New SaaS businesses cut corners that are hard to fix later. Today I am shipping LetsGo, an open-source project to address this issue: 47chapters/letsgo.

When you start a new SaaS application, you often optimize for the time to market. In the process, many reduce the near-term work while creating technical debt. If your business shows signs of traction, the time comes to address this debt. However, making architectural changes with customers in production is expensive. It is like changing brakes on a running train. At one point, many early-stage SaaS businesses find themselves in a situation where it is hard to make progress and evolve the product.

The root of the problem is the lack of a proper foundation to build a new SaaS application. On the operations side, AWS provides a fantastic set of building blocks, but you still have to write a lot of code to combine them all together and engineer a proper devops experience. On the product side, many of the SaaS applications solve the same problems over and over:

• marketing site,
• management dashboard,
• HTTP API,
• worker behind a queue,
• database,
• authentication,
• payment processing,
• devops story.

All of this boilerplate work stands in your way to working on the core product, so it becomes a natural target for cutting corners.

This is where LetsGo comes in.

LetsGo provides the architecture and the tooling that will put your startup on a solid foundation from day one.

It helps you save months of work leading to the launch while allowing you to focus on the essence of your product. The day you let the first customer in, you have no technical debt. As you grow, you can continue focusing your resources on what matters most: your customers and product.

LetsGo does it by providing a prescriptive architecture implemented with a modern set of technologies and robust operational tooling for managing your app in AWS.

On day one you start with more than most startups build in the first two years.

LetsGo gives you:

• An application architecture with a web, HTTP API, worker, and database components, all wired up and ready to go.
• A devops CLI that helps you set up CI/CD and manage several deployments of your app in AWS to help you segregate your production and development workloads or to support dedicated deployments for your customers.
• Integration with Auth0 to authenticate your users and protect your APIs.
• Integration with Stripe to automate your billing and subscription lifecycle management.
• Integration with Slack to keep current with new customers signing up and subscriptions being paid.
• A flexible tenancy and user model with membership management and invitation flow.
• A set of modern yet robust technologies including Next.js, Node.js, and Typescript that make your days exciting and the nights boring.
• LetGo is open source under MIT, so there is no vendor lock-in and you can always see what makes it tick.

I want to welcome you to explore how LetsGo can help you at https://github.com/47chapters/letsgo.

Let’s go!