Product 2 - Starter Index

Recap

The second month of the challenge has come to an end. I have soft-launched Starter Index on the 1st of September. The post is a bit late because I’ve focused my attention on getting the website indexed and time went by so swiftly 😅. Anyway, let’s dive right in: The project is a listing website that currently has 60 boilerplates grouped by technology and features. The goal was to build a simple and beautiful website, helping developers discover Saas boilerplates available on the market.

Problem

The current way of boilerplate discovery is to go on Twitter/Reddit and ask the community or read blog posts that list only partial content. There are also two other websites that aggregate boilerplates: Saasitron and Boilerplate List. I decided to build an alternative solution because I wanted to include a more comprehensive list and create a simpler design.

The directory

Boilerplates are grouped by technologies and can be filtered by features. You have the option to submit new starter kits and product reviews. More features will follow soon.

I spent more time than I thought was needed on the design because it’s a skill I’m trying to improve.

Technology

I built it as a static website with SvelteKit. As a data source, the norm for directory websites is to use Spreadsheets. I’ve tried using a Google sheet, but because I haven’t used it that much I found it overly complicated. So I have switched to using a local Pocketbase instance and pulling the data at build time. I save a periodic backup on my local machine, but it can also be exported to S3.

I’ve used a local instance to save on money, but you can self-host pocketbase for only 5$/mo on a simple droplet. I highly recommend this approach over a sheet (for developers) since it saved me a lot of time when curating the boilerplate list.

For hosting I use Cloudflare Pages, for analytics Cloudflare Web Analytics, and for file storage Cloudflare R2(free tier). So, this website is built with only free tools🤑.

A limitation of SvelteKit static site generation I ran into, was not being able to display a 404 error page out of the box. The +error.svelte page isn’t prerendered into a 404.html so I had to create a separate 404 route.

Revenue Model

The focus will be on affiliate links and sponsored listings.

Outro

I’ve really enjoyed working on this project and I’m planning to continue building it. But first, I will be spending some time on distribution.

As in the previous post, for feedback, you can DM me on Twitter.