How a Solo Founder Built SaaS Selling to Bakeries

**Fexingo** (0:01)
If these conversations are useful for what you're building or running, then you are in the right place. Today, we are talking about bakeries.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:10)
Bakeries. As in croissants and sourdough?

**Fexingo** (0:14)
Exactly that. And I know it sounds hyper-specific, even more niche than the laundromats and cat cafes we have covered. But that is exactly the point. Our guest this week, well, the founder we are profiling, he's not a guest, we are talking about his story. He is a solo developer named Marcus Chen. He built a SaaS for small bakeries, not Panera, not a chain, your local bakery that opens at 6 a.m. and closes when the bread sells out.
Right.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:43)
So how does a solo founder even discover that market?

**Fexingo** (0:47)
Marcus was a freelance web developer in Portland. He did odd jobs, WordPress sites for dentists, a booking system for a yoga studio.
Then his partner took a job at a bakery called Tabor Bread, and Marcus started hearing her talk about the chaos behind the counter.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:05)
What kind of chaos?

**Fexingo** (1:07)
Two big ones. First, scheduling. Bakeries work in shifts.
Bakers come in at 2 a.m., counter staff at 6 a.m. They were using a paper calendar and group texts. Second, wholesale orders.
Tabor Bread supplies about a dozen coffee shops and restaurants with croissants and loaves. Those orders came in via email, text, and sometimes phone calls that got written on napkins. They were losing about 15 percent of orders every month to miscommunication.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:40)
Fifteen percent. That is huge for a small business.

**Fexingo** (1:44)
Huge. But here is the thing Marcus noticed.
There were already good scheduling tools for restaurants.
Toast, Square, Breadcrumb, all aimed at full service restaurants. But bakeries are different. They don't have a lunch rush. They have a morning bake cycle. They have wholesale accounts that order weekly, not daily. And they have a product that spoils in 48 hours if not sold. So a restaurant tool doesn't fit.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:13)
So he built something specifically for bakeries.

**Fexingo** (2:17)
He did, but he did not build anything for the first three months. He spent three weekends working behind the counter at Tabor Bread.
Not as a developer, as a volunteer. Washing dishes, bagging bread, answering the phone. He wanted to see the workflow from the inside.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:36)
That is a level of customer discovery most founders skip.

**Fexingo** (2:40)
Most founders send a survey.
Marcus stood in a bakery at 5 a.m. watching the baker write the day's production list on a whiteboard. He saw the wholesale customer call at 7:30 a.m. to add 10 baguettes.
And the owner had to stop kneading dough to write it down. That experience shaped every feature decision.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:00)
What was the first feature he built?

**Fexingo** (3:03)
A simple wholesale order portal. A bakery sets up a menu with prices and minimum orders. Coffee shops and restaurants get a link.
No app, no login required, and they place orders for the next day by 4 p.m. The bakery gets a consolidated list of orders sorted by pickup time. That was it. No inventory, no accounting, no pay hole.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:28)
Just the order intake. And that was enough.

**Fexingo** (3:32)
For the first six months, yes. He launched under the name Batchboard just a web app.
He charged $49 a month for bakeries with up to 10 wholesale accounts, $99 for Unlimited. He signed up Tabor Bread as the first customer, then went to three other bakeries in Portland. Within four months, he had 15 paying customers. All word of mouth.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:56)
That is a pretty good start for a side project.

**Fexingo** (3:59)
He was still freelancing at that point, but then he added a second feature scheduling.
Not the full employee scheduling like seven shifts. Just the production schedule, what bread gets baked, how many loaves, at what time. That came from watching the baker rewrite the whiteboard every morning.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:18)
So the bakers could see the orders and plan their bake.

**Fexingo** (4:22)
Exactly. And this is where the pricing got interesting. Marcus did something I had not seen before.
He priced by oven capacity, not by number of users. A bakery with a two-deck oven paid less than a bakery with a six-deck oven, because larger ovens mean more production, more wholesale accounts, more value from the software.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:44)
That is clever. And it aligns the price with the actual business reality.

**Fexingo** (4:49)
He also made a deliberate choice.
No mobile app, not even a mobile responsive web app in the first version. He wanted the bakers to use it on a tablet or desktop, because he noticed they did not carry phones on the floor, flower and dough destroy phones. So the interface was designed for a 10-inch screen mounted on a shelf.