Dan Hulton

A good two years later, and I'm here at 1.0. Nodewood is finally at a place where I feel it represents a truly excellent foundation for a new SaaS business to start building on. It offers user management, team management, subscription management, an admin panel, a CLI tool, a variety of code patterns designed to save time developing, and a robust, infrastructure-as-code tool to deploy production builds to AWS in a scalable manner.

I've decided to keep the beta 20% discount around for a couple more weeks as a launch discount, since I didn't really advertising the imminent end of the beta period.

Up next, I've got another little SaaS idea of my own that I've been kicking around for a few months that Nodewood would be perfect for, which also makes this an excellent opportunity to discover what else I can add to Nodewood.

More details are up in the launch blog post: https://nodewood.com/blog/nodewood-1-0-official-full-release/

I ended up getting a lot done this year, but it was also definitely The Year of Burnout: https://nodewood.com/blog/nodewood-2022-year-in-review/

Nodewood is in a lot better place. Adding team management, scripting, a responsive mobile design, and upgrading to Vue 3 makes it a lot more attractive as a tool to start a new SaaS with. But I did basically zero marketing - something to fix in 2022, just as soon as I drop the next release and bring it to 1.0!

I've got a pretty good cadence going these days, with this release coming only a month after the last one, and including a bunch of good features. Vue 3 is now no longer in compatibility mode, I've added scripting support (so that you can write scripts and tasks that can easily use Nodewood's custom loader), and a bunch more little fixes I've been wanting to add for a while. Like for one, the admin dashboard displays accurate data, and even has a 30-day chart tracking your users, teams, and subscriber MRR!

Plus, this is the last beta release of Nodewood, so the last release I'll be offering the 20% beta discount. I know "SaaS starter kit" is kind of a time-dependant purchase - if you're not ready to build your SaaS now or in the near future, you probably won't speculatively buy a boilerplate to help you build it (or if you've already built yours, you probably won't rewrite the whole thing), but it's also been in beta for over a year now, that's probably enough opportunity for the hold-outs.

Excited to push through to the 1.0 release!

https://nodewood.com/blog/nodewood-0-20/

One of the big steps left towards beta was improving Nodewood's mobile showing. Specifically, Nodewood sites looked _awful_ on mobile phones, which means if you used Nodewood to build your SaaS, you were limited to desktop-only applications. That's a level of professionalism I'm not willing to sacrifice on before taking off that "beta" label.

Thankfully, thanks to Tailwind CSS's Responsive Design tooling, this was a fairly simple task. The largest part of it was solved by creating a new DataTable component that integrates directly with Nodewood's models, fields, and backend to display a mobile-friendly table in only a few lines of code!

This is a major step closer to the 1.0 release, which should come (hopefully) in early 2022!

https://nodewood.com/blog/nodewood-0-19-0/

Specifically on how to screw up when choosing your business name:

https://nodewood.com/blog/ways-to-screw-up-when-choosing-a-business-name/

It's the first post in a series I'm starting, on "how to screw up your business". I figure, there are enough people out there dispensing business advice they've only read from others about what you should DO, I can at least tell you from personal experience what you SHOULDN'T do. =)

Very last minute, I know, but I put up a coupon for Nodewood at 50% off for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

I was figuring I was too busy to properly organize promotion, marketing materials, etc, to make it really worth it, but then I realized I could throw it together in about an hour, and if I even make a single sale because of that, well, it's a good hour spent.

Hell, even if I don't make a sale, I found a weird bug in the code that applies coupons to new purchases, so it's still worth it.

Next year, Nodewood should be 1.0 (or ideally higher), and I'll make the time to properly prepare marketing materials and promotion, but for this year, well, wish me luck. =)

Turns out it is a _lot_ of work to upgrade a large Vue 2 project to Vue 3, let alone a project designed to be used as a base for any other projects, but after a lot of work finding new libraries, converting to those libraries, or even just writing my own alternative libraries, I've been able to upgrade the version of Vue to 3 in Nodewood, and release Nodewood version 0.18.0: https://nodewood.com/blog/nodewood-0-18-0-now-with-vue-3/

Even better, this has helped clarify what tasks are remaining before I can bring Nodewood to version 1.0, and I've been able to put together a roadmap to help users better understand what's planned: https://nodewood.com/docs/roadmap/

In other news, boy howdy the new MacBook Pros are fast. I feel like I've finally got my mojo back, now that I'm not fighting an old Intel chip just to run a couple Docker containers!

Nodewood has been in closed beta for a while now -- longer than I'd originally hoped! The lockdown, plus some volatility in my day job really got in the way a lot more than I'd expected. But I'm through that now, and Nodewood is now ready to open up to anyone interested!

Nodewood is a JavaScript SaaS starter kit, designed to save you weeks or months of time when building your next web app. It has user authentication & administration, subscriptions, an application scaffolding including user profiles & an administration panel, and more coming!

There are a number of features I'm eager to build out next before I leave beta, so I'd love any feedback you have to help improve!