Bullet Train is a Ruby on Rails SaaS-in-a-Box that saves developers weeks of effort.Bullet Train saves you weeks of development by starting you off with all the features that are the same in every SaaS, so you can focus on what makes your app unique.
Andrew let me begin by mentioning that this is certainly one of the best SaaS boilerplates for RoR. Do you mind sharing which admin UI is template you are using?
@istereotype Hey Rahul, not at all! It's Light Admin from Pinsurpreme. Tamerlin's work is amazing and the template is a real joy to work with. He's kept this theme updated and improving as long as I've been working with it. One awesome thing about having already done the work of integrating this theme into the Rails asset pipeline is that folks using Bullet Train are able to just copy and paste any of the blocks of HTML from the theme demo site into their Rails app and the layout "just works." I'm sure this is part of what Kyle Duck was referring to in his review when he said developing in Bullet Train is "like painting." Anyway, I can't recommend this template enough! http://light.pinsupreme.com
Hi Andrew,
Building UIs in React is essential for the type of products I build and for how I do the best frontend work. Is BulletTrain an option for me?
Along with that, I need a GraphQL API. I’m assuming I could add these API endpoints to BulletTrain just like if I was starting from scratch?
@beedesignllc@cgenco Yeah, GraphQL is a not-infrequently requested feature and in theory we should be able to provide very good (and pretty automatic) support for it via Super Scaffolding, the same way we do for REST API endpoints now. As for React, Vue.js, or whatever JS framework you want to use, you're welcome to bolt on anything you like. However, Bullet Train isn't designed to just be a headless API for those frameworks. Instead, the approach we recommend is the same as what DHH recommends in his article introducing Stimulus: Don't build your whole app in React or Vue.js; build _parts_ of your app with React or Vue.js. (Here's his blog post for reference: https://m.signalvnoise.com/stimu... )
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Hey Andrew! First of all congrats, the website looks really nice. I took the live demo but haven't really been able to understand what was going on. It asks me to add "Things", but it's not clear what those are. What's your target market for this?
@fanahova Hey Alessio! You're totally right that we need to revisit and enhance the online demo to make it more clear what people are looking at. The "Things" you see in the dashboard are an example of the CRUD (Create-Read-Update-Delete) and API functionality provided by the Super Scaffolding engine. Put another way, it's demonstrating what the generic data management workflows are in a Bullet Train app. You can learn more about Super Scaffolding here: https://twitter.com/andrewculver...
The target market is anyone who wants to launch and monetize their software with minimum time and friction. Typically this has ended up being agencies and independent consultants who are trying to provide a lot of value within a budget and successful founders whose time is valuable but they want to launch some polished looking and fully featured pet projects.
Is it possible to share the Gemfile here/on the marketing site? I have a pathological hatred for some common gems (which I guess might disqualify me as a potential Bullet Train customer! Ha!).
Can you easily turn the features on/off to reduce the app bloat? I'm thinking of the Alexa/SMS conversation support you'd mentioned on twitter for example.
@ideasasylum Hey Jamie! Our biggest dependencies are Devise, CanCanCan, Koudoku, and Bootstrap. We use the Rails default Minitest, not RSpec, although mostly everyone seems to want to switch to RSpec, and I'm open to it. Many of the features, like the ones you mentioned and also even the subscription stuff, are toggle-able and are well namespaced within the codebase to avoid cluttering up the app if you don't need them.
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Good concept. This could speed up lot of companies who are planning to launch new products. Quick thoughts on its B2B acquisition strategy:-
- You could track companies that are launching new products as it would be the right time to pitch your product.
- You could track companies that are hiring for "ruby on rails" and have 1-10 or 10-50 employee size as they are the ones who are more likely to buy your complementary product.
- Partner with startup incubators since most of the companies there are in IDEA Stage and you need these companies to use your product to fast track their idea to a SAAS product.
Can share more thoughts while we speak further. Cheers.
@nitinbajaj1423 Thanks so much for taking the time to present these ideas! Given that you like thinking about this kind of thing, I'll share that our primary customers and prospective customers tend to be software consultancies who are building for clients and independent developers who already have a successful product or company, they know the value of their time, and are looking to experiment with some new product or business ideas. The other group of folks we want to do a better job of reaching out to are code schools who are on the frontlines of helping folks acquire the skills that will change their careers and in many cases their lives. In theory Bullet Train should be able to make it easier for these folks to launch a product and start making money from their newly acquired coding superpowers, without having to meddle with tricky billing code and other problems that are both kind of hard to solve, but also solved so many times before. Really appreciate the time you took to write that.
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@andrewculver super cool. Do you mind me sending you an email and see if we can do something on these lines. I am always excited to work on B2B ideas, as thats where I feel I contribute :)
I've used Bullet Train before it was publicly available and even then, it was amazing. Andrew was super helpful and is moving fast enough to add a lot of value to Bullet Train.
It's the SaaS base you always needed. No need to think about all the fluffs like user accounts, teams and billing. it's all in there. And much more.
This is a no-brainer for any new app, and even to migrate to for many apps.
Pros:
Will speed up your SaaS development, by a LOT. Andrew is super helpful.
Cons:
None? It was early when I used it and was already solid and super helpful.
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I only wish i would have found out about this earlier. Currently porting my SAAS to BT after building 1.0 by hand. BT just does so much stuff out of the box that will take you weeks/months to sort out otherwise - Stripe subscriptions, users, teams, password reset, great scaffolding, etc etc etc.
Cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone building a SaaS business.
I've said before and will say again: coding with BulletTrain is like painting.
Pros:
It's a SAAS in a box. You can deploy an MVP SaaS in a day.
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I've used Bullet Train before it was publicly available and even then, it was amazing. Andrew was super helpful and is moving fast enough to add a lot of value to Bullet Train.
It's the SaaS base you always needed. No need to think about all the fluffs like user accounts, teams and billing. it's all in there. And much more.
This is a no-brainer for any new app, and even to migrate to for many apps.
Pros:Will speed up your SaaS development, by a LOT. Andrew is super helpful.
Cons:None? It was early when I used it and was already solid and super helpful.
I only wish i would have found out about this earlier. Currently porting my SAAS to BT after building 1.0 by hand. BT just does so much stuff out of the box that will take you weeks/months to sort out otherwise - Stripe subscriptions, users, teams, password reset, great scaffolding, etc etc etc.
Cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone building a SaaS business.
I've said before and will say again: coding with BulletTrain is like painting.
Pros:It's a SAAS in a box. You can deploy an MVP SaaS in a day.
Cons:None?