- Makers Make by SaaSykit
- Posts
- How to hit $10M ARR in a few months, Notes on software quality, Hard truths about building in the AI era & more
How to hit $10M ARR in a few months, Notes on software quality, Hard truths about building in the AI era & more
Ahmad
June 07, 2026
Hey Makers 👋
Building a SaaS is one of those things that sounds simple until you actually start doing it.
You begin with an idea you're excited about. Then suddenly you're wiring up authentication, subscriptions, permissions, teams, onboarding flows, billing, and a dozen other things that have nothing to do with the problem you're trying to solve.
That's why I built SaaSykit.
Instead of starting from a blank Laravel project, you get a production-ready SaaS foundation with the essential building blocks already in place, so you can focus on what makes your product unique.
Grab a SaaSykit license and turn that idea into something real.
Now, let's dive into what's happening in the Laravel & SaaS world this week 👇
From the Community
The last months, and even more so the last weeks, saw an increasing amount of software supply chain attacks targeting open-source ecosystems. A handful of these have hit the PHP ecosystem too, via taken-over GitHub accounts and stolen access tokens that let attackers publish new tags on packages they had no legitimate access to. Most notably laravel-lang on May 22 and intercom/intercom-php on April 30th.
Installing a Laravel package takes thirty seconds. Writing a solid implementation takes time. But with AI-assisted development, time isn't as much of a factor because the writing happens in the background.
We ask the agent to build a file uploader. In the past, that request would have triggered a reflex: how am I going to build this? Browsing through Laravel packages, Spatie's media library package looks like a popular and safe choice. I'll install it, configure it, and get going with my day. Agents don't have that reflex. They just build.
Keith Rabois was an early executive at PayPal (part of the famous PayPal Mafia), COO at Square, VP of Corporate Development at LinkedIn, and an early investor in Stripe, DoorDash, Airbnb, YouTube, Ramp, and Palantir. Currently he’s managing director at Khosla Ventures. Also, he hasn’t touched a computer since September 2010 (he does everything from an iPad).
“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.
The most practical way to measure quality is to test with many different people, and have many experts take a look. If thorough testing and 100 experts can’t find a problem, the thing is probably perfect.
Picture yourself wrestling with a complex problem - maybe it's an elusive bug in a legacy codebase, or a fragile system architecture held together by workarounds and technical debt. You've invested countless hours diving deep into the problem, meticulously mapping out dependencies and edge cases. Your mind is swimming with implementation details when someone casually drops in to say: Why don't you just...
Expressive, by Wendell Adriel, converts Eloquent models into typed PHP objects and can convert those objects back into Eloquent models when your application needs to persist data. The goal is to give services, actions, and tests a typed object boundary while Eloquent continues to handle querying, relationships, casts, visibility rules, mass assignment, and database writes.
All about SaaS
Below is our playbook.
The frame comes from one premise.
Marketing is trading.
And the rest of what follows is what falls out of taking that seriously. Most of it disagrees with the standard playbook.
Outcome-based pricing is easy to describe and hard to operationalize. The headline is simple: customers pay when your product delivers a defined result. The mechanics are a bit harder to define.
You must define the outcome, prove it happened, decide what does not count, choose dollars or credits, handle the onboarding period before outcomes flow, and make the invoice auditable.
How do you market to developers? Developers have a reputation: they block your ads, they smell marketing-speak from three sentences away, they trust a random GitHub repo over your whole campaign, and if they’re reading this, they are rolling their eyes (hi Casey!). So most teams either throw money at LinkedIn ABM, or they decide developers are “unmarketable” and go around them to a VP.
Zero. That’s how many customer conversations it takes to decide what to build next.
Not six. Not a pattern across a rapid design sprint. Just transcripts, retrieved by an AI system, matched to a keyword. That’s the basis for the next sprint.
Building in public used to be simple. You’d launch on Product Hunt with some story, ask (aka beg) your friends to share it, tweet about it all day, and then hopefully some customers would appear.
The second wave was all about bombast, with indie hackers posting revenue dashboards and selling to the audience watching. But as a general backlash against hustle culture sets in, there are new and better ways of building in public emerging. The new growth meta is to be publicly excellent, making the company itself your content.
Here are three founders who are running this playbook right now.
The iconic B2B software companies of the next decade will build distribution from day 0. The moat just moved, and we’ve entered the Distribution Era of company building.
The shifting moat of B2B software and AI
The story of enterprise software is the story of an evolving moat. Each era opens with one cost as the binding constraint – capital, deployment, distribution, or building itself – and the companies that own that era recognize and weaponize that constraint for their benefit. They deeply understand the limiting variable of the day and how to unlock it. Then a new technology collapses the binding cost, the moat moves one step further from the product, and a new set of winners emerges.
Videos
Keep building, keep rocking! 🤘