“Don’t code. Just sell.” : The rule that saved our SaaS

I’m going to share a story with you about how the company I work for actually started, before it was a proper SaaS.

Not the founder, not the dev. I work close to product and growth at a SaaS that turns Google Maps into usable lead lists. Seeing the "behind the scenes" here has been a serious reality check.

Before there was an automated platform, the founders were coming off a failed project. They were burned out from building features that looked great on paper but didn't sell. So for this new idea, they made a simple rule: Don’t code. Just sell.

For the first few months, the product was just a manual service. They found people who needed local business data, and when someone asked for a list, they ran scripts manually on a laptop. They cleaned the Excel files by hand, line by line, and sent them via email with a simple PayPal invoice.

It sounds counter-intuitive for a tech company, but this manual grind is exactly what saved the business. If the data was wrong, the customer complained instantly. They didn't need to analyze user behavior to know what was broken, they felt it in the inbox. It also proved that people weren't paying for a slick tool, they were paying for the result. If a customer is willing to wait 24 hours for a manual email, you know you have a real business. Plus, those early sales literally funded the first months of actual development.

The automated dashboard was only built once the manual work became physically impossible to handle.

The lesson from inside the machine is clear: The SaaS was built to scale a solution that already worked, not to try and find a problem with a shiny UI. If what you’re doing right now feels ugly, slow, and unscalable, you’re probably exactly where you need to be.