Building a SaaS After Bedtime

Building a SaaS while working full-time is mostly about finding small pockets of time.

For me it’s nights. After the kids go to sleep and the house finally gets quiet. Usually around 9:30pm I open the laptop and get an hour or two before my brain is done for the day.

Some nights I write real features. Other nights I fix tests or clean up code.

Progress is slower than I’d like, but it adds up.

It’s starting to feel real

Months of small sessions later, ParkMyAWS is starting to feel like a real product.

Scheduling works. EC2 and RDS instances stop and start automatically. There’s a savings dashboard showing what you’d save against running everything 24/7.

The core loop is solid. You connect your AWS account, set a schedule, and the tool handles the rest.

The coding isn’t the hardest thing

The funny part is that the coding isn’t the hardest part of building a SaaS. It’s everything around it:

• Legal pages
• Billing integration
• Monitoring and error tracking
• Security reviews
• Terms of service

The unglamorous stuff every SaaS needs and nobody talks about. Each one sounds small on its own, but they all take real time, especially in 90-minute windows.

The rhythm

What I’ve learned is that consistency matters more than intensity. One hour every night gets further than a weekend marathon every few weeks, mostly because you don’t spend the first twenty minutes remembering where you left off.

If you’ve built something on the side you probably know the feeling. Nothing seems to be happening for months, and then you look at it one day and there’s a product there.