.png)
1 hour ago
2
Here’s how I validate project ideas quickly, before spending weeks or months on them
I do NOT recommend vibe coding your final product, however as a solo developer, I think it has become a powerful strategy to vibe code and bootstrap together a near product-ready concept to get validation.
Every idea needs validation, especially if you are a solo developer working on your own projects, and one method I have recently adopted is to just get a working prototype deployed as soon as possible, and see if it gains traction before going too deep into niche features that don't really represent the core goal or problem your SaaS is solving.
Take for example this site I created with only a few hours of development time [Haloby.com]. I have only put little effort into marketing this platform, but I can already tell that it's not going to be a success, but that's fine because it only took me some hours to create and deploy, and now I can move on quicker to my next failure, which might be a success. And at the end of the day I still have a product I can go back to.
How do I get these out so fast? With Authentication, Stripe Payments, Firebase. I cut down most of the time by using [Lovable.dev] or one of the close alternatives. This helps me get the initial frontend built within a couple of minutes.
Once you’ve described your product, put it on GitHub and clone the repo down (make sure it's private). Then open this in your preferred IDE, in my case [Cursor.com] or VS Code, and make any tweaks.
The immediate next thing I do is create the backend, sticking to TypeScript/JavaScript, and I create an Express endpoint, and this gets me to a position where I can create the authentication endpoints. For this I use Firebase, which is now pretty much plug and play. All you need to do is create a Firebase project, and you will need to retrieve two sets of credentials: for your frontend you need your public Firebase Config, and for the API, you'll need to generate a new Private Key and use that admin.json. Make sure you keep these separate.
Now you have authentication, and you have decided what your product does — for example, in the case of Haloby, it's just storing policies in Firebase, and allowing authenticated users to edit their respective policies — then you are ready for the next step.
Setting up Stripe, which again is pretty much plug and play; However, there are some caveats that I'll mention. For setting up Stripe, on the frontend you only really need to import Stripe.js (or Stripe Elements), and add the following keys:
STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY and STRIPE_PROFESSIONAL_PRICE_ID.
And for your API, you need to get STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET and STRIPE_SECRET_KEY. All of these can be found on the Stripe developer dashboard.
Now, the only issue is the webhook: when developing locally, your API isn't publicly available over HTTP, so you'll have to expose it, which is dead easy using NGROK.
So how this works is: the client makes a purchase, Stripe.com processes this payment, and then once it's complete, they call your webhook endpoint (the API), which will then ask Firebase to update the user's roles.
To set up the port forwarding, you just need to download NGROK, and start an HTTP tunnel to your localhost:8080 (or whatever your backend endpoint is). This will give you a public URL, and you can pop this into the Stripe dashboard under webhook URLs in the developer settings.
And that's essentially Authentication and Stripe managed, with Firebase integration. I don't recommend vibe coding your final product, but for getting something fast, using [Lovable.dev] and then [Cursor.com] to link these together, you can literally get a working SaaS which looks great deployed within hours.
Don't overbuild, solve your problem, and deploy. Come back later for the niche stuff. And the more times you fail, the more times you'll succeed.
Check out my X/Twitter where I post these projects and updates. [x.com/joshmcrk]
If anyone wants a real technical guide of what I actually do, let me know.
