“It did not start as a SaaS at all. I locked myself in my room for two months and put that Photoshop script into a very bad UI/UX product. I didn't know how to do license validation or user management, so I had to sell it as a one-time fee. For a couple of years I sold it as a lifetime deal, and once I had enough funds I went to Upwork and hired a developer to polish the product.”

Sell a hacky one-time-fee tool for years, then reinvest revenue into a polished SaaS

Vikash shipped an ugly script with no auth or licensing as a lifetime deal because he couldn't build the infrastructure himself. He used years of one-time-fee revenue to fund a hired developer who rebuilt it into the real SaaS — letting cash flow, not VC, pay for the technical upgrade.