Home>Blog>SaaS Dialogue 1: Bedrock by Max Stoiber

SaaS Dialogue 1: Bedrock by Max Stoiber

David·April 20, 2021

Who is Max Stoiber?

As one would expect, knowing his Austrian origin, Max is a passionate skier. Often spending a whole day on tours with friends. And if there is no snow to be found you're most likely to find him working on one of his countless projects, bouldering or pouring patterns into his coffee. He's most known for creating styled-components and react-boilerplate. And if you ask his friends, they will tell you that his genuinely friendly character is what really defines him.

What is this Interview about?

Recently, Max released another project that made huge waves in the SaaS community. Of course, Bedrock is what we're talking about. This project will be the main focus of our little interview with its talented creator. Let's get right into it, but first let's kick it off with a little fact sheet about Bedrock:

Max, can you describe bedrock to us?

Bedrock is a full-stack Next.js boilerplate that helps my customers build SaaS products more quickly. It comes with all the things you would usually spend weeks building already done for you, like authentication, payments, subscriptions, teams, invitations, etc.

Can you tell us a little bit about how bedrock came to be and why you decided to build it?

I love to build SaaS products and I hate to do the same things over and over again. When I wanted to build a new product I spent two weeks building functionality that I had already built for my past products yet again!

So I decided to solve that problem instead and built a full-stack boilerplate that contains all the functionality I don't care about re-implementing every time I want to build a new product.

If you would start all over again, would you do something differently?

Yes, I would build Bedrock way earlier because that would've saved me months of effort in total. 😅

How big of a role did your huge twitter following play in bedrock's success?

It was vital, of course! Without those followers and the trust I have built up over the years of doing (good) open-source work, there is no way anybody would've bought Bedrock. The fact that people know me for having invented react-boilerplate and styled-components meant that they could trust that Bedrock would be similarly well done.

Open Source is the backbone of your audience, why would you recommend someone to start doing open source projects?

First and foremost: Solve your own god damn problems 😉

How did you determine the price for bedrock?

I started it out pretty cheap ($149) for pre-orders to gauge interest. Once I had some orders there and knew this was something people wanted, I kept gradually increasing the price until the conversion rate dropped — which happened at $400 (the current price)!