.
  • Ran into a lot of annoying issues with Azure's preconfigured CDN but worked through that now.
• @MTF recommended some SEO tools to me that I've begun messing with but haven't actually pinned down the first post I am going to write to get content started on the blog side. Honestly I am hemming and hawing here from reading peoples opinions on AI generated content but I need to just go for it. By end of next week I will have the first article up (hopefully much sooner but my schedule this week is insane and most likely the peak busy I will have before finishing school).
• Have started piece by piece re-implementing my backend server. The code is now ~3 years out of date library wise and very coupled to my custom auth solution so I am manually moving it to a new codebase, upgrading libraries, and correcting some bad patterns that developed there while migrating to Google Firebase auth. Local environment setup is also getting way more streamlined and simplified.
  • So far was able to get most of the libraries updated (with a lot of code still waiting to be reimplemented), database migration scripts working again and stood up a copy locally, running off of a simple npm start, and a very very early Google auth token flow.
  • Reason for a lot of this is the following goal: Do the bare minimum needed to simplify and re-establish a working local environment with the new auth + libraries so that I can contract out the work on upwork while I do my day job. I plan to review their merges and provide guidance in the early mornings and evenings once I am at this point. I will contract out the mobile app, backend, and front end to different people to help make sure no-one person has my code. Each of these already exists but needs tweaks and re-stood up before they are even contractor ready or I am going to deal with more time and money explaining things to them than it is worth.

 

[MattR82]

So I've never used Deputy or Route but my quick take on them:

• Deputy: More a generic timeclock sort of tool similar to something like Chronotek that is very popularly used in the cleaning industry - not really management software or a "unified" solution. But more and more "generic" solutions keep entering this market for example Quickbooks Time sheets.
• Route: Never heard of it before but this looks somewhat close to what I am building/have built - the website doesn't explain too many of the features and the video was pretty generic too. Looks pretty early concept type stage to be honest looking at the scheduling section.

I agree with that statement of what you said "have never heard of any cc biz owner fully happy with what they have" - what I plan to do with my software is making a subsection of the market basically 100% happy with the software which requires making opinionated features instead of generic tools. It is going to be more a system for running a commercial cleaning business that also has slick software rather than just bland software that just kinda helps. It will be based on a list of pain points I experienced running my cleaning business for 3-4 years.

My current target customer:

• Has at least 10 cleaning employees and at least one supervisor
• Has already tried at least one other janitorial management software
• Employs their cleaners mostly and rarely or minimally subcontracting
• Is not using a sales CRM and/or not experienced with tracking leads/prospecting in a systematic way OR does not like their current CRM flow

Small-ish update that relates to above:
Day job and school have been all kinds of busy for me - under quite a bit of pressure - free time has been almost non-existent but have tried to make progress. So far this is notable things I've done:

• Got domain repurchased and fixed some email issues that were hanging about from when I last was trying to stand this up which ended up with dealing with some previous unpaid invoice that was sitting in an email box I thought was forwarding but was not.
• Applied for and was accepted into Microsoft Azure's startup program. This will help keep costs down and as long as I am proving out my concept can potentially cut out $150k in costs over next few years as I keep applying for higher tiers.
• Previously my marketing site was built into the web app code - I decided instead to have the marketing site be a wordpress site so its more maintainable SEO + content wise. This was a bit of a learning curve but got it up and going on Azure Wordpress. Bought a theme and while configuring it and its underlying Elementor implementation decided it was junk and moved to Bricks.
  • For now it is really just a "sign up for an email when we launch" page. Bricks has built in support for MailCheat(Chimp) and sendgrid - so applied for sendgrid account and was given some lame denied email with no information provided. For now I whipped up some code to save the emails to a google sheet so I can move on.
  • Ran into a lot of annoying issues with Azure's preconfigured CDN but worked through that now.
• @MTF recommended some SEO tools to me that I've begun messing with but haven't actually pinned down the first post I am going to write to get content started on the blog side. Honestly I am hemming and hawing here from reading peoples opinions on AI generated content but I need to just go for it. By end of next week I will have the first article up (hopefully much sooner but my schedule this week is insane and most likely the peak busy I will have before finishing school).
• Have started piece by piece re-implementing my backend server. The code is now ~3 years out of date library wise and very coupled to my custom auth solution so I am manually moving it to a new codebase, upgrading libraries, and correcting some bad patterns that developed there while migrating to Google Firebase auth. Local environment setup is also getting way more streamlined and simplified.
  • So far was able to get most of the libraries updated (with a lot of code still waiting to be reimplemented), database migration scripts working again and stood up a copy locally, running off of a simple npm start, and a very very early Google auth token flow.
  • Reason for a lot of this is the following goal: Do the bare minimum needed to simplify and re-establish a working local environment with the new auth + libraries so that I can contract out the work on upwork while I do my day job. I plan to review their merges and provide guidance in the early mornings and evenings once I am at this point. I will contract out the mobile app, backend, and front end to different people to help make sure no-one person has my code. Each of these already exists but needs tweaks and re-stood up before they are even contractor ready or I am going to deal with more time and money explaining things to them than it is worth.

Cool, I'll be following!
I've heard nothing but good things about deputy for tracking staff etc but yes, not like a management software and if planning for big ticket clients where there is no need for travel between jobs anyway then not needed.
I agree with Route being a bit average on explaining what they do. It's been built by Ricky and his team from Rozalado (now around a 10mil per year BSC) he's the guy that runs the cleaning and cocktails podcast on YouTube which is an awesome channel that I'm surprised doesn't get more views.

I know the guys from Octockean that also have a large biz and YouTube channel just use hubspot but mentioned a while ago that it's incredibly expensive for what they do.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with, good luck!