Hi all,
I am rozi, founder of OnLeave. I just found bootstrapped.fm from Google and really excited to join this community. As this is my first post, I will introduce a bit of my journey into SaaS.
When I was working for a previous company, we used an open source program to track leave applications. The software itself was not specialized to track leave, but we customized it to make it work with our needs. One of the issues we had was the software not always working like we wanted it to. I often thought about writing custom software to overcome the issue, but I did not have time to make it.
In mid-2013, I started working to develop my leave application software. I had searched all about SaaS, backend structure, web servers, and the open source components that I would use. I had high hopes of making it successful in three months.
A year later, I still had nothing to release. I took a step back to figure out what I was doing wrong. I started collecting information on what caused the problems. After doing some digging into the issues, here is the main problem that I found:
At first, I choose Laravel as my backend framework. At that time, Laravel was still new, and the latest version was version 3. While working on my project, Laravel 4 came out, so I upgraded my whole project to Laravel 4. It took me a few weeks. Later I fell in love with the Django framework and decided to rewrite my whole project using Django. It took me a few months.
I realized I needed to be more organized and stick to one framework.
Less than 4 months later, I finished my project. I felt amazing that all my effort paid off. I was happy because my project was finished, afraid because it was live on internet, I worried what would happen next, and I was excited to see people sign up.
So here it is, my first SaaS service, onleaveapp.com. OnLeave is an online service for organization to manage leave applications. It is simple, and the tagline is “Apply Leave, Simplified”. My targeted customers is small to medium company.
Feel free to give review and comments about my SaaS service. Thank you!
