Cory Zue has built a living making Django SaaS boilerplates for founders. It means you can get started with your SaaS much quicker without having to code lots of basic functionality. Cory talks us through his first success as a founder, why he switched to selling SaaS boilerplates and his top marketing channels.
Can you tell us about what SaaS Pegasus is and your achievements so far?
SaaS Pegasus is a SaaS boilerplate written for Django (a Python-based web framework). The idea behind a SaaS boilerplate is that instead of starting a new project from scratch, you instead get all the boring features already built for you—so things like user accounts, login and password reset, billing, teams, and so on. Boilerplates allow you to launch apps much faster, without having to dive into the world of nocode tools.
Pegasus is unique among boilerplates in that it lets you configure quite a lot about your project, including what features you want to enable as well as tech choices like different CSS and JavaScript frameworks. The result is that the code you start with is cleaner and has only the features your app needs.
I’ve been working on Pegasus for about four years, and many people have used it to launch profitable businesses (including several that are now bigger than Pegasus itself). It did over $100k in profit last year.
Why did you create SaaS Pegasus?
I created Pegasus after creating two other SaaS applications (one of which was my other business, Place Card Me) and realizing how much of the effort was copy/pasting the same code/features across apps. I figured if I had this problem then other people must too.
After doing a bit of research I learned that paid boilerplates were a profitable product category, but at the time there wasn’t one for Django (which is my preferred web framework). So it seemed like an obvious opportunity.
Can you tell us about Place Card Me and why you moved on to SaaS Pegasus?
Place Card Me is an app to help you with your place cards for a wedding or event. You upload a spreadsheet with your guest list, and it spits out a PDF file with your cards laid out and ready to print. It was my first product, and now runs on autopilot, doing about $20k a year.
I moved on because I wasn’t passionate about the wedding industry, and I really didn’t like marketing it. Also, during the pandemic the whole thing completely tanked. By the time the pandemic was over, Pegasus was more exciting and more profitable than Place Card Me, so I never looked back.
