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by bradgessler 1521 days ago
I’d be interested in building the bootstrapped “git push and we build and publish”, aka “heroku for static site compilers”

Chime in if you’d like to be one of the first few customers. If there’s enough interest here’s how I’d play it:

1. I won’t raise VC money. I know how to build a SaaS business without it—I bootstrapped Poll Everywhere from $0 to $10m+.

2. My motivations these days are to build low complexity products. Ideally they’re “evergreen”, meaning I can ship a core feature set that I know will be the same in 10 years. The feature I’m selling their is stability.

3. I like to price things in a way that makes them accessible to as many people as possible while being sustainable for the business so it can operate for a long time with the support it needs for customers.

2 comments

I built something that will take care of the publish part but not the static site generation part here https://github.com/newbeelearn/sserver. Right now it only has one user i.e. me :-)
How would you convince people to go with you over Cloudflare Sites, Vercel, Netlify etc? Is the pitch "we do what they do, but less" compelling?
I’d position it as “we do exactly what needs to be done: push, build, deploy” and talk to the benefits of deploying static websites without all the complexity of edge functions and the complicated pricing that goes with it.

I’d also speak to the idea that the service is shooting for longevity and stability by not adding a bunch of whiz bang stuff needed to justify PM salaries or impress VCs that will be sunset later.

FWIW, we've been building this exact thing over at Read the Docs for the past 11 years :)

* https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about.html * https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/story.html

Historically we've only supported Sphinx & Mkdocs, but we're looking to expand into serving all docs tooling with a versioned URL scheme, and search indexing & backend API's that are docs specific.