Show HN: How I built a SaaS thanks to my wife

10 points by Ametrin a day ago

I’m Michał, and I’d like to share with you the journey I went through with my wife and how, thanks to her, we built our first SaaS, PDFBolt (https://pdfbolt.com). I’ve been a developer for over 10 years. In 2020, I decided to build a side project to learn all aspects of app development—deployment, authentication, payments, frontend, landing pages, etc. While looking for project ideas, I came across the Indie Hackers community, where I found a simple HTML to PDF API project. The creator mentioned a lot of interest in it and that it was generating revenue. I thought I’d build something similar myself and learn a lot in the process. But it wasn’t easy at all. After working from 9 to 5, it’s hard to spend another few hours in front of the computer in the evening. What about other responsibilities? Groceries, cooking, cleaning, hobbies, spending time with my wife? Still, I tried, very slowly. I had breaks lasting several months, and at one point, due to mental health issues, I practically stopped working on the project altogether.

My wife worked as a physiotherapist but, due to difficulties in her job, decided to switch to IT with my help, starting as a manual tester. She did it very quickly (maybe six months) and immediately found a job. In mid-2024, she started asking about my old project and insisted that we finish it. Thanks to her enthusiasm, we managed to do it very quickly. I focused on the backend, and she, in addition to testing, handled the entire frontend and landing page. Around the same time, we also adopted a dog from a shelter, which added a lot of positive energy to our lives and helped us stay motivated. In early January 2025, we officially launched the project. It’s been a long journey, and we don’t have any customers yet—we don’t even know if we will, as we have no idea about marketing :) But we’ve learned a lot and are already happy with the journey itself.

As for the technical aspects, the app uses:

Backend: Kotlin, Spring Boot, Postgres, Redis

Frontend: React, Next.js, Docusaurus

Auth: Firebase

Hosting: Render (the app is Dockerized)

Cloudflare R2 for file storage

PDFs are generated using Chromium via Playwright.

If you have any questions about the tech stack or anything else, feel free to ask! I’ll be happy to answer. Any feedback or criticism will be greatly appreciated. Thank you! :)