Original Summary

I’m a lifelong collector of comics, and I was really unhappy with the apps being offered to collectors (the latest ones are actually from marketplaces that want to track what people own), So, managing a serious collection had become really fragmented. Cataloguing in one place. Market research through Google. Spreadsheets for tracking. Price guides for values. Marketplace searches when I wanted actual comparable sales. I wanted one mobile app that could make all of that feel simple. So I built ComiCollector. I started thinking that I could lean on AI to help out and keep things simple. But I massively underestimated how complicated “simple” would become. AI isn't ready for these types of complex tasks. I could go on for hours about just how bad it is, but it forced me to leverage deterministic programming as the real bedrock for the application. Deterministic rules, structured data, market evidence, filtering, caching, validation and a lot of guardrails. The principle became: AI can help interpret the market. It doesn’t get to invent the market. That changed the architecture of the entire product. The backend eventually grew into market-assessment pipelines, reusable market intelligence, background refresh workers, subscriptions and usage limits, a production database, blue/green deployment, and infrastructure designed with a path to load balancing and AWS/Kubernetes if usage eventually justifies it. So, what started as a simple project to make a pretty interface for comic books turned into a project that dragged on for well over a year and has become a technical behemoth. For other SaaS founders, especially solo builders, I’m curious: At what point did your “simple product” turn into a much bigger system than you originally expected? And did that complexity ultimately become part of your moat, or just something you had to keep fighting? I'd be really interested in hearing about your journey.   submitted by   /u/SnooRevelations3503 [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/10/1 06:29:51