Carrot Seed — the smart way to develop digital products
Isn’t it sad how much time we need to spend to get started with a SaaS Idea? I mean that moment from having an idea and the point in time when your first users/customers can use your newly invented and implemented idea?
I mean there are ways, you can quickly hack a first version without much architecture and let friendly users test the core functionality. But what about the ultimate validation of your business idea — when your users are happy to pay for your service?
At latest when you need to add payment to your SaaS things often get tricky. Even with Stripe — which is already a huge improvement — it’s still a lot to consider.
Often times, the first “hack” has not enough quality and is not secure enough that it is a good idea to add a payment system into it. But to be honest, to get a payment system integrated we need to have at least a user management. And when people start paying for your service we also need to ensure that we are compliant with the legal regulations regarding having an online business (taxing, invoicing, GDPR, PSD2, etc).
So, to get these things done, we need to spend a good amount of time to build a SaaS System with web app and mobile apps to fulfill all these requirements.
Since I was a kid I wanted to try out things quickly which is rarely possible for doing mechanical engineering wich was back then my main interest. But when I got deeper into the software development area I thought that realising ideas should work easily in the digital world.
That was around 25 years ago and reality is, that SaaS solutions and digital products are complex system and they need time, planning and experience to get done right.
I was not happy with that, I wanted to test things out quickly and grow them agile. I didn’t want to start with a “hack” which I have to throw away when things get traction. So my goal was to improve the bootstrapping of typical SaaS products tremendously. Like, I wanted to get a fully running project in 10 minutes with website, Angular SPA web app, docker server infrastructure, internationalisation, payment system and a lot more things.
It took us at Carrot & Company quite some years and lot of practising in building SaaS solutions from scratch until we invented Carrot Seed. Which is simply spoken a SaaS Kit which bootstraps a solid, enterprise ready, SaaS system within 10 minutes. You can start coding immediately, or even deploy the system immediately on a kubernetes cluster and watch your users sign up only 10 minutes later.
That means the only thing which is missing is the business logic of your idea. The rest is already done, built with carefully chosen open source technology, provided to you as git monorepo with full source code access, so you can customise also the tiniest detail of functionality if you want to.
If you are interested in more details have a look at https://www.cnc.io/seed or watch this video.
UPDATE 2020–10–29: Now also on product hunt https://www.producthunt.com/posts/carrot-seed-saas-kit
